Nate Silver, the Sultan of Stats behind FiveThirtyEight.com, referred to himself as a “poll Nazi” this past week when he criticized the methodology of some pollsters.
The internals of one poll had John McCain leading Barack Obama 74%-22% among 18-24 year olds. “Who knew the kids were groovin’ on J-Mac these days?” Silver wrote. He then explained how it couldn’t be true.
The previous day he issued a challenge to some organizations whose likely voter models he called “suspect.” Silver wrote, “tell me why you think what you’re doing is good science.”
Silver made his reputation as a baseball stats expert. A year ago, he called the turnaround of the Tampa Bay Rays, who are playing the Philadelphia Phillies in this year’s World Series.
Now, some consider him a political genius. The “Spreadsheet Psychic,” New York magazine recently called him. The “clear winner in the 2008 election season,” the San Francisco Chronicle said. Even Nobel laureate Paul Krugman complimented Silver for figuring out that someone was trying to manipulate the odds on an election trading exchange to influence the political perceptions of McCain.
Silver, whose main job is as managing partner of Baseball Prospectus, started writing about politics on DailyKos.com, under the pseudonym Poblano. In March he launched FiveThirtyEight (named for the number of votes in the Electoral College). The first day, the site had 80 visits. On Oct. 9, seven months to the day later, it had 693,216. For September, ComScore ranked FiveThirtyEight.com among the top 20 stand-alone political sites with 169,000 unique visitors.
Baseball statistics mean nothing without context, Silver says. He tries to do the same for politics.
“Polls are cherry-picked based on their brand name or shock value rather than their track record for accuracy,” Silver wrote in a June column in the New York Post. “Demographic variables are misrepresented or misunderstood.”
One section of his site rates all the polls and polling organizations on their accuracy.
A University of Chicago grad, Silver worked briefly as a consultant for KPMG before getting involved with Baseball Prospectus. He invented PECOTA, a software program that forecasts the future performance of players. Since becoming a political expert, he has written for Newsweek and The Guardian, and he has appeared on Countdown with Keith Olbermann and on the Colbert Report. He lives in Chicago.
Which of his computerized forecasting models is more intricate, baseball or politics?
“The baseball stuff is more complex, I’d say, by a factor of three,” Silver told Progress Illinois in an interview earlier this year. “But it’s because I’ve been doing it since the original version back in ‘02 or ‘03, so it’s been constantly tweaked and revised for five or six years now.”
As of this weekend, Silver’s political model gives Obama about a 95 percent chance of winning on Nov. 4.
“On November 5th we’ll either make him a saint or burn him at the stake,” one commenter wrote of Silver in response to the online New York magazine article.
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1 Comments
#1. Democrat for McCain Win 10.26.2008
All you guys are seeing the world through tinted glasses. You will never know the Grass is Green. Case in point. Every poll with Obama with a double digit lead nationally & in Battleground polls assume a 52% Democrats & 28% Republican mix in the electorate. Nopes.. Cut it down to normal levels of 10% differentials instead of 24% diferentials. You would see why some polls show a tighter margin. Especially those Battleground Polls.. Don’t tell me & more importantly write in these blogs with all honesty that Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Missouri and let alone Pennsylvania has 24% more democrats than Republicans.. Shame on you guys.
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