Hans-Sachs-Straße - Emirates.com

The combination of intelligent
analysis, approachable
number-crunching, success, and
occasional levity kept Silver’s blog
moving along, and The New York
Times came calling. During the summer
of 2010, he signed a three-year
deal with the publication, which
would host FiveThirtyEight on its
own site. The opportunity gave Silver,
who left Baseball Prospectus
the year before, more resources and
more freedom. He and his team of
writers and statisticians kept producing,
gearing up what was sure
to be a wild and intense 2012 campaign
season. But no one could have
predicted exactly how crazy things
would get, nor how completely Silver
and stats would win in the end.
The intense coverage of the 2012
election made the glut of information
that outlets spewed forth in
2008 look like a cute little endeavour.
Media outlets around the country,
desperate for advertising dollars,
staffed up their political teams
in an effort to capture eyeballs and,
in turn, revenue. For the entire year
before the November event, the
election was everywhere. It was,
increasingly and inevitably, overwhelming.
Through it all, Silver and
his FiveThirtyEight team kept writing
and refining their algorithms.
Somewhere along the way, an interesting
thing happened. The statistician’s
numbers, which gave the
Obama a decided advantage over
challenger Mitt Romney, started to
diverge from the story news outlets
– specifically right-wing ones –
were telling. Their reporters found
a much closer race than a glance at
Silver’s predictions would indicate.
Silver found his work assaulted by
everyone from Newsweek’s David
Frum and Niall Ferguson to MSNBC
co-host Joe Scarborough. It was all
very dramatic.
The attacks, however, also
demonstrated a fundamental flaw
in the understanding of Silver’s
work, which deals with probability,
not certainty. A 70 per cent
chance that Obama would win
meant exactly that: if the election
took place 100 times, he would win
in 70 of them. Applying probability
to a one-off event, be it a coin flip
or a presidential election, can be a
difficult concept to explain but the
vehemence with which pundits
attacked Silver was unfair, more
representative of the need to create
drama than the importance of
telling the story of the campaign.
Silver, it seemed, became a proxy
for a discussion about the state of
the media in the web age.
At the same time, he had a great
deal riding on the outcome of Tuesday,
November 6. In Silver’s model,
President Obama’s chances for
Silver found himself
and his work
attacked by both
sides of the political
spectrum. He proved
them wrong, again,
in the 2012 election
re-election had risen to almost 91
per cent, despite the fact that the
two candidates were basically tied
in the polls. Television pundits,
Democrat and Republican alike,
were apoplectic at this fact. Furthermore,
the Michigan native was
experiencing unprecedented visibility,
with 20 per cent of visitors to
The New York Times’ website going
to FiveThirtyEight the day before
the election.
The vote tallies started to roll in
on Election Night, and it became
increasingly clear that Silver’s
methods were superior to the punditry.
The election was tight, but in
the end it was a rout for Obama and
one for Silver as well. His algorithm
did even better than it had four
years ago, successfully calling the
80
Open skies / march 2013
result of all 50 states, as well as 31 of
the 33 senatorial seats. The sitting
President had four more years and
maths’ champion had his biggest
victory ever.
Overnight, Silver transformed
from ‘That FiveThirtyEight guy’ to
a legitimate celebrity. Someone recognised
him on top of the Sun Pyramid
at Teotihuacan, a moment he
jokingly said was “a sign of the Apocalypse.”
He hit the talk show circuit,
wearing a Cookie Monster shirt
on Conan O’Brien’s late-night show.
His book, The Signal and the Noise
that was published two months before
the election, jumped to No. 1 on
The New York Times non-fiction
bestseller list. A poker tournament
flew him to Australia to participate.
It was a good time to be Nate Silver.
He also fueled the next trend in
journalism: data journalism. Numbers,
formulas and algorithms will
play an increasingly important
role in understanding and explaining
the world. Silver helped prove
the masses would pay attention.
When the 2016 election rolls
around, the networks will have
their blustery pundits. Those
people aren’t going away. But
Silver and others like Sam Wang of
the Princeton Election Consortium
team that also nailed the 2012 outcome,
will be on TV, countering the
hot air with facts and logic. Political
coverage in the United States is better
for the efforts of an unassuming
baseball fan from Michigan.
At his TED talk in 2009, Silver
explained to the audience that he
spent his days looking for predictability.
The reasons: if something
is predictable, it’s designable; the
only hard part is building the model.
That observation has been one of
the major keys to his astonishing
success. No one, however, could
have designed a model that anticipated
Silver’s rise.
Noah Davis is a writer living in
Brooklyn, New York