Tag: Nate Silver

Is Nate Silver’s departure an indictment of the journalistic culture at the NYT?

Nate Silver — statistician and analyst whose blog FiveThirtyEight was most recently hosted by the New York Times — has moved to ESPN: Silver, who rose to fame with his award-winning website, FiveThirtyEight.com, also will appear on ESPN and its…

Nate Silver gives Louisville 22.7% chance of taking NCAA men’s championship

Maybe now that Nate Silver is researching and writing about topics beyond the presidential race, some of the doubters will get a sense for the FiveThirtyEight statistician’s nuanced use of numbers. Those of us who trusted Silver’s work in making…

Nate Silver on internal vs. independent polls (i.e., did Romney’s team really believe its own hype?) (UPDATED 12/4)

Another dry, wordy, must-read from Nate Sliver at FiveThirtyEight about the most puzzling question of campaign 2012: Why were Romney and his team so surprised by the election night results, when statistical models showed them trailing significantly in the states that mattered most?

Gallup defends (?) its erratic presidential polling results; Paul Ryan says results were “a shock” on election night

Really? Even on election night, with North Carolina too close to call deep into the night, with Obama performing well in Virginia and Florida, with states like Iowa and Colorado showing good returns for Obama — even with all that going on, Ryan thought they were in a position to win until Ohio was called?

Nate Silver ranks the pollsters — in a bad, bad year for Gallup

Nate Silver and his team at FiveThirtyEight are still at it. And I sincerely suggest that journalists interested in giving accurate information in elections spend some time reading his wonky post-mortems.

And another big winner Tuesday night: the polls

I wonder how the race might have played out differently if Romney supporters and right-wing pundits had simply accepted the simple facts of the polling and spent their energy trying to understand why Romney was losing instead of insisting over and over and over that he was winning.

A few final (?) thoughts on Nate Silver’s role in the election

To paraphrase one of Silver’s comments from last week: anyone who would focus their coverage of the presidential race on it being a “tossup” after looking at the results of the last 25 national polls — 17 for Obama, 6 ties, 2 for Romney — is not in the business of delivering serious news.

NYT’s public editor throws Nate Silver under the bus — what does it tell us?

A few days ago, the NYT’s Public Editor Margaret Sullivan posted Under Attack, Nate Silver Picks the Wrong Defense. Sullivan seriously compromised her own credibility in that piece.

The electoral map five days before the election

The state level polling is consistently showing Obama headed for something around 300 electoral votes. Obama is apparently ahead in Ohio, which would seem almost certain to guarantee him the election, but he also has other paths to 270 with states where he apparently has even narrower leads: New Hampshire, Iowa, Colorado, and Virginia. Florida looks very close too, but an average of state polling puts Romney slightly ahead.


What’s up with Gallup tracking poll giving Romney a big lead?

Gallup’s daily updated tracking poll of the presidential race shows Romney with a solid 6 point lead.

FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

I’ve been talking a lot about Nate Silver’s great work at FiveThirtyEight, where he and his team input every presidential poll into a complex computer model. Here’s the first part of Silver’s extended interview with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show:


Open the post for the 2nd part.

Nate Silvers’ first November projections now live at FiveThirtyEight

Silver is an amazing numbers cruncher, and his dynamic modeling of the polling back in 2008 resulted in spot-on predictions about Obama’s win over McCain.