Silver, who rose to fame with his award-winning website, FiveThirtyEight.com, also will appear on ESPN and its broadcast partner, ABC News. FiveThirtyEight.com, which had been hosted on The New York Times website since 2010, will be independent of ESPN but connect to other sites owned by the network and parent company Disney.

Silver gained attention analyzing baseball statistics before he moved to politics. In 2012, FiveThirtyEight.com correctly predicted the presidential election outcome in all 50 states. The site will include forecasts of the 2014 and 2016 elections. […]

The FiveThirtyEight’s new incarnation will allow Silver to return to his sports roots while expanding his approach to other disciplines.

In the brief ESPN article quoted above, Silver says he now has his “dream job.”

But shouldn’t working for the New York Times have been a dream job?

If you want to get a taste of some of the tensions in journalism today, read this post today by the NYT’s public editor Margaret Sullivan: Nate Silver Went Against the Grain for Some at The Times.

In that revealing and somewhat disturbing post, Sullivan downplays her own criticism of Silver at the height of last fall’s campaign and overstates her support for him. I blogged about the issues involved (CLICK HERE for that lengthy post a few days before the fall election), and the various nuances of the controversy left me convinced that Sullivan herself didn’t even quite understand what Silver was even doing with his ratings and aggregation of various state and national polls.

Now comes this from Sullivan’s post today:

I donâ€t think Nate Silver ever really fit into the Times culture and I think he was aware of that. He was, in a word, disruptive. Much like the Brad Pitt character in the movie “Moneyball” disrupted the old model of how to scout baseball players, Nate disrupted the traditional model of how to cover politics.

His entire probability-based way of looking at politics ran against the kind of political journalism that The Times specializes in: polling, the horse race, campaign coverage, analysis based on campaign-trail observation, and opinion writing, or “punditry,” as he put it, famously describing it as “fundamentally useless.” Of course, The Times is equally known for its in-depth and investigative reporting on politics.

His approach was to work against the narrative of politics – the “story” – and that made him always interesting to read.

As it turned out, of course, the traditional “horse race” model of how to cover politics led many Americans — and apparently even the Romney campaign itself — to many flat, dead, totally wrong conclusions about the state of the presidential race.

If Silver “disrupted” that journalistic culture, then good. The Times should have been embracing Silver and his approach not only to political polling but also to other fields heavy in data.

And this from Sullivan:

A number of traditional and well-respected Times journalists disliked his work. The first time I wrote about him I suggested that print readers should have the same access to his writing that online readers were getting. I was surprised to quickly hear by e-mail from three high-profile Times political journalists, criticizing him and his work. They were also tough on me for seeming to endorse what he wrote, since I was suggesting that it get more visibility.

Let me echo Kevin Drum’s thoughts in Mother Jones about that snippet:

Even for those of us who are pretty cynical about political reporting, this is astonishing. If I were editor of the Times, I’d do whatever it took to find out who those three are, and then fire them instantly. Whoever they are, they shouldn’t be trusted to cover the pig races at a country fair, let alone write about politics for the most influential newspaper in the country.

Again, Silver and his team’s analysis of last fall’s presidential election, not to mention their work on other elections and topics, was spot on. Reading and watching other political coverage throughout the cycle, Americans might have had the idea that the Obama-Romney matchup was a highly volatile affair with voters switching sides constantly, with large numbers of undecided voters, and with totally unpredictable turnout. But while there were some mild surprises in the final numbers, it all went pretty much according to the script that Silver and his team laid out: Obama had a relatively solid lead many months ahead of the campaign, that lead shrank by a small amount after the first debate, and Obama won rather handily, as Silver’s model projected.

Nationwide, Obama ended up winning 51.07 percent to 47.21 percent for Romney. Silver’s model’s final projection was that Obama would win 50.8 percent to 48.3 percent.

I can’t say I’m sorry that Silver has left the Times — we can expect that he’ll continue to do his rigorous analysis wherever he is.

But the handling of Silver while he was with the NYT and Sullivan’s statements regarding his departure send up some big red flags about political coverage at the paper, not to mention raising real concerns about the Times’ adaptability as new media continues to put pressure on traditional journalism.

Those of us who trusted Silver’s work in making our presidential calls last November did pretty well.

Given the parity in men’s college basketball, picking the NCAA champ is a lot harder than picking the winner of a two-person race.

But Louisville, the #1 seed, emerges as the favorite in FiveThirtyEight’s forecast. From FiveThirtyEight:

Louisville is in fact the nominal favorite to win the tournament despite its tough draw, according to the FiveThirtyEight forecast. Still, Louisville has only a 23 percent chance of doing so, just ahead of Indiana at 20 percent.

In 2012, the FiveThirtyEight formula listed Kentucky as the tournament favorite. That call looks prescient since the Wildcats went on to win the tournament. Still, the result involved as much luck as skill, since the forecast gave Kentucky just a 27 percent chance of winning the tournament, only modestly better than Louisville and Indiana this year.

All the #1 seeds are favored to make the final four except for Kansas, which Silver’s model has as an underdog to #3 seed Florida.

You can read about his methodology at the post linked above.

It’s worth noting the Silver’s five top teams have a combined probability of about 2 in 3 of walking the champion.

Regular readers know that I was arguing even before the election that the likely voter models were screening out far too many Americans who were likely in fact to vote. That became more and more obvious as we lumbered toward election day.

At a forum last week at Harvard, Daniel Axelrod and others spoke about campaign strategy. From The Washington Post piece, regarding the Obama campaign’s amazingly high level of nightly polling:

The reason [they were so confident]: Massive amounts of their own polling — not just nationally and in individual states, but in nightly surveys of 9,000 likely voters across 10 battleground states.

“All three of them were saying the same thing . . . in a way that gave us real confidence,” campaign manager Jim Messina said in remarks released Monday. “We thought we knew exactly where the electorate was.”

Another thing they learned, said Obama strategist David Axelrod, was that as many as 20 percent of the people who were actually going to vote were not being picked up as “likely voters” in publicly available surveys.

“It just becomes a big horse-race story, and you guys donâ€t even know where the horses are,” Axelrod said.

Time for Gallup and other organizations to revisit their likely voter models, as I’ve said repeatedly.

ORIGINAL POST:

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?

Check out When Internal Polls Mislead, a Whole Campaign May Be To Blame.

The main takeaway:

Nonetheless, the seeming inaccuracy of Mr. Romneyâ€s internal polls ought to present a warning to future campaigns. The problems with internal polls may run deeper than the tendency for campaigns to report them to the public in a selective or manipulative way. The campaigns may also be fooling themselves.

Silver goes through the numbers, some based on Noam Scheiber’s reporting at The New Republic: Exclusive: The Internal Polls That Made Mitt Romney Think He’d Win.

Assuming Scheiber really did see some of the Romney campaign’s internal polls, the differences from reality are striking. The internal poll had Romney up 2.5 in Colorado and 3.5 in New Hampshire, for example. He lost those states by 5.4 and 5.6, respectively. Those differences are hard to account for by any logical measure.

I wonder if the Romney campaign systematically “unskewed” the polls to match a predetermined — and erroneous — notion that whites would surge to the polls and massive numbers of minorities would stay home?

The most interesting parts of Silver’s latest post are the discussions of the politics of internal polling — the decisions to selectively release or to preview on background certain numbers for gullible reporters who assume that the campaigns have the real numbers. Here:

But when campaigns release internal polls to the public, their goal is usually not to provide the most accurate information. Instead, they are most likely trying to create a favorable news narrative — and they may fiddle with these assumptions until they get the desired result.

The Democratic pollster Harrison Hickman, who testified under oath in the federal case against John Edwards, put this bluntly, describing the release of internal polls to the news media as a form of “propaganda”:

Hickman testified that when circulating the polls, he didnâ€t much care if they were accurate. “I didnâ€t necessarily take any of these as for — as you would say, for the truth of the matter. I took them more as something that could be used as propaganda for the campaign,” the veteran pollster said.

From Talking Points Memo, Ryan: It ‘Looked Like We Stood A Pretty Good Chance Of Winning†On Election Day:

“The polling we had. The numbers we were looking at looked like we stood a pretty good chance of winning,” Ryan said. “So, when the numbers came in, going the other direction. When we saw the turnout that was occurring in urban areas which were really fairly unprecedented, it did come as a bit of a shock. So, those are the toughest losses to have — the ones that catch you by surprise.”

Click here for the entire interview video and read a bit more:

As they saw the states fall one-by-one, reality began to settle in, and by the time Ohio was called for President Barack Obama, they knew the race was over.

“Once we realized that we probably weren’t going to win Ohio, that’s when we realized that it probably wasn’t going to turn out for us,” Ryan said.

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?

Wow, talk about insularity.

Anyway, there’s a bit of a bizarre memo posted on Gallup’s website today. It’s dated November 9th, but no one in the media covering such things seems to have seen it until today. From Polling, Likely Voters, and the Law of the Commons by Gallup Editor-in-Chief Frank Newport:

We will continue to examine our likely voter procedures, a real key to understanding the final popular vote. Our final estimate of registered voters was an unallocated 49% for Obama, 46% for Romney. The transition to likely voters moved that to the unallocated 49% Romney, 48% Obama.

We have modified our likely voter procedures in a number of ways over the years since they were first developed by George Gallup and Paul Perry decades ago. But I think it is clear that voting today is subject to new pushes and pulls, including, in particular, the highly sophisticated ground games employed by the Obama (and, to a lesser degree, the Romney) campaign this year. These methods may in the end affect voters who were not certain about voting at the time of a poll interview, but who were brought into the voting pool at the last minute by aggressive get-out-the-vote and late registration methods. Our traditional “bootstrap” method of identifying likely voters is self-weighting — letting voters†responses to questions determine their probability of voting. This bears investigation. We will use the governmentâ€s post-election data, along with internal evidence, to see if further assumptions, investigations, or changes might be necessary.

We do believe that the presidential campaign underwent significant changes as it progressed this year. Romney clearly gained as a result of the first debate in Denver, and he held onto at least a marginal lead position in our polling until the week before the election, when Superstorm Sandy hit. Obama gained five points on the gap between our last pre-storm polling and the final poll. It may be that he continued to gain on into Election Day.

So Gallup thinks they were right all along? Romney was 6 points up a week before the election, even though the vast weight of the polling gave the edge to Obama? Then Hurricane Sandy swung the election 5 or more points toward Obama, even though its main impact was in states where Obama was already destined to prevail? And that there their miss of a single point (“a statistical tie”) was acceptable given that Obama’s win will be more than 2.5 points once all the votes in California are counted?

Sitting here in Savannah, I was convinced that Gallup had dramatic problems with its likely voter model, which I wrote about in October and then referred to briefly in my electoral prediction on Nov. 5th:

Newport also takes a jab at Silver and other aggregators, while raising a legitimate concern:

Itâ€s not easy nor cheap to conduct traditional random sample polls. Itâ€s much easier, cheaper, and mostly less risky to focus on aggregating and analyzing others†polls. Organizations that traditionally go to the expense and effort to conduct individual polls could, in theory, decide to put their efforts into aggregation and statistical analyses of other peopleâ€s polls in the next election cycle and cut out their own polling.

Silver has already tweeted a couple of reasonable and pithy responses:

Gallup’s demographic weighting algorithms probably contain a few bugs. They need to hire better statisticians.

— Nate Silver (@fivethirtyeight) November 13, 2012

Polls shouldn’t bounce around as much as Gallup’s, given their large sample sizes. Something is designed badly and introducing noise.

— Nate Silver (@fivethirtyeight) November 13, 2012

Sort of a disappointing response from Gallup to all of this.

As most of you probably know, Silver’s method of aggregating polling data was vindicated on Tuesday night, when his model had Obama the favorite in every state that he in fact won. In FiveThirtyEight’s projection of the popular vote, Obama was a 2.5 point favorite. He won the popular vote by 2.6 points.

In a post last night, Silver deals with the basic issue: Which Polls Fared Best (and Worst) in the 2012 Presidential Race.

A snippet:

As Americans†modes of communication change, the techniques that produce the most accurate polls seems to be changing as well. In last Tuesdayâ€s presidential election, a number of polling firms that conduct their surveys online had strong results. Some telephone polls also performed well. But others, especially those that called only landlines or took other methodological shortcuts, performed poorly and showed a more Republican-leaning electorate than the one that actually turned out.

Twenty three polling firms conducted 5 or more polls in the final three weeks of the election. Of those, TIPP had an average error of .9 percent and the tiniest of partisan leans with a .1 percent bias toward Romney. In other words, simply averaging the TIPP polls of the presidential race would have led someone to a prediction as good as Silver’s. But in terms of average error for individual polls, the second best was Google Consumer Surveys at 1.6, with RAND Corporation at 1.8.

But it’s even more interesting to look at the terrible misses of the 60 final Rasmussen polls, which included the tracking polls, and Gallups abysmal performance in its tracking poll. The Washington Post/ABC News poll had a bad year too:

Back on October 19th, I wrote a lengthy post about why Gallup’s numbers didn’t look trustworthy this year.

Time for some soul-searching at Gallup and at Rasmussen too — 60 polls with an average miss of 4.2 percent! With a Republican bias of 3.7 percent! One could argue in Rasmussen’s defense that the race moved toward Obama at the end. But if it did so, it couldn’t have been more than a point in the final week or so.

Also an interesting note: of the 23 polling firms that were most active in gauging the presidential race, 19 of them had a statistical bias toward Romney — the polls that were supposedly biased against him actually turned out to be biased against Obama.

As I write this late on Tuesday night, Obama sits at 303 — after a very narrow victory — but Florida is still likely to go his way.

And if Florida goes his way, then I was right on the money. I wish I could take lots of credit for that, but for months I’ve just been following FiveThirtyEight’s lead. And FiveThirtyEight was taking its data from dozens of polling companies’ work.

And that work, taken together, turned out to be excellent. In an increasingly complex world of cell phones and low response rates, the pollsters are making solid moves.

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.

By the way, I felt quite certain how things would play out tonight when Pew’s Andrew Kohut said on All Things Considered this afternoon that the electorate looked almost just like 2008 — same percentage of whites, of blacks, and of voters under 30.

Here was the map I picked on Monday:

From Michael Gerson today at The Washington Post, The trouble with Obamaâ€s Silver lining:

Silverâ€s prediction is not an innovation; it is trend taken to its absurd extreme. He is doing little more than weighting and aggregating state polls and combining them with various historical assumptions to project a future outcome with exaggerated, attention-grabbing exactitude. His work is better summarized as an 86.3 percent confidence that the state polls are correct.

The main problem with this approach to politics is not that it is pseudo-scientific but that it is trivial. An election is not a mathematical equation; it is a nation making a decision. People are weighing the priorities of their society and the quality of their leaders. Those views, at any given moment, can be roughly measured. But spreadsheets donâ€t add up to a political community. In a democracy, the convictions of the public ultimately depend on persuasion, which resists quantification.

Put another way: The most interesting and important thing about politics is not the measurement of opinion but the formation of opinion. Public opinion is the product — the outcome — of politics; it is not the substance of politics. If political punditry has any value in a democracy, it is in clarifying large policy issues and ethical debates, not in “scientific” assessments of public views.

So, yet again, we have someone — in this case Gerson — with a national platform who seemingly does not grasp the simple importance of Silver’s work.

Who doesn’t want news outlets to give us more coverage of large policy issues? Who doesn’t think the media should spend more time talking about the priorities of our society and the best ways to get there?

I think the vast majority of Americans would agree with Gerson’s broader point.

But what is the content that actually consumes much of the broadcast time and print space? Lame punditry about “tossup” races and “sprints to the finish.” Glib predictions about candidates’ likely surges here or there — ideas that bear only passing relationship to probable outcomes.

Nate Silver and others who are trying to aggregate polling data in a truly meaningful way are pointing out the sheer inanity of those discussions and predictions. They’re injecting data into the public discussion, and in the process they are showing much of our news coverage for what it is: entertainment.

To paraphrase one of Silver’s comments from last week: anyone who would cover the presidential race as 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.

Silver’s work isn’t “trivial”, as Gerson argues. Silver and others have told the usual media suspects that the American public doesn’t need their horse race punditry when we can look at the data ourselves about who’s most likely to win and by how much. We don’t need reporters to tell us that anymore.

Those reporters and columnists now need to work a little harder and ask more important questions — they need to spend less time haggling about the politics and more time covering policies.

Rather than complaining about Silver’s work, folks like Gerson should embrace the freedom they have been given by it. They don’t have to waste their own time or their readers’ with ill-informed predictions. They can focus on more substantive things.

I like Michael Gerson’s columns. The one today is exceptionally disappointing.

The blog is based at the New York Times, but Silver developed his own methodology over the years for analyzing available polling data for national elections (and other things too). The Times lured him under their umbrella after the 2008 election, but he has his own brand and could easily go back out on his own.

I hope he does, actually.

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.

Short background: MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough had apparently been criticizing Silver’s work (and engaging in personal attacks), so via Twitter Silver bet him $1000 that Obama would win. Nate’s many things — a statistician, a bettor, someone who believes in his own work, a blogger. He’s not a traditional journalist and he’s not a Times reporter who is expected to maintain an appearance of neutrality. Silver’s model shows Obama with a better than 80 percent chance of re-election, so the $1000 bet is a pretty good one (although he could still lose — close to 1/5 of the time).

Sullivan took Silver to task for that bet, which could be fine given the Times’ standards but in practice is really problematic given the hazy definition of Silver’s position.

And it’s the way that Sullivan went about it that I object most strongly too.

She writes:

For months now, he has been predicting that President Obama has about a 75 percent probability, give or take a few points, of winning re-election on Tuesday. He uses an algorithm – some call it a secret sauce — that combines the numbers in public opinion polls and produces a result that he then turns into a prediction.

Since the summer, the model has shown Obama with a lead, but his actual chances of winning on Nov. 6 have varied from 59 percent to 89 percent. That’s hardly “a few points” — and that’s precisely the sort of lazy characterization all too common in news coverage. And that’s precisely the sort of lazy use of numbers that Silver himself would never allow.

And why echo the derisive “secret sauce” complaint? Some mathematical details can’t be released lest Silver undermine his own value, but he’s been exhaustive — really — in explaining over the months what data goes in, how data cycles out, how various weights of information change over time, why some pollsters are weighed more heavily or are adjusted for their partisan “house effect”, and so forth and so on.

Again, Sullivan’s decision to use the derisive “secret sauce” term coupled with her own vague understanding of the model’s methodology insults both Silver and his readership.

And I should add that Silver is not really in the “prediction” racket. He’s determining odds of a particular outcome, not necessarily predicting one.

Sullivan writes:

Itâ€s also inappropriate for a Times journalist, which is how Mr. Silver is seen by the public even though heâ€s not a regular staff member.

“I wouldnâ€t want to see it become newsroom practice,” said the associate managing editor for standards, Philip B. Corbett. He described Mr. Silverâ€s status as a blogger — something like a columnist — as a mitigating factor.

Granted, Mr. Silver isnâ€t covering the presidential race as a political reporter would.

But he is closely associated with The Times and its journalism – in fact, heâ€s probably (and please know that I use the p-word loosely) its most high-profile writer at this particular moment.

FiveThirtyEight’s electoral predictions three days before the election

But consider Sullivan’s formulation: it’s inappropriate for a Times journalist to make a bet on Twitter; therefore it’s inappropriate for a non-staff blogger who is not a reporter but who is a little like a columnist. In an earlier post, executive editor Jill Abramson was quoted as saying that Silver is “a separate entity, somewhat analogous to that of a columnist.”

Really, what the hell?

Sullivan backtracked a bit with a followup post, but she misses the point there too.

A few observations:

Journalists are scared of numbers
Not all of them certainly, but this is a huge problem in news coverage today. For example, if more reporters had understood simple concepts like months of inventory, we would have seen a much better public grasp of the hubris of the housing boom. What Silver is doing at FiveThirtyEight seems to scare people who prefer words over numbers. Silver’s a good writer, a clear writer, but he’s not going to win any awards for his long-winded prose. He uses words to give voice to the data he collects and analyzes. Bill McBride does the same thing at Calculated Risk. Such approaches are challenging to the irrational world of punditry that dominates so much of our public discourse.

The NYT and other legacy media are struggling to adjust to the world of new media
As I note above, the Times clearly needs to figure out exactly what Silver’s content is. If the NYT itself doesn’t know, then how can they possibly criticize him like this based on non-existent standards?

News coverage is biased toward horse races and “tossups”
Romney could still win on Tuesday, but it’s not a tossup. Check out Silver’s post about Friday’s polling: Nov. 2: For Romney to Win, State Polls Must Be Statistically Biased. Of 22 swing state polls (CO, FL, IA, ME-2, MI, MN, NH, OH, VA, WI) released on Friday, two were tied and Obama led in 19 of them. Romney led in one poll in Florida. And that’s not just a single day — Obama has maintained small but steady leads in more than enough states to get to 270 electoral votes. From that post:

If you have just one poll of a state, the statistical sampling error will be fairly high. For instance, a poll of 800 voters has a margin of error in estimating one candidateâ€s vote share of about plus or minus 3.5 percentage points. In a two-candidate race, however, the margin of error in estimating the difference between the candidates (as in: “Obama leads Romney by five points”) is roughly twice that, plus or minus seven percentage points, since a vote for one candidate is necessarily a vote against the other one.

The margin of error is much reduced, however, when you aggregate different polls together, since that creates a much larger sample size. In Ohio, for example, there have been 17,615 interviews of likely voters in polls conducted there within the past 10 days. That yields a margin of error, in measuring the difference between the candidates, of about 1.5 percentage point — smaller than Mr. Obamaâ€s current lead in the polling average there.

Legacy media need to figure this thing out — and fast. For informed news consumers, it’s now almost laughable for media outlets to give focused attention to an individual poll, as major publications and stations do routinely for polls they have commissioned.