's Nate Silver on life post-election

Known as a superstar statistician whose blog gave Democrats daily data that calmed them down last fall, Silver was the keynote speaker at SXSWi Sunday. Afterward, he spoke to CNET News. blogger Nate Silver (right) was the keynote speaker at SXSWi on Sunday. He was interviewed onstage by Business Week writer Stephen Baker. Silver's blog was home to some of the most accurate statistics about the 2008 election. Daniel Terdiman/CNET











Q: How helpful was it to to have the Minnesota election and the Mississippi runoff to keep buzz going after the election?
Silver: Definitely the Minnesota race, and also Alaska took awhile to resolve. But we were going to lose a lot of our traffic no matter what. Especially because we had had people clicking on the site 10 times a day or 10 times an hour waiting for the polling updates. So, those kind of eased the transition, especially Minnesota. But we're now at a point where I'm in some ways enjoying writing the blog more now because now there's all these other things I want to talk about.

Q: Was that the plan for after the election?
Silver: The plan was to do a little bit more with the Congress, where we started to analyze Congressional voting patterns, and we're doing a little bit of that. But my background is in economics, and fortunately, most of the major issues relate to economics, things like the stimulus and the bailout. But health care is all about economics, and so is cap-and-trade environmental policy. And so I think I'm fortunate that the issues that are most important now are things I can talk about.

National security and "values" issues, those are less amenable to the quantitative analysis that I do. So we're talking more about policy and less about politics than I expected.

Q: What are your traffic numbers now, and how does that compare to the campaign?
Silver: We're at about 800,000 uniques per month, and in October and November, we peaked at about 2.2 million. With visits, the difference is larger, because people were clicking so repeatedly on the site. But basically we're doing about the same now as we were in August, just before the conventions. You would like to still be getting 2 million visits on a particular day, but of course you're not going to get that. A lot of people tune out after the election.

Nate Silver
Nate Silver SXSW

Q: The artist Shepard Fairey never imagined that his Obama "Hope" poster would be such an icon. Did you expect your site to have as big an effect as it did?
Silver: No, I'm a pretty confident guy, and I thought that this is something I'm doing in part because people aren't doing it that well, but I didn't think there would be this kind of scale. You discover that Web traffic is very non-linear, and it's viral. You don't go from 1,000 to 2,000. You go from 1,000 to 10,000 and from 10,000 to 100,000. You have this multiple happening, kind of four times, on a logarithmic scale, and I didn't expect that. But there's a lot of luck here.

Q: What do you attribute your success to?
Silver: Being in the right place at the right time. Also, it's working hard, and having an interesting product. But that just gets you in the door. So from that point of view, a lot was luck. It's some of the media we did, or certain predictions we made, like for the North Carolina primary, where we said Obama would win comfortably, and he did, and a guy at Newsweek did an interview based on that. Especially with the media, it all kind of feeds back on itself, where your qualification to do media is doing other media.

Q: What was your process for working on your statistical models?
Silver: There's no one step that's all that complicated. You're building it bit by bit. It started when I was coming back from a trip to New Orleans and was in the airport, and thought, "Why hasn't anyone collected all these general election polls and seen whether Clinton or Obama is doing better against McCain?" That was the first stroke of insight. But you start doing that, and then I became frustrated by the fact that there are some polls that I knew weren't very good, but they were getting as much weight as good ones, so it became going back and seeing who's been most accurate over time. So it's literally been one step at a time. A lot of it is you sitting there at 4 in the morning with a can of Red Bull and a data-processing program.

Q: What software are you using?
Silver: I use Microsoft Excel. I use Excel in ways that it shouldn't probably be used, but it's a pretty flexible program if you know how to trick it out a little bit. And for the hard-core data processing, you need something else, and I use Stata.

Q: How are political campaigns and baseball connected?
Silver: There is kind of the same rhythm to political campaigns and baseball seasons. You have to be patient to appreciate it. In political campaigns that last two years, you have certain primaries, like Iowa and New Hampshire, that are very important. And two conventions, three or four debates, and the vice presidents being picked. Collectively, those took up about 20 days, whereas the campaign lasted about 700 days.

So there's not much high-impact stuff, and you have to follow it every single day, and understand how little threads become big threads, and how the picture develops very slowly. That's similar to baseball, which has a long season.

Q: There's also a partisan thing, like Yankees versus Red Sox and Democrats versus Republicans, right?
Silver: I think there is something to that. Political affiliations are kind of like picking sports teams. And that's why when we are expressing a political point of view we try not to make it personal. Some people think those who think differently than they do politically are evil people. That's not the most productive way of looking at the world.

Q: Were pollsters calling cell phone users?
Silver: At the end of the day, I think about half the firms were. Most of the national polling firms, like NBC/Wall Street Journal, and I think ABC News and Pew Research were. The better-financed polls are starting to do that. But it's going to become more and more important, because it's not like the thirtysomething or twentysomething generations are going to feel the need to have landlines. This is a real problem for the polling firms in the long term.


Join the discussion

Conversation powered by Livefyre

Show Comments Hide Comments
Latest Galleries from CNET
Uber's tumultuous ups and downs in 2014 (pictures)
The best and worst quotes of 2014 (pictures)
A roomy range from LG (pictures)
This plain GE range has all of the essentials (pictures)
Sony's 'Interview' heard 'round the world (pictures)