Nate Silver Creation and motivation What did Nate create ? On November 1, 2007, while still employed by Baseball Prospectus, Silver began publishing a diary under the pseudonym "Poblano" on the progressive political blog Daily Kos. What was in the diary ? Silver set out to analyze quantitative aspects of the political game to enlighten a broader audience. What was the motivation ? 'I was just frustrated with the analysis. ... I saw a lot of discussion about strategy that was not all that sophisticated, How did the diary further develop ? Silver established his own blog, FiveThirtyEight.com. What did he publish on the blog ? On June 1, 2008, Silver published a two-page Op-Ed article in the New York Post outlining the rationale underlying his focus on the statistical aspects of politics. Did he publish anything else on the blog other than the Op-Ed piece ? I don't know.
When did he start the website fivethirtyeight.com ?
When did Nate Silver start the fivethirtyeight.com website?
On November 1, 2007, while still employed by Baseball Prospectus, Silver began publishing a diary under the pseudonym "Poblano" on the progressive political blog Daily Kos. Silver set out to analyze quantitative aspects of the political game to enlighten a broader audience. Silver reports that "he was stranded in a New Orleans airport when the idea of FiveThirtyEight.com came to him. 'I was just frustrated with the analysis. ... I saw a lot of discussion about strategy that was not all that sophisticated, especially when it came to quantitative things like polls and demographics'". His forecasts of the 2008 United States presidential primary elections drew a lot of attention, including being cited by The New York Times Op-Ed columnist William Kristol.  On March 7, 2008, while still writing as "Poblano," Silver established his own blog, FiveThirtyEight.com. Often colloquially referred to as just 538, the website takes its name from the number of electors in the United States electoral college.  On May 30, 2008, Poblano revealed his identity to FiveThirtyEight.com readers. On June 1, 2008, Silver published a two-page Op-Ed article in the New York Post outlining the rationale underlying his focus on the statistical aspects of politics. He first appeared on national television on CNN's American Morning on June 13, 2008.  Silver described his partisan orientation as follows in the FAQ on his website: "My state [Illinois] has non-partisan registration, so I am not registered as anything. I vote for Democratic candidates the majority of the time (though by no means always). This year, I have been a supporter of Barack Obama". With respect to the impartiality of his electoral projections, Silver stated, "Are [my] results biased toward [my] preferred candidates? I hope not, but that is for you to decide. I have tried to disclose as much about my methodology as possible". CANNOTANSWER
On March 7, 2008, while still writing as "Poblano," Silver established his own blog, FiveThirtyEight.com.
Nathaniel Read Silver (born January 13, 1978) is an American statistician, writer and poker player who analyzes baseball (see sabermetrics), basketball, and elections (see psephology). He is the founder and editor-in-chief of FiveThirtyEight and a Special Correspondent for ABC News.

Silver first gained public recognition for developing PECOTA, a system for forecasting the performance and career development of Major League Baseball players, which he sold to and then managed for Baseball Prospectus from 2003 to 2009.

Silver was named one of The World's 100 Most Influential People by Time in 2009 after an election forecasting system he developed successfully predicted the outcomes in 49 of the 50 states in the 2008 U.S. Presidential election. In the 2012 United States presidential election, the forecasting system correctly predicted the winner of all 50 states and the District of Columbia. FiveThirtyEight, like many  outlets, said Donald Trump had a lower probability of victory in the 2016 presidential election than Hillary Clinton. However, the 28% chance of victory they gave Trump going into election day was significantly higher than that of most other analysts, and FiveThirtyEight discussed a Trump win as a distinct possibility, while most media treated it as a remote, if not near-impossible, outcome. In 2020, FiveThirtyEight correctly predicted Joe Biden's victory in the election, forecasting 48 out of 50 states correctly. However, while FiveThirtyEight viewed the actual results as a plausible scenario, it significantly overestimated Biden's margins in battleground states such as Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

In 2010, the FiveThirtyEight blog was licensed for publication by The New York Times. In 2012 and 2013, FiveThirtyEight won Webby Awards as the "Best Political Blog" from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences.

In July 2013, Silver sold FiveThirtyEight to ESPN, and Silver became its Editor in Chief. The ESPN-owned FiveThirtyEight launched on March 17, 2014. The site focused on a broad range of subjects under the rubric of "data journalism".

Silver's book, The Signal and the Noise, was published in September 2012. It subsequently reached The New York Times best seller list for nonfiction, and was named by Amazon.com as the No. 1 best nonfiction book of 2012. The Signal and the Noise won the 2013 Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science. The book has been translated into eleven languages: Chinese (separate editions in traditional and simplified characters), Czech, Finnish, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, and Spanish.

Early life
Silver was born in East Lansing, Michigan, the son of Sally (née Thrun), a community activist, and Brian David Silver, a former chair of the political science department at Michigan State University. Silver's mother's family, of English and German descent, includes several distinguished men and women, including his maternal great-grandfather, Harmon Lewis, who was president of the Alcoa Steamship Company, Inc. Silver's father's family includes two uncles -- Leon Silver and Caswell Silver—who were distinguished geologists. Silver has described himself as "half-Jewish".

Silver showed a proficiency in math from a young age. According to journalist William Hageman, "Silver caught the baseball bug when he was 6.... It was 1984, the year the Detroit Tigers won the World Series. The Tigers became his team and baseball his sport. And if there's anything that goes hand in glove with baseball, it's numbers, another of Silver's childhood interests ("It's always more interesting to apply it to batting averages than algebra class")".

As a student at East Lansing High School, in 1996 Silver won first place in the State of Michigan in the 49th annual John S. Knight Scholarship Contest for senior high school debaters.

Silver first showed his journalism skills as a writer and opinion page editor for The Portrait, East Lansing High School's student newspaper, from 1993–1996.

In 2000, Silver graduated with Honors with a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics from the University of Chicago. He also wrote for the Chicago Weekly News and the Chicago Maroon. He spent his third year at the London School of Economics.

Career

Economic consultant: 2000–2004
After college graduation in 2000, Silver worked for three and a half years as a transfer pricing consultant with KPMG in Chicago. When asked in 2009, "What is your biggest regret in life?" Silver responded, "Spending four years of my life at a job I didn't like". While employed at KPMG, Silver continued to nurture his lifelong interest in baseball and statistics, and on the side he began to work on his PECOTA system for projecting player performance and careers. He quit his job at KPMG in April 2004 and for a time earned his living mainly by playing online poker. According to Sports Illustrated writer Alexander Wolff, over a three-year period Silver earned $400,000 from online poker.

Baseball analyst: 2003–2008
In 2003, Silver became a writer for Baseball Prospectus (BP), after having sold PECOTA to BP in return for a partnership interest. After resigning from KPMG in 2004, he took the position of Executive Vice-President, later renamed Managing Partner of BP. Silver further developed PECOTA and wrote a weekly column under the heading "Lies, Damned Lies". He applied sabermetric techniques to a broad range of topics including forecasting the performance of individual players, the economics of baseball, metrics for the valuation of players, and developing an Elo rating system for Major League baseball.

Between 2003 and 2009, Silver co-authored the Baseball Prospectus annual book of Major League Baseball forecasts, as well as other books, including Mind Game: How the Boston Red Sox Got Smart, Won a World Series, and Created a New Blueprint for Winning, Baseball Between the Numbers, and It Ain't Over 'til It's Over: The Baseball Prospectus Pennant Race Book.

He contributed articles about baseball to ESPN.com, Sports Illustrated, Slate, the New York Sun, and The New York Times.

Silver has authored more than 200 articles for Baseball Prospectus.

PECOTA

PECOTA (Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm) is a statistical system that projects the future performance of hitters and pitchers. It is designed primarily for two users: fans interested in fantasy baseball, and professionals in the baseball business trying to predict the performance and valuation of major league players. Unlike most other baseball projection systems, PECOTA relies on matching a given current player to a set of "comparable" players whose past performance can serve as a guide to how the given current player is likely to perform in the future. Unlike most other such systems, PECOTA also calculates a range of probable performance levels rather than a single predicted value on a given measure such as earned run average or batting average.

PECOTA projections were first published by Baseball Prospectus in the 2003 edition of its annual book as well as online by BaseballProspectus.com. Silver produced the PECOTA forecasts for each Major League Baseball season from 2003 through 2009.

Political analyst and blogger: 2008–present

FiveThirtyEight blog

Creation and motivation
On November 1, 2007, while still employed by Baseball Prospectus, Silver began publishing a diary under the pseudonym "Poblano" on the progressive political blog Daily Kos. Silver set out to analyze quantitative aspects of the political game to enlighten a broader audience. Silver reports that "he was stranded in a New Orleans airport when the idea of FiveThirtyEight.com came to him. 'I was just frustrated with the analysis. ... I saw a lot of discussion about strategy that was not all that sophisticated, especially when it came to quantitative things like polls and demographics'". His forecasts of the 2008 United States presidential primary elections drew a lot of attention, including being cited by The New York Times op-ed columnist William Kristol.

On March 7, 2008, while still writing as "Poblano", Silver established his own blog, FiveThirtyEight.com. Often colloquially referred to as just 538, the website takes its name from the number of electors in the United States electoral college.

On May 30, 2008, Poblano revealed his identity to FiveThirtyEight.com readers. On June 1, 2008, Silver published a two-page op-ed in the New York Post outlining the rationale underlying his focus on the statistical aspects of politics. He first appeared on national television on CNN's American Morning on June 13, 2008.

Silver described his partisan orientation as follows in the FAQ on his website: "My state [Illinois] has non-partisan registration, so I am not registered as anything. I vote for Democratic candidates the majority of the time (though by no means always). This year, I have been a supporter of Barack Obama". With respect to the impartiality of his electoral projections, Silver stated, "Are [my] results biased toward [my] preferred candidates? I hope not, but that is for you to decide. I have tried to disclose as much about my methodology as possible".

2008 election and aftermath
Shortly after the November 4 election, ESPN writer Jim Caple observed, "Forget Cole Hamels and the Phillies. No one in baseball had a more impressive fall than Nate Silver....  [R]ight now Silver is exhausted. He barely slept the last couple weeks of the campaign—'By the end, it was full-time plus'—and for that matter, he says he couldn't have kept it up had the campaign lasted two days longer. Plus, he has his Baseball Prospectus duties. 'We write our [Baseball Prospectus 2009] book from now through the first of the year,' [Silver] said. 'I have a week to relax and then it gets just as busy again. In February 2009 I will just have to find an island in the Caribbean and throw my BlackBerry in the ocean'".

Later in November 2008, Silver signed a contract with Penguin Group USA to write two books, reportedly for a $700,000 advance.

Silver was invited to be a speaker at TED 2009 in February 2009, and keynote speaker at the 2009 South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive conference (March 2009).

While maintaining his FiveThirtyEight.com website, in January 2009 Silver began a monthly feature column, "The Data", in Esquire as well as contributed occasional articles to other media such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.  He also tried his luck in the 2009 World Series of Poker.

The success of his FiveThirtyEight.com blog marked the effective end of Silver's career as baseball analyst, though he continued to devote some attention to sports statistics and sports economics in his blog. In March 2009, he stepped down as Managing Partner of Baseball Prospectus and handed over responsibility for producing future PECOTA projections to other Baseball Prospectus staff members. In April 2009, he appeared as an analyst on ESPN's Baseball Tonight. After March 2009, he published only two "Lies, Damned Lies" columns on BaseballProspectus.com.

In November 2009, ESPN introduced a new Soccer Power Index (SPi), designed by Nate Silver, for predicting the outcome of the 2010 FIFA World Cup. He published a post-mortem after the tournament, comparing his predictions to those of alternative rating systems.

In April 2010, in an assignment for New York magazine, Silver created a quantitative index of "The Most Livable Neighborhoods in New York".

Transition to The New York Times
On June 3, 2010, Silver announced on FiveThirtyEight

In the near future, the blog will "re-launch" under a NYTimes.com domain. It will retain its own identity (akin to other Times blogs like DealBook), but will be organized under the News:Politics section. Once this occurs, content will no longer be posted at FiveThirtyEight.com on an ongoing basis, and the blog will re-direct to the new URL. In addition, I will be contributing content to the print edition of The New York Times, and to the Sunday Magazine. The partnership agreement, which is structured as a license, has a term of three years.

The New York Times "FiveThirtyEight: Nate Silver's Political Calculus" commenced on August 25, 2010, with the publication of "New Forecast Shows Democrats Losing 6 to 7 Senate Seats". From that date the blog focused almost exclusively on forecasting the outcomes of the 2010 U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives elections as well as state gubernatorial contests. Silver's Times Sunday Magazine feature first appeared on November 19, 2010, under the heading "Go Figure". It was later titled "Acts of Mild Subversion".

While blogging for The Times, Silver also worked on his book about prediction, which was published in September 2012. At that time, Silver began to drop hints that after 2012 he would turn his attention to matters other than detailed statistical forecasting of elections. As reported in New York magazine: " 'I view my role now as providing more of a macro-level skepticism, rather than saying this poll is good or this poll is evil,' he says. And in four [years], he might be even more macro, as he turns his forecasting talents to other fields. 'I'm 97 percent sure that the FiveThirtyEight model will exist in 2016,' he says, 'but it could be someone else who's running it or licensing it.'"

During the last year of FiveThirtyEights license to The New York Times, it drew a very large volume of online traffic to the paper:

The Times does not release traffic figures, but a spokesperson said yesterday that Silver's blog provided a significant—and significantly growing, over the past year—percentage of Times pageviews. This fall, visits to the Times' political coverage (including FiveThirtyEight) have increased, both absolutely and as a percentage of site visits. But FiveThirtyEight's growth is staggering: where earlier this year, somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of politics visits included a stop at FiveThirtyEight, last week that figure was 71 percent.

But Silver's blog has buoyed more than just the politics coverage, becoming a significant traffic-driver for the site as a whole. Earlier this year, approximately 1 percent of visits to the New York Times included FiveThirtyEight. Last week, that number was 13 percent. Yesterday, it was 20 percent. That is, one in five visitors to the sixth-most-trafficked U.S. news site took a look at Silver's blog.

Departure from The Times

In an online chat session a week after the 2012 election Silver commented: "As tempting as it might be to pull a Jim Brown/Sandy Koufax and just mic-drop/retire from elections forecasting, I expect that we'll be making forecasts in 2014 and 2016. Midterm elections can be dreadfully boring, unfortunately. But the 2016 G.O.P. primary seems almost certain to be epic." In late November 2012, Times executive editor Jill Abramson declared her wish to keep Silver and his blog: "We would love to have Nate continue to be part of the New York Times family, and to expand on what he does", she said. "We know he began in sports anyway, so it is not an exclusively political product. I am excited to talk to Nate when he finishes his book tour about ways to expand that kind of reporting."

On July 22, 2013, ESPN announced that it had acquired ownership of the FiveThirtyEight website and brand, and that "Silver will serve as editor-in-chief of the site and will build a team of journalists, editors, analysts and contributors in the coming months."

The New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan wrote upon Silver's decision to leave for ESPN:

I don'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.

She added, "A number of traditional and well-respected Times journalists disliked his work." Later, Sullivan wrote in The Times that "I don't feel so good about not being able to investigate every complaint from every individual reader fully, or about making some misjudgments in individual posts — my Nate Silver commentary, among others, has probably been off-base...".

New York magazine reported that executive editor Jill Abramson "put on a full-court press" to keep Silver at The Times and that "for Abramson, Silver was a tentpole attraction for her favorite subject, national politics, and brought the kind of buzz she thought valuable", but the company's CEO and President Mark Thompson "confirmed that keeping Silver was not at the top of his agenda." The article stated that "the major reason Silver left was because he felt it was Thompson who had not committed to building his franchise. The mixed signals from Thompson and Abramson—his lack of enthusiasm for committing resources to Silver, her desire to keep a major star—frustrated Silver and his lawyer."

FiveThirtyEight under ESPN ownership
When FiveThirtyEight was relaunched under ESPN's ownership on March 17, 2014, Silver outlined the scope of topics that would be covered under the rubric of "data journalism":

FiveThirtyEight's election forecasts

2008 U.S. elections

In March 2008, Silver established his blog FiveThirtyEight.com, in which he developed a system for tracking polls and forecasting the outcome of the 2008 general election. At the same time, he continued making forecasts of the 2008 Democratic primary elections. That several of his forecasts based on demographic analysis proved to be substantially more accurate than those of the professional pollsters gained visibility and professional credibility for "Poblano", the pseudonym that Silver was then using.

After the North Carolina and Indiana primaries on May 6, the popularity of FiveThirtyEight.com surged. Silver recalls the scenario: 'I know the polls show it's really tight in NC, but we think Obama is going to win by thirteen, fourteen points, and he did. ... Any time you make a prediction like that people give you probably too much credit for it.... But after that [Silver's and the website's popularity] started to really take off. It's pretty nonlinear, once you get one mention in the mainstream media, other people [quickly follow suit]'".

As a CNET reporter wrote on election eve, "Even though Silver launched the site as recently as March, its straightforward approach, daring predictions, and short but impressive track record has put it on the map of political sites to follow. The Washington Post featured Silver in its 14th annual election prediction contest this year, and he'll be reporting on Tuesday night's results with Dan Rather on HDNet".

Silver's final 2008 presidential election forecast accurately predicted the winner of 49 of the 50 states as well as the District of Columbia (missing only the prediction for Indiana). As his model predicted, the races in Missouri and North Carolina were particularly close. He also correctly predicted the winners of every U.S. Senate race.  The accuracy of his predictions won him further acclaim, including abroad, and added to his reputation as a leading political prognosticator.

Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign signed off on a proposal to share all of its private polling with Silver. After signing a confidentiality agreement, Silver was granted access to hundreds of polls the campaign had conducted.

2010 U.S. elections

Shortly after FiveThirtyEight relocated to The New York Times, Silver introduced his prediction models for the 2010 elections to the U.S. Senate, the U.S. House of Representatives, and state governorships. Each of these models relied initially on a combination of electoral history, demographics, and polling. Silver eventually published detailed forecasts and analyses of the results for all three sets of elections. He correctly predicted the winner in 34 of the 37 contested Senate races.  His 2010 congressional mid-term predictions were not as accurate as those made in 2008, but were still within the reported confidence interval. Silver predicted a Republican pickup of 54 seats in the House of Representatives; the GOP won 63 seats. Of the 37 gubernatorial races, FiveThirtyEight correctly predicted the winner of 36.

2012 U.S. elections

Although throughout 2011 Silver devoted a lot of attention on his blog to the 2012 Republican party primaries, his first effort to handicap the 2012 Presidential general election appeared as the cover story in The New York Times Magazine a year prior to the election: "Is Obama Toast? Handicapping the 2012 Election". Accompanying the online release of this article, Silver also published "Choose Obama's Re-Election Adventure", an interactive toy that allowed readers to predict the outcome of the election based on their assumptions about three variables: President Obama's favorability ratings, the rate of GDP growth, and how conservative the Republican opponent would be. This analysis stimulated a lot of critical discussion.

While publishing numerous stories on the Republican primary elections, in mid-February 2012 Silver reprised and updated his previous Magazine story with another one, "What Obama Should Do Next". This story painted a more optimistic picture of President Obama's re-election chances. A companion article on his FiveThirtyEight blog, "The Fundamentals Now Favor Obama", explained how the model and the facts on the ground had changed between November and February.

Silver published the first iteration of his 2012 general election forecasts on June 7, 2012. According to the model, at that time Barack Obama was projected to win 291 electoral votes—21 more than the 270 required for a majority. Obama then had an estimated 61.8% chance of winning a majority.

On the morning of the November 6, 2012, presidential election, the final update of Silver's model at 10:10 A.M. gave President Barack Obama a 90.9% chance of winning a majority of the 538 electoral votes. Both in summary tables and in an electoral map, Silver forecast the winner of each state. At the conclusion of that day, when Mitt Romney had conceded to Barack Obama, Silver's model had correctly predicted the winner of every one of the 50 states and the District of Columbia. Silver, along with at least three academic-based analysts—Drew Linzer, Simon Jackman, and Josh Putnam—who also aggregated polls from multiple pollsters—thus was not only broadly correct about the election outcome, but also specifically predicted the outcomes for the nine swing states. In contrast, individual pollsters were less successful. For example, Rasmussen Reports "missed on six of its nine swing-state polls".

2016 U.S. elections 

In the week leading up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the FiveThirtyEight team predicted that Hillary Clinton had a 64.5% chance of winning the election. Their final prediction on November 8, 2016, gave Clinton a 71% chance to win the 2016 United States presidential election, while other major forecasters had predicted Clinton to win with at least an 85% to 99% probability. Donald Trump won the election.  FiveThirtyEight argued it projected a much higher chance (29%) of Donald Trump winning the presidency than other modelers, a projection which was criticized days before the election by Ryan Grim of The Huffington Post as "unskewing" too much in favor of Trump.

Reception
Silver has been criticized for inaccurate predictions. In January 2010, journalist and blogger Colby Cosh criticized Silver's performance during the Massachusetts special Senate election, saying he was "still arguing as late as Thursday afternoon that [Martha] Coakley was the clear favourite; he changed his mind at midnight that evening and acknowledged that Scott Brown had a puncher's chance." (Brown won the election.)

Silver's quantitative focus on polling data, without insight from experience in political organizing or journalism, has been a recurring critique from experienced commentators. Huffington Post columnist Geoffrey Dunn described Silver as someone who "has never organized a precinct in his life, much less walked one, pontificating about the dynamics in the electoral processes as if he actually understood them."

Considerable criticism during the 2012 elections came from political conservatives, who argued that Silver's election projections were politically biased against Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate for president. For example, Silver was accused of applying a double standard to his treatment of Rasmussen Reports polls, such as a 2010 analysis asserting a statistical bias in its methodology. Josh Jordan wrote in National Review that Silver clearly favored Obama and adjusted the weight he gave polls "based on what [he] think[s] of the pollster and the results and not based on what is actually inside the poll".

On MSNBC's Morning Joe, host Joe Scarborough stated that Silver's prediction that day of a 73.6% chance of a win for Obama greatly exceeded the confidence of the Obama campaign itself, which Scarborough equated to that of the Romney campaign, both believing "they have a 50.1 percent chance of winning", and calling Silver an "ideologue" and a "joke". Silver responded with the offer of a $1,000 wager (for charity) over the outcome of the election. The New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan, while defending Silver's analysis, characterized the wager as "a bad idea" as it gave the appearance of a partisan motive for Silver, and "inappropriate" for someone perceived as a Times journalist (although Silver was not a member of the newspaper's staff).

After a post-election appearance by Silver on Joe Scarborough's Morning Joe, Scarborough published what he called a "(semi) apology", in which he concluded:

"I won't apologize to Mr. Silver for predicting an outcome that I had also been predicting for a year. But I do need to tell Nate I'm sorry for leaning in too hard and lumping him with pollsters whose methodology is as rigorous as the Simpsons' strip mall physician, Dr. Nick. For those sins (and a multitude of others that I'm sure I don't even know about), I am sorry.

Politics is a messy sport. And just as ball players who drink beer and eat fried chicken in dugouts across America can screw up the smartest sabermetrician's forecast, Nate Silver's formula is sure to let his fervent admirers down from time to time. But judging from what I saw of him this morning, Nate is a grounded guy who admits as much in his book. I was too tough on him and there's a 84.398264% chance I will be less dismissive of his good work in the future."

Silver's nondisclosure of the details of his analytical model has resulted in some skepticism. Washington Post journalist Ezra Klein wrote: "There are good criticisms to make of Silver's model, not the least of which is that, while Silver is almost tediously detailed about what's going on in the model, he won't give out the code, and without the code, we can't say with certainty how the model works." Colby Cosh wrote that the model "is proprietary and irreproducible. That last feature makes it unwise to use Silver's model as a straw stand-in for "science", as if the model had been fully specified in a peer-reviewed journal".

The Signal and the Noise

The Signal and The Noise was published in the United States on September 27, 2012. It reached the New York Times Best Sellers List as #12 for non-fiction hardback books after its first week in print. It dropped to #20 in the second week, before rising to #13 in the third, and remaining on the non-fiction hardback top 15 list for the following 13 weeks, with a highest weekly ranking of #4. Sales increased after the election on November 6, jumping 800% and becoming the second best seller on Amazon.com.

The book describes methods of mathematical model-building using probability and statistics. Silver takes a big-picture approach to using statistical tools, combining sources of unique data (e.g., timing a minor league ball player's fastball using a radar gun), with historical data and principles of sound statistical analysis; Silver argues that many of these are violated by many pollsters and pundits who nonetheless have important media roles. Case studies in the book include baseball, elections, climate change, the financial crash, poker, and weather forecasting. These different topics illustrate different statistical principles. As a reviewer in The New York Times notes: "It's largely about evaluating predictions in a variety of fields, from finance to weather to epidemiology. We learn about a handful of successes: when, for instance, meteorologists predict a hurricane's landfall 72 hours in advance.... But mostly we learn about failures. It turns out we're not even close to predicting the next catastrophic earthquake or the spread of the next killer bird flu, despite the enormous amounts of brainpower trained on these questions in the past few decades".

Blogs and other publications
Blogs
 FiveThirtyEight blog, now owned by ABC
 Nate Silver's Baseball Prospectus article archive (2003–2009)
 Nate Silver's The Burrito Bracket (2007)

Other publications
 Nate Silver, "The Most Livable Neighborhoods in New York: A Quantitative Index of the 50 Most Satisfying Places to Live", New York, April 11, 2010.
 Nate Silver, "The Influence Index", Time, April 29, 2010.
 Nate Silver and Walter Hickey, "Best Picture Math", Vanity Fair, March 2014.
 Gareth Cook (Editor), Nate Silver (Introduction). The Best American Infographics 2014, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. .
 Review of two children's books, with an autobiographical comment: "Beautiful Minds: The Boy Who Loved Math and On a Beam of Light", The New York Times, July 12, 2013.
 Andrew Gelman, Nate Silver, Aaron S. Edlin, "What Is the Probability Your Vote Will Make a Difference", Economic Inquiry, 2012, 50(2): 321–26.
In addition to chapters in several issues of the Baseball Prospectus annual, Silver contributed chapters to one-off monographs edited by Baseball Prospectus, including:
Mind Game: How the Boston Red Sox Got Smart, Won a World Series, and Created a New Blueprint for Winning. Steven Goldman, Ed. New York: Workman Publishing Co., 2005. .
Baseball Between the Numbers: Why Everything You Know about the Game Is Wrong. Jonah Keri, Ed. New York: Basic Books, 2006.  (hardback) and  (paperback).
It Ain't over 'til It's over: The Baseball Prospectus Pennant Race Book. Steven Goldman, Ed. New York: Basic Books. Hardback 2007. ; paperback 2008. .

Media
Silver's self-unmasking at the end of May 2008 brought him a lot of publicity focused on his combined skill as both baseball statistician-forecaster and political statistician-forecaster, including articles about him in The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Science News, and his hometown Lansing State Journal.

In early June he began to cross-post his daily "Today's Polls" updates on "The Plank" in The New Republic. Also, Rasmussen Reports began to use the FiveThirtyEight.com poll averages for its own tracking of the 2008 state-by-state races.

In 2009 through 2012, Silver appeared as a political analyst on MSNBC, CNN and Bloomberg Television, PBS, NPR, Democracy Now!, The Charlie Rose Show, ABC News, and Current TV.

Silver also appeared on The Colbert Report (October 7, 2008 and November 5, 2012), The Daily Show (October 17, 2012 and November 7, 2012), and Real Time with Bill Maher (October 26, 2012).

That Silver accurately predicted the outcome of the 2012 presidential race, in the face of numerous public attacks on his forecasts by critics, inspired many articles in the press, ranging from Gizmodo, to online and mainstream newspapers, news and commentary magazines, business media, trade journals, media about media, and Scientific American, as well as a feature interview on The Today Show, a return appearance on The Daily Show, and an appearance on Morning Joe

Silver's first appearance on ABC News as Editor-in-Chief of the new FiveThirtyEight.com was on George Stephanopoulos's This Week on November 3, 2013.

Silver is referenced in the Syfy channel show The Magicians as an earth wizard who uses polling spells.

In 2015, Silver appeared on the podcast Employee of the Month, where he criticized Vox Media for "recycling Wikipedia entries" in their content.

Selected recognition and awards
 April 30, 2009: Silver was named one of "The World's 100 Most Influential People" by TIME magazine.
 May 12, 2013: Silver received an honorary Doctor of Science degree (Scientiæ Doctor honoris causa – D.Sc. h.c.) and gave the commencement address at Ripon College.
 May 24, 2013: Silver received an honorary Doctor of Literature degree (Doctor of Literature honoris causa) and presented a commencement address at The New School.
 October 2013: Silver's The Signal and the Noise won the 2013 Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science, which recognizes "outstanding contributions by scientists to the literature of science".
 December 2013: The University of Leuven (KU Leuven) (Belgium) and the Leuven Statistics Research Centre awarded Silver an honorary doctoral degree "for his prominent role in the development, application, and dissemination of proper prediction methods in sports and in political sciences".
 May 25, 2014: Silver received a Doctorate of Humane Letters, honoris causa, from Amherst College.
May 2017: Georgetown University awarded Silver a degree of Doctor of Humane Letters honoris causa.
May 2018: Kenyon College awarded Silver a degree, Doctor of Humane Letters.

Personal life
In a 2012 interview with Charlie Rose he said, "I'd say I’m somewhere in between being a libertarian and a liberal. So if I were to vote, it would be kind of a Gary Johnson versus Mitt Romney decision, I suppose."

Silver is a great-nephew of geologists Caswell Silver and Leon Silver. He is a great-grandson of Harmon Lewis, the President of Alcoa Steamship Company, as well as a great-great-nephew of the embryologist Warren Harmon Lewis and his wife, biologist Margaret Reed Lewis.

Silver is openly gay. "I've always felt like something of an outsider. I've always had friends but I've always come from an outside point of view. I think that's important. If you grow up gay, or in a household that's agnostic, when most people are religious, then from the get-go, you are saying there are things that the majority of society believes that I don't believe", he told an interviewer in 2012. "When asked what made you feel more of a misfit, being gay or being a geek, he replied, 'Probably the numbers stuff since I had that from when I was six.'" When asked in 2008 if he had noticed people looking at him as a "gay icon", he responded, "I've started to notice it a little bit, although so far it seems like I'm more a subject of geek affection than gay affection".

Silver discussed his sexuality in the context of growing up in East Lansing, in an article about the Supreme Court ruling Obergefell v. Hodges in favor of recognizing same-sex marriage on the date of its announcement. He analyzed the speed of the change of public sentiment, pointing out that the change over only several decades has been palpable to the current generations.

Silver has long been interested in fantasy baseball, especially Scoresheet Baseball. While in college he served as an expert on Scoresheet Baseball for BaseballHQ. When he took up political writing, Silver abandoned his blog, The Burrito Bracket, in which he ran a one-and-done competition among the taquerias in his Wicker Park neighborhood in Chicago.

Silver plays poker semi-professionally.

See also

 Computational statistics
 Editorial board
 LGBT culture in New York City
 List of LGBT people from New York City
 New Yorkers in journalism
 Political analysis
 Sports betting

References

Further reading

External links

 
 

1978 births
ABC News personalities
American bloggers
American male journalists
21st-century American journalists
American people of English descent
American people of German descent
American people of Jewish descent
American poker players
American political commentators
American political writers
American statisticians
Baseball statisticians
American gay writers
Journalists from Michigan
KPMG people
LGBT journalists from the United States
LGBT people from Michigan
LGBT scientists from the United States
Living people
Online journalists
People from East Lansing, Michigan
Mathematicians from New York (state)
Psephologists
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Sean Quinn is an American writer from Clayton, Missouri. He was a member of the White House press corps representing the political blog FiveThirtyEight.com.

Prior to becoming a political journalist, Quinn completed his Juris Doctor at the University of Virginia School of Law and was a political campaign worker. Democratic candidates he worked for include Jon Tester and Ciro Rodriguez.

Quinn led FiveThirtyEight.com's On The Road series, covering the battleground states in person during the 2008 US presidential election. His work provided poignant on the ground observations complementing the statistical analysis of polling data by partner Nate Silver.

After the inauguration of President Obama, Quinn moved to Washington, D.C., to be the White House correspondent for FiveThirtyEight.com. Quinn was one of the first bloggers to be part of the White House press corps.

In August 2011 Sean went back on the road to liveblog the 2012 primaries.

On April 6, 2021, Sean released a series of tweets extremely critical of the state of Arkansas and its people, referring to the state as "evil" and a "malignant shithole."

References 

1971 births
Living people
Writers from Missouri
Missouri Democrats
People from St. Louis County, Missouri
21st-century American journalists FiveThirtyEight, sometimes rendered as 538, is an American website that focuses on opinion poll analysis, politics, economics, and sports blogging. The website, which takes its name from the number of electors in the United States electoral college, was founded on March 7, 2008, as a polling aggregation website with a blog created by analyst Nate Silver. In August 2010, the blog became a licensed feature of The New York Times online and renamed FiveThirtyEight: Nate Silver's Political Calculus.

In July 2013, ESPN acquired FiveThirtyEight, hiring Silver as editor-in-chief and a contributor for ESPN.com; the new publication launched on March 17, 2014. Since then, the FiveThirtyEight blog has covered a broad spectrum of subjects including politics, sports, science, economics and popular culture. In 2018, the operations were transferred from ESPN to sister property ABC News (also under parent The Walt Disney Company).

During the presidential primaries and general election of 2008 the site compiled polling data through a unique methodology derived from Silver's experience in sabermetrics to "balance out the polls with comparative demographic data". Silver weighted "each poll based on the pollster's historical track record, sample size, and recentness of the poll".

Since the 2008 election, the site has published articles—typically creating or analyzing statistical information—on a wide variety of topics in current politics and political news. These included a monthly update on the prospects for turnover in the Senate; federal economic policies; Congressional support for legislation; public support for health care reform, global warming legislation and LGBT rights; elections around the world; marijuana legalization; and numerous other topics. The site and its founder are best known for election forecasts, including the 2012 presidential election in which FiveThirtyEight correctly predicted the vote winner of all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

FiveThirtyEight has won numerous awards. These include Bloggie Awards for Best Political Coverage in 2008 and Best Weblog about Politics in 2009 as well as Webbies for Best Political Blog in 2012 and 2013. While under the ownership of ESPN in 2016, FiveThirtyEight won the Data Journalism Website of the Year award from the Global Editors Network.

Genesis and history
When Silver started FiveThirtyEight in early March 2008, he published under the name Poblano, the same name that he had used since November 2007 when he began publishing a diary on the political blog Daily Kos. Writing as Poblano on Daily Kos, he had gained a following, especially for his primary election forecast on Super Tuesday, February 5, 2008. From that primary election day, which included contests in 24 states plus American Samoa, Poblano predicted that Barack Obama would come away with 859 delegates, and Hillary Clinton 829; in the final contests, Obama won 847 delegates and Clinton 834. Based on this result, New York Times op-ed columnist William Kristol wrote: "And an interesting regression analysis at the Daily Kos Web site (poblano.dailykos.com) of the determinants of the Democratic vote so far, applied to the demographics of the Ohio electorate, suggests that Obama has a better chance than is generally realized in Ohio".

FiveThirtyEight gained further national attention for beating out most pollsters' projections in the North Carolina and Indiana Democratic party primaries on May 6, 2008. As Mark Blumenthal wrote in National Journal, "Over the last week, an anonymous blogger who writes under the pseudonym Poblano did something bold on his blog, FiveThirtyEight.com. He posted predictions for the upcoming primaries based not on polling data, but on a statistical model driven mostly by demographic and past vote data. ... Critics scoffed. Most of the public polls pointed to a close race in North Carolina. ... But a funny thing happened. The model got it right." Silver relied on demographic data and on the history of voting in other states during the 2008 Democratic primary elections.

On May 30, 2008, Silver revealed his true identity for the first time to his FiveThirtyEight readers. After that date, he published just four more diaries on Daily Kos.

As the primary season was coming to an end, Silver began to build a model for the general election race. This model, too, relied in part on demographic information but mainly involved a complex method of aggregating polling results. In 2008, Rasmussen Reports had an apparently short-term partnership with FiveThirtyEight in order to include this unique methodology for generating poll averages in their "Balance of Power Calculator". At the same time, FiveThirtyEights daily "Today's Polls" column began to be mirrored on "The Plank", a blog published by The New Republic.

By early October 2008, FiveThirtyEight approached 2.5 million visitors per week, while averaging approximately 400,000 per weekday.  During October 2008 the site received 3.63 million unique visitors, 20.57 million site visits, and 32.18 million page views. On Election Day, November 4, 2008, the site had nearly 5 million page views.

On June 3, 2010, Silver announced that in early August the blog would be "relaunched under a NYTimes.com domain". The transition took place on August 25, 2010, with the publication of Silver's first FiveThirtyEight blog article online in The New York Times.

In July 2013, it was revealed that Silver and his FiveThirtyEight blog would depart The New York Times and join ESPN. In its announcement of its acquisition of FiveThirtyEight, ESPN reported that "Silver will serve as the editor-in-chief of the site and will build a team of journalists, editors, analysts and contributors in the coming months. Much like Grantland, which ESPN launched in 2011, the site will retain an independent brand sensibility and editorial point-of-view, while interfacing with other websites in the ESPN and Disney families. The site will return to its original URL, www.FiveThirtyEight.com."

According to Silver, the focus of FiveThirtyEight in its ESPN phase would broaden: "People also think it's going to be a sports site with a little politics thrown in, or it's going to be a politics site with sports thrown in. ... But we take our science and economics and lifestyle coverage very seriously. ... It's a data journalism site. Politics is one topic that sometimes data journalism is good at covering. It's certainly good with presidential elections. But we don't really see politics as how the site is going to grow".

FiveThirtyEight launched its ESPN webpage on March 17, 2014. The lead story by Silver explained that "FiveThirtyEight is a data journalism organization. ... We've expanded our staff from two full-time journalists to 20 and counting. Few of them will focus on politics exclusively; instead, our coverage will span five major subject areas – politics, economics, science, life and sports. Our team also has a broad set of skills and experience in methods that fall under the rubric of data journalism. These include statistical analysis, but also data visualization, computer programming and data-literate reporting. So in addition to written stories, we'll have interactive graphics and features".

In April 2018, it was announced that FiveThirtyEight would be transferred to ABC News from ESPN, Inc., majority owned by The Walt Disney Company. ABC News Live streaming channel was launched on Roku in May 2019. With the reorganization creating the Walt Disney Direct-to-Consumer and International segment in March 2018, ABC News Digital and Live Streaming (websites, ABC News Live and FiveThirtyEight) was transferred to the new segment.

2008 U.S. elections

Methods
One unique aspect of the site is Silver's efforts to rank pollsters by accuracy, weight their polls accordingly, and then supplement those polls with his own electoral projections based on demographics and prior voting patterns. "I did think there was room for a more sophisticated way of handling these things", Silver said.

FiveThirtyEight weighs pollsters' historical track records through a complex methodology and assigns them values to indicate "Pollster-Introduced Error".

At base Silver's method is similar to other analysts' approaches to taking advantage of the multiple polls that are conducted within each state: he averaged the polling results. But especially in the early months of the election season polling in many states is sparse and episodic. The "average" of polls over an extended period (perhaps several weeks) would not reveal the true state of voter preferences at the present time, nor provide an accurate forecast of the future. One approach to this problem was followed by Pollster.com: if enough polls were available, it computed a locally weighted moving average or LOESS.

However, while adopting such an approach in his own analysis, Silver reasoned that there was additional information available in polls from "similar" states that might help to fill the gaps in information about the trends in a given state. Accordingly, he adapted an approach that he had previously used in his baseball forecasting: using nearest neighbor analysis he first identified "most similar states" and then factored into his electoral projections for a given state the polling information from "similar states". He carried this approach one step further by also factoring national polling trends into the estimates for a given state. Thus, his projections were not simply based on the polling trends in a given state.

Furthermore, a basic intuition that Silver drew from his analysis of the 2008 Democratic party primary elections was that the voting history of a state or Congressional district provided clues to current voting. This is what allowed him to beat all the pollsters in his forecasts in the Democratic primaries in North Carolina and Indiana, for example. Using such information allowed Silver to come up with estimates of the vote preferences even in states for which there were few if any polls. For his general election projections for each state, in addition to relying on the available polls in a given state and "similar states", Silver estimated a "538 regression" using historical voting information along with demographic characteristics of the states to create an estimate that he treated as a separate poll (equivalent to the actually available polls from that state). This approach helped to stabilize his projections, because if there were few if any polls in a given state, the state forecast was largely determined by the 538 regression estimate.

In July 2008, the site began to report regular updates of projections of 2008 U.S. Senate races. Special procedures were developed relying on both polls and demographic analysis. The projections were updated on a weekly basis.

Final projections of 2008 elections
In the final update of his presidential forecast model at midday of November 4, 2008, Silver projected a popular vote victory by 6.1 percentage points for Barack Obama and electoral vote totals of 349 (based on a probabilistic projection) or 353 (based on fixed projections of each state). Obama won with 365 electoral college votes. Silver's predictions matched the actual results everywhere except in Indiana and the 2nd congressional district of Nebraska, which awards an electoral vote separately from the rest of the state. His projected national popular vote differential was below the actual figure of 7.2 points.

The forecasts for the Senate proved to be correct for every race, but the near stalemate in Minnesota led to a recount that was settled only on June 30, 2009. In Alaska, after a protracted counting of ballots, on November 19 Republican incumbent Ted Stevens conceded the seat to Democrat Mark Begich, an outcome that Silver had forecast on election day. In Georgia, a run-off election on December 2 led to the re-election of Republican Saxby Chambliss, a result that was also consistent with Silver's original projection.

After the 2008 U.S. election

Focus
During the first two months after the election, no major innovations in content were introduced. A substantial percentage of the articles focused on Senatorial races: the runoff in Georgia, won by Saxby Chambliss; recounts of votes in Alaska (won by Mark Begich), and Minnesota (Al Franken vs. Norm Coleman); and the appointments of Senatorial replacements in Colorado, New York, and Illinois.

After President Obama's inauguration, Sean Quinn reported that he was moving to Washington, D.C., to continue political writing from that locale. On February 4, 2009, he became the first blogger to join the White House press corps. After that time, however, he contributed only a handful of articles to FiveThirtyEight.

During the post-2008 election period Silver devoted attention to developing some tools for the analysis of forthcoming 2010 Congressional elections, as well as discussing policy issues and the policy agenda for the Obama administration, especially economic policies. He developed a list of 2010 Senate races in which he made monthly updates of predicted party turnover.

Later, Silver adapted his methods to address a variety of issues of the day, including health care reform, climate change, unemployment, and popular support for same-sex marriage. He wrote a series of columns investigating the credibility of polls by Georgia-based firm Strategic Vision, LLC.  According to Silver's analysis, Strategic Vision's data displayed statistical anomalies that were inconsistent with random polling.  Later, he uncovered indirect evidence that Strategic Vision may have gone as far as to fabricate the results of a citizenship survey taken by Oklahoma high school students, which led him to denounce Strategic Vision as "disreputable and fraudulent". FiveThirtyEight devoted more than a dozen articles to the Iranian presidential election in June 2009, assessing of the quality of the vote counting. International affairs columnist Renard Sexton began the series with an analysis of polling leading up to the election; then posts by Silver, Andrew Gelman and Sexton analyzed the reported returns and political implications.

FiveThirtyEight covered the November 3, 2009, elections in the United States in detail. FiveThirtyEight writers Schaller, Gelman, and Silver also gave extensive coverage to the January 19, 2010 Massachusetts special election to the U.S. Senate. The "538 model" once again aggregated the disparate polls to correctly predict that the Republican Scott Brown would win.

In spring of 2010, FiveThirtyEight turned a focus on the United Kingdom general election scheduled for May 6, with a series of more than forty articles on the subject that culminated in projections of the number of seats that the three major parties were expected to win. Following a number of preview posts in January and February, Renard Sexton examined subjects such as the UK polling industry and the 'surge' of the third-party Liberal Democrats, while Silver, Sexton and Dan Berman developed a seat projection model. The UK election was the first time the FiveThirtyEight team did an election night 'liveblog' of a non-U.S. election.

In April 2010, the Guardian Newspaper published Silver's predictions for the 2010 United Kingdom General Election. The majority of polling organisations in the UK use the concept of uniform swing to predict the outcome of elections. However, by applying his own methodology, Silver produced very different results, which suggested that a Conservative victory might have been the most likely outcome. After a series of articles, including critiques and responses to other electoral analysts, his "final projection" was published on the eve of the election. In the end, Silver's projections were off the mark, particularly compared with those of some other organizations, and Silver wrote a post mortem on his blog. Silver examined the pitfalls of the forecasting process, while Sexton discussed the final government agreement between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats.

Question over transparency in pollster ratings
On June 6, 2010, FiveThirtyEight posted pollster rankings that updated and elaborated Silver's efforts from the 2008 election. Silver expanded the database to more than 4,700 election polls and developed a model for rating the polls that was more sophisticated than his original rankings.

Silver responded on 538: "Where's the transparency? Well, it's here [citing his June 6 article], in an article that contains 4,807 words and 18 footnotes. Every detail of how the pollster ratings are calculated is explained. It's also here [referring to another article], in the form of Pollster Scorecards, a feature which we'll continue to roll out over the coming weeks for each of the major polling firms, and which will explain in some detail how we arrive at the particular rating that we did for each one".

As for why the complete 538 polling database had not been released publicly, Silver responded: "The principal reason is because I don't know that I'm legally entitled to do so. The polling database was compiled from approximately eight or ten distinct data sources, which were disclosed in a comment which I posted shortly after the pollster ratings were released, and which are detailed again at the end of this article. These include some subscription services, and others from websites that are direct competitors of this one. Although polls contained in these databases are ultimately a matter of the public record and clearly we feel as though we have every right to use them for research purposes, I don't know what rights we might have to re-publish their data in full".

Silver also commented on the fact that the 538 ratings had contributed to Markos Moulitsas's decision to end Daily Kos use of Research 2000 as its pollster.

Subsequently, on June 11, Mark Blumenthal also commented on the question of transparency in an article in the National Journal titled "Transparency In Rating: Nate Silver's Impressive Ranking Of Pollsters' Accuracy Is Less Impressive In Making Clear What Data Is Used". He noted that in the case of Research 2000 there were some discrepancies between what Silver reported and what the pollster itself reported. Other researchers questioned aspects of the methodology.

On June 16, 2010, Silver announced on his blog that he is willing to give all pollsters who he had included in his rating a list of their polls that he had in his archive, along with the key information that he used (poll marginals, sample size, dates of administration); and he encouraged the pollsters to examine the lists and the results to compare them with the pollster's own record and make corrections.

In September 2014, Silver put into the public domain all of his pollster ratings, as well as descriptive summary data for all of the more than 6,600 polls in his data collection for the final three weeks of U.S. Presidential primaries and general elections, state governor elections, and U.S. Senate and U.S. Congress elections for the years 1998–2012. In addition to updating his pollster ratings, he published an updated methodological report.

Partnership with The New York Times: 2010–2013
On June 3, 2010, The New York Times and Silver announced that FiveThirtyEight had formed a partnership under which the blog would be hosted by the Times for a period of three years. In legal terms, FiveThirtyEight granted a "license" to the Times to publish the blog. The blog would be listed under the "Politics" tab of the News section of the Times. FiveThirtyEight would thus be subject to and benefit from editing and technical production by the Times, while FiveThirtyEight would be responsible for creating the content.

Silver received bids from several major media entities before selecting the Times. Under terms of the agreement, Silver would also write monthly articles for the print version of both the newspaper and the Sunday magazine. Silver did not move his blog to the highest bidder, because he was concerned with maintaining his own voice while gaining the exposure and technical support that a larger media company could provide. "There's a bit of a Groucho Marx quality to it [Silver has said]. ... You shouldn't want to belong to any media brand that seems desperate to have you as a member, even though they'll probably offer the most cash".

The first column of the renamed FiveThirtyEight: Nate Silver's Political Calculus appeared in the Times on August 25, 2010, with the introduction of U.S. Senate election forecasts. At the same time, Silver published a brief history of the blog. All columns from the original FiveThirtyEight were also archived for public access.

Shortly after FiveThirtyEight relocated to The New York Times, Silver introduced his prediction models for the 2010 elections to the U.S. Senate, the U.S. House of Representatives, and state Governorships. Each of these models relied initially on a combination of electoral history, demographics, and polling.  The 538 model had forecast a net pickup of 8 seats by the Republicans in the Senate and 55 seats in the House, close to the actual outcome of a pickup of 6 seats in the Senate and 63 seats in the House.

Writers
When the transition to The New York Times was announced, Silver listed his staff of writers for the first time. However, of the seven listed writers, only three of them had published on 538/New York Times by late December 2010: Silver, Renard Sexton and Hale Stewart. Andrew Gelman contributed again in early 2011. Brian McCabe published his first article in January 2011.

Beginning in 2011, one writer who emerged as a regular contributor was Micah Cohen. Cohen provided a periodic "Reads and Reactions" column in which he summarized Silver's articles for the previous couple of weeks, as well as reactions to them in the media and other blogs, and suggested some additional readings related to the subject of Silver's columns. Silver identified Cohen as "my news assistant". Cohen also contributed additional columns on occasion.

On September 12, 2011, Silver introduced another writer: "FiveThirtyEight extends a hearty welcome to John Sides, a political scientist at George Washington University, who will be writing a series of posts for this site over the next month. Mr. Sides is also the founder of the blog The Monkey Cage, which was named the 2010 Blog of the Year by The Week magazine".

Beyond electoral politics

While politics and elections remained the main focus of FiveThirtyEight, the blog also sometimes addressed sports, including the March Madness and the 2012 NCAA Men's Basketball tournament selection process, the B.C.S. rankings in NCAA college football, the NBA, and Major League Baseball matters ranging from the 2011 attendance at the New York Mets' Citi Field to the historic 2011 collapse of the Boston Red Sox.

In addition, FiveThirtyEight sometimes turned its attention to other topics, such as the economics of blogging, the financial ratings by Standard & Poors, economists' tendency to underpredict unemployment levels, and the economic impact and media coverage of Hurricane Irene (2011).

FiveThirtyEight published a graph showing different growth curves of the news stories covering Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street protests. Silver pointed out that conflicts with the police caused the sharpest increases in news coverage of the protests and assessed the geography of the protests by analyzing news reports of the size and location of events across the United States.

2012 U.S. elections

FiveThirtyEight rolled out its 2012 general election forecasting model on June 7, 2012. The model forecast both the popular vote and the Electoral College vote, with the latter being central to the exercise and involving a forecast of each state. In the initial forecast, Barack Obama was estimated to have a 61.8% chance of winning the electoral vote. The website provided maps and statistics about the electoral outcomes in each state as well as nationally. Later posts addressed methodological issues such as the "house effects" of different pollsters as well as the validity of telephone surveys that did not call cell phones.

On the morning of November 6, Election Day, Silver's model gave President Obama a 90.9% chance of winning a majority of the electoral votes. The 538 model correctly predicted the winner of all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Silver, along with at least two academic-based analysts who aggregated polls from multiple pollsters, thus not only correctly predicted all 50 states, but also all nine "swing states". In contrast, individual pollsters were less successful. For example, Rasmussen Reports "missed on six of its nine swing-state polls".

An independent analysis of Silver's state-by-state projections, assessing whether the percentages of votes that the candidates actually received fell within the "margin of error" of Silver's forecasts, found that "48 out of 50 states actually fell within his margin of error, giving him a success rate of 96%. And assuming that his projected margin of error figures represent 95 percent confidence intervals, which it is likely they did, Silver performed just about exactly as well as he would expect to over 50 trials. Wizard, indeed". Additional tests of the accuracy of the electoral vote predictions were published by other researchers.

ESPN affiliation
FiveThirtyEight launched its ESPN-affiliated stage on March 17, 2014. As of July, it had a staff of 20 writers, editors, data visualization specialists, and others. By March 2016, this staff had nearly doubled to 37 listed on the masthead, and 7 listed as contributors. The site produced articles under 5 headings: politics, economics, science and health, (cultural) life, and sports. In addition to feature articles it produced podcasts on a range of subjects.

Monthly traffic to the site grew steadily from about 2.8 million unique visitors in April 2014 to 10.7 million unique visitors in January 2016.

2014 U.S. elections
On September 3, 2014, FiveThirtyEight introduced its forecasts for each of the 36 U.S. Senate elections being contested that year. At that time, the Republican Party was given a 64 percent chance of holding a majority of the seats in the Senate after the election. However, Silver also remarked, "An equally important theme is the high degree of uncertainty around that outcome. A large number of states remain competitive, and Democrats could easily retain the Senate". About two weeks later, the forecast showed the Republican chances of holding the majority down to 55 percent.

2016 Oscars predictions
FiveThirtyEight sought to apply its mathematical models to the Oscars, and produced internal predictions regarding the subject, predicting four out of six categories correctly. The website also compiled a list of other predictions made by other people using different methods.

2016 U.S. elections

Presidential primary elections
FiveThirtyEight applied two separate models to forecast the 2016 presidential primary elections – polls-only and polls-plus models. The polls-only model relied only on polls from a particular state, while the polls-plus model was based on state polls, national polls and endorsements. For each contest, FiveThirtyEight produced probability distributions and average expected vote shares according to both models.

As early as June 2015, FiveThirtyEight argued that Donald Trump "isn't a real candidate". When Donald Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee in May 2016, New York Times media columnist Jim Rutenberg wrote that "predictions can have consequences" and criticized FiveThirtyEight for underestimating Trump's chances. He argued that by giving "Mr. Trump a 2 percent chance at the nomination despite strong polls in his favor ... they also arguably sapped the journalistic will to scour his record as aggressively as those of his supposedly more serious rivals".

In a long retrospective, "How I Acted Like a Pundit and Screwed up on Donald Trump", published in May 2016 after Trump had become the likely nominee, Silver reviewed how he had erred in evaluating Trump's chances early in the primary campaign. Silver wrote, "The big mistake is a curious one for a website that focuses on statistics. Unlike virtually every other forecast we publish at FiveThirtyEight – including the primary and caucus projections I just mentioned  – our early estimates of Trump's chances weren't based on a statistical model. Instead, they were what we [call] 'subjective odds' – which is to say, educated guesses. In other words, we were basically acting like pundits, but attaching numbers to our estimates. And we succumbed to some of the same biases that pundits often suffer, such as not changing our minds quickly enough in the face of new evidence. Without a model as a fortification, we found ourselves rambling around the countryside like all the other pundit-barbarians, randomly setting fire to things".

On the Democratic side, FiveThirtyEight argued that Senator Bernie Sanders could "lose everywhere else after Iowa and New Hampshire" and that the "Democratic establishment would rush in to squash" him if he does not. Sanders went on to win 23 states in the primaries.

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a progressive nonprofit media watch group, wrote in May 2016 that FiveThirtyEight "sacrificed its integrity to go after Sanders" and that they have "at times gone beyond the realm of punditry into the realm of hackery – that is, not just treating their own opinions as though they were objective data, but spinning the data so that it conforms to their opinions."

FiveThirtyEights predictions for each state primary, both for the Republican and the Democratic party nominations, were based on statistical analysis, not on the analyst's opinions. The core data employed were polls, which FiveThirtyEight aggregated for each state (while also considering national polls) using essentially the same method it had employed since 2008. In the 2016 primaries, the projections also took into account endorsements. The website also kept track of the accumulation of national party convention delegates. In a comparison of prediction success published by Bloomberg News after the primary season was completed, FiveThirtyEight prediction success tied for the highest percentage of correct primary poll winners, at 92%; but it lagged behind PredictWise in predicting a larger set of primaries. Notably, even with FiveThirtyEight track record of correctly predicting elections that pollsters get wrong, it still missed Bernie Sanders's upset victory in the Michigan primary, for instance, regarded as "one of the biggest upsets in modern political history".

Presidential general election

The final prediction by FiveThirtyEight on the morning of election day (November 8, 2016) had Hillary Clinton with a 71% chance to win the 2016 United States presidential election, while other major forecasters had predicted Clinton to win with at least an 85% to 99% probability. FiveThirtyEights model pointed to the possibility of an Electoral College-popular vote split widening in final weeks based on both Clinton's small lead in general polls, but also on Trump's improvement in swing states like Florida or Pennsylvania, mixed with Clinton's poor performing in several of those swing states in comparison with Obama's performance in 2012. The main issues pointed out by the forecast model was the imbalance of Clinton's improvement in very populated states like Texas, Georgia (projected safe for Republican) and California (projected safe for Democrats); mixed with her inability to attract white voters without a college degree, an increasing demographic in swing states, in addition to a potential decline in turnout from minorities. In consequence, Clinton's probabilities to win the Electoral College were not improving. Silver also focused on state-by-state numbers in so-called 'must-win' states like Ohio and Florida, plus a consideration of polls' margin of error in advantages of less than three points.

Donald Trump won the election. FiveThirtyEight projected a much higher probability of Donald Trump winning the presidency than other pollsters, a projection which was criticized by Ryan Grim of the Huffington Post as "unskewing" too much in favor of Trump. While FiveThirtyEight expressed that "nonetheless, Clinton is probably going to win, and she could win by a big margin", the forecaster also made a point about the uncertainty of poll trackers in some cases, about a considerable number of undecided voters and about the unpredictable outcome in traditional swing states.

2020 U.S. elections

Redesign of forecast 
In early August 2020, FiveThirtyEight announced that for their 2020 general election forecast they had designed a new graphical structure. This included going with modular structure, a "ball swarm" design for the chart depicting each candidate's chances, and the addition of a "forecast mascot" named Fivey Fox. An episode of "Chart Chat" discussing the design described the direction saying "FiveThirtyEight has leaned heavily towards a cutesy and engaging approach. The Fivey Fox mascot pops up next to most charts with call-outs to more further information."

Fivey Fox would also issue reminders to readers of "the potential for extreme outcomes" according to Jessica Hullman, in a piece written for The Hill. Hullman also said of the design that the introduction of the mascot, in conjunction with the new simplified look of the page, was perhaps "perhaps the strongest indicator that Silver intends to emphasize uncertainty" in his coverage of the 2020 election.

Jasmine Mithani, visual journalist with FiveThirtyEight, said in an interview when asked about the complaints of new mascot said "I think the biggest complaint about Fivey Fox is that some people find it infantilizing, but that wasn't our intention" and that the motivation for including the character was to help make the forecast more of "a teaching tool". In November 2020, Rolling Stone reported that Fivey Fox had reached over 7,000 followers on his dedicated Twitter account.

The forecast favored the actual winner of 48 states, the District of Columbia, and four of the five congressional districts awarding electoral votes, only missing Florida, North Carolina, and Maine's 2nd congressional district. In those three contests the forecast had favored Biden, but they were carried by Trump. Despite correctly forecasting Biden to win nationally, they overestimated Biden's margins in some battleground states such as Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania and underestimated Trump's margins in states such as Ohio, Iowa and Texas. Their forecast showed Democrats winning Senate races in North Carolina and Maine, which Republicans ended up winning. However, their forecast did correctly predict that the Democrats would take control of the Senate. In the House elections, their forecast favored Democrats to gain seats, yet Democrats suffered a net loss of 10 seats. The actual house results fell outside their 80% confidence interval, with Democrats winning 222 seats, lower than the confidence interval's lower bound of 225.

Recognition and awards
 In September 2008, FiveThirtyEight became the first blog ever selected as a Notable Narrative by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. According to the Foundation, "In his posts, former economic analyst and baseball-stats wunderkind Nate Silver explains the presidential race, using the dramatic tension inherent in the run-up to Election Day to drive his narrative. Come November 5, we will have a winner and a loser, but in the meantime, Silver spins his story from the myriad polls that confound us lesser mortals".
 The New York Times described FiveThirtyEight in November 2008 as "one of the breakout online stars of the year".
 Huffington Post columnist Jason Linkins named FiveThirtyEight as No. 1 of "Ten Things that Managed to Not Suck in 2008, Media Edition".
 FiveThirtyEight is the 2008 Weblog Award Winner for "Best Political Coverage".
 FiveThirtyEight earned a 2009 "Bloggie" as the "Best Weblog about Politics" in the 9th Annual Weblog Awards.
 In April 2009, Silver was named "Blogger of the Year" in the 6th Annual Opinion Awards of The Week, for his work on FiveThirtyEight.
 In September 2009, FiveThirtyEight predictive model was featured as the cover story in STATS: The Magazine for Students of Statistics.
 In November 2009, FiveThirtyEight was named one of "Our Favorite Blogs of 2009" ("Fifty blogs we just can't get enough of") by PC Magazine.
 In December 2009, FiveThirtyEight was recognized by The New York Times Magazine in its "Ninth Annual Year in Ideas" for conducting "Forensic Polling Analysis" detective work on the possible falsification of polling data by a major polling firm.
 In November 2010, editor-in-chief of Politico John F. Harris, writing in Forbes magazine, listed Silver as one of seven bloggers among "The Most Powerful People on Earth".
 In June 2011, Time "The Best Blogs of 2011" named FiveThirtyEight one of its Essential Blogs.
 May 2012: FiveThirtyEight won a Webby Award for "Best Political Blog" from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences in the 16th annual Webby Awards.
 April 2013: FiveThirtyEight won a Webby Award for "Best Political Blog" from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences in the 17th annual Webby Awards.
 June 2016: FiveThirtyEight was named the "Data Journalism Website of the Year" for 2016 by the Global Editors Network, a Paris-based organization that promotes innovation in newsrooms around the world. FiveThirtyEight won an additional award for "News Data App of the Year (large newsroom)" for "Swing the Election", an interactive project by Aaron Bycoffe and David Wasserman.
 September 2017: The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine awarded a 2017 Communication Award in the "Online" category to "FiveThirtyEight's Maggie Koerth-Baker, Ben Casselman, Anna Maria Barry-Jester, and Carl Bialik for 'Gun Deaths in America'. A balanced and fact-filled examination of an unfolding crisis, with compelling interactives that are meticulously attentive to data quality and statistics. (italics in the original)
 June 2018: "The Atlas of Redistricting" was named "News App of the Year" by the Data Journalism Awards sponsored by the Global Editors Network.

Mascot 
Fivey Fox is the mascot of FiveThirtyEight. This is in reference to a phrase attributed to Archilochus: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing". The name "Fivey" is a reference to the website's name, FiveThirtyEight. Fivey Fox is colored orange, white and beige with comically sized black glasses and has white colored sock-like paws.

See also

United States Electoral College
 Electoral-vote.com
 RealClearPolitics
Statewide opinion polling for the United States presidential election, 2008

Notes

References

General citations

FiveThirtyEight articles

Further reading

External links
 
 Nate Silver interview on Bloggingheads.tv (August 21, 2008)

2008 establishments in the United States
ABC News
Aggregation websites
American political blogs
English-language websites
Internet properties established in 2008
The New York Times
ESPN.com
Opinion polling in the United States
Data journalism
American political websites