How things have changed. Nate Silver, the election forecaster for the Democratic Party during the Obama years, was the darling of that party. He was The New York Times’ official number cruncher and went on to create two of the most popular polling aggregate websites.
In 2016, things began to change. Silver, despite still giving Hillary Clinton a 70+% chance of beating Donald Trump, was accused by some of bias because he did not call the election over as others had. Since then, Silver’s popularity has declined with the media and the left. Has he become more “right-wing”? He’s not a right-winger. He’s the same guy as always. But contradicting the narrative even by merely aggregating data meant he was expelled.
Silver has released his first presidential election forecast for 2024. It gives Trump an astonishingly high 66 percent chance of winning the election.
Nate Silver’s first forecast of this election season gives Donald Trump a 66% chance of winning at the moment.https://t.co/kMOSPZSDRO pic.twitter.com/Zf2674lqx8
— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) June 26, 2024
Faced with a drop in the economy, it is important to be concerned about the situation and to look for ways to improve the situation. What was the response of the Democrats? Silver was attacked personally and with a personal outburst by Democrats.
I’d like to point out that Nate Silver has been epically wrong on Biden, over and over. So I would recommend not listening to his voter suppressing, erroneous bull puckey. https://t.co/SXjVfDRm5B
— Kitty Ann Swink (@KitSwink) June 26, 2024
Silver was “wrong”, and therefore discredited, has been a popular refrain. But is it true? It’s simply not true. In his final prediction for the 2020 election, he gave Joe Biden an 89 percent chance to win. It’s understandable to be skeptical of forecasting, as it is not a precise science and will always be inaccurate in some way. But it’s difficult to argue that Silver was off the mark the last eight years. Silver seems to be letting his model speak for itself, which is happening again.
Silver was ready for criticism. Silver addressed the criticism in advance when he wrote about his latest forecast.
It would be suspicious if I told you to trust your gut instead of polls in the first presidential election cycle since 2004 where the Democrat consistently trails in the polls. If I replaced my previous model with a newer one that had Biden as the favorite or even had the election in a toss-up?
Of course. This would indicate that I had become a hack. I have spent years telling people, that although polls can be wrong, they are almost always wrong in some way. It is hard to predict which direction the error will go. Biden may easily exceed his current polls, but it is also possible that he will underachieve. The conventional wisdom that Democrats would outperform their polls by 2022 is a bit of a myth, but the truth is they did better than expected. Trump’s polls were significantly higher in 2016 and 2020. It is better to rely on polls and some reasonable presuppositions about the economy or the number of yard signs in your neighborhood than what your friends believe or what you hope for.
Silver feeds several data into a model that does not take into consideration feelings and vibes. If he had manipulated the data to get Democrats what they wanted, then he was a hack. If every poll consistently overestimates Trump and underestimates Biden, then we’re stuck with these numbers. If you can’t prove that every other statistic is incorrect, then you are probably losing.