FiveThirtyEight.com
Encyclopedia
FiveThirtyEight is a polling aggregation website with a blog created by Nate Silver
. Sometimes colloquially referred to as 538 dot com or just 538, the website takes its name from the number of electors in the United States
electoral college. Established on March 7, 2008 as FiveThirtyEight.com, in August 2010 the blog became a licensed feature of The New York Times
online and was renamed FiveThirtyEight: Nate Silver's Political Calculus.
During the presidential primaries
and general election of 2008
, the site compiled polling data through a unique methodology derived from Silver's experience in baseball sabermetrics
to "balance out the polls with comparative demographic data" and "weighting each poll based on the pollster's historical track record, sample size, and recentness of the poll".
For the 2008 Presidential Election
, FiveThirtyEight.com also used computer models to simulate the election 10,000 times per day in order to provide a continually up-to-date assessment of probability for electoral outcomes. The method proved to be highly accurate, as Silver correctly predicted the winner of 49 of the 50 states in the presidential election, as well as every Senate race
in 2008.
After the 2008 election, the site 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 U.S. Senate; federal economic policies; Congressional support for legislation; public support for health care reform
, global warming
legislation, gay rights; elections around the world; marijuana legalization; and numerous other topics.
On June 3, 2010, Nate 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.
Daily Kos
since November 2007. 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 actual contests, Obama won 847 delegates and Clinton 834. Based on this result, New York Times op-ed
columnist William Kristol
cited "Poblano" thus: "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.com 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. “I think it is interesting and, in a lot of ways, I’m not surprised that his predictions came closer to the result than the pollsters did”, said Brian F. Schaffner, research director of American University
’s Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies
.
On May 30, 2008, Silver revealed his true identity for the first time to his FiveThirtyEight.com 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. On June 13, Rasmussen Reports
began partnering with FiveThirtyEight.com in order to include this unique methodology for generating poll averages in their "Balance of Power Calculator". At the same time, FiveThirtyEight.coms daily "Today's Polls" column began to be mirrored on "The Plank," a blog published by The New Republic
.
By June 25, 2008, entering "FiveThirtyEight" in a Google search
generated a list of more than 150,000 articles that mentioned FiveThirtyEight.com; by October 13 the same search yielded more than 400,000 articles; by November 5, more than 580,000. By December 29, 2008, after the excitement of the election had died down, this search still yielded 480,000 articles; then interest in the site gradually rebuilt so that by August 14, 2009, it yielded 496,000; by September 27 it yielded 512,000; by November 17 (roughly a year after the 2008 election), 568,000.
By early October 2008, FiveThirtyEight.com 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 view
s. On Election Day, November 4, 2008, the site had nearly 5 million page views.
and prior voting patterns. “I did think there was room for a more sophisticated way of handling these things,” Silver said.
FiveThirtyEight.com weighs pollster's historical track record through a complex methodology and assigns them a value to indicate "Pollster-Introduced Error (PIE)".
Polls on FiveThirtyEight.com are weighted using a half-life
of thirty days using the formula 0.5P/30 where 'P' is the number of days transpired since the median date that the poll was in the field. The formula is based on an analysis of 2000, 2004, 2006 and 2008 state-by-state polling data.
.
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 election
s 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 in 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.
Additional aspects of the methodology are described in a detailed FAQ
on the FiveThirtyEight.com website.
. The projections were updated on a weekly basis.
s, focusing on so-called "Tipping Point States". 'Tipping Point States' are those states that tip the outcome of the election from one candidate to the other. In each simulation run, the winner's states won are lined up in reverse order of victory margin by percentage. A simple algorithm selects the minimum closest states that, if switched to the loser's side, would change the election outcome, then weights that run's significance based on the margin of victory in the popular vote. Thus, the closer the popular vote, the fewer the number of tipping point states and the greater the significance of that run in assessing tipping point importance. For example, the 2004 election's sole tipping point state was Ohio by this method, while 1960's were Illinois
, Missouri
, and New Jersey
— even though Hawaii
was the closest state race.
and electoral vote totals of 349 (based on a probabilistic projection) or 353 (based on fixed projections of each state). 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. And 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.
, a second contributor, drew on his knowledge and experience with campaign organizations to evaluate the ground game
and "get out the vote"
strategies of the McCain and Obama campaign teams. A poker player, Quinn drew an analogy between Barack Obama's electoral strategy and a poker player having multiple "outs" for winning a hand.
In September, Quinn launched a series of essays under the name On the Road. Quinn traveled from state to state telling the story of the campaign from the electoral battleground, drawing on observations and interviews with grassroots
campaign workers.
; 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.com.
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 makes 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 Strategic Vision, LLC (of Georgia), presenting an analysis that Silver said produced strong indirect evidence of fraud. 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 Nate 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 Nate 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-US 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.
on June 9 titled "Where's the Transparency in Pollster 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. Literally every detail of how the pollster ratings are calculated is explained. It's also here [referring to another article], in the form our 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
s 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.
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.com were also archived for public access.
contributed again in early 2011. Brian McCabe published his first article in January 2011. Why other writers played only a limited role in FiveThirtyEight/NYT was explained in February 2011 as follows:
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 article for the previous couple of weeks, as well as reactions to it 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 outstanding blog The Monkey Cage, which was named the 2010 Blog of the Year by The Week
magazine".
While politics and elections remained the main focus of FiveThirtyEight, the blog also sometimes addressed sports, including American college athletic conference realignment, professional tennis, the 2011 NCAA Men's Basketball
"March Madness", the B.C.S.
rankings in NCAA college football, NBA Basketball
, and Major League Baseball
matters ranging from Derek Jeter
's 2011 performance to 2011 attendance at the New York Mets
' Citi Field.
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 he assessed the geography of the protests by analyzing news reports of the size and location of events across the United States.
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.
in the special election in January 2010, Silver launched the first iteration of his Senate prediction model a few days later, using objective indicators including polling to project each state outcome in November. This model incorporated some elements of the 2008 presidential model. It was first published in full form in The New York Times on August 25, 2010. It relied basically on aggregating of public polls for each Senate race, with some adjustment for national trends in recognition of a correlation in poll movement across state lines, i.e., each race cannot be interpreted as entirely independent of all others.
In addition to making projections of the outcomes of each Senate race, FiveThirtyEight tracked the expected national outcome of the partisan division of the Senate. Just before election day (October 31), the FiveThirtyEight Senate projection was for the new Senate to have 52 Democrats and 48 Republicans. (The model did not address the possibility of party switching by elected candidates after November 2.)
Of the 37 Senate seats contested in the November 2, 2010 elections, 36 were resolved by November 4, including very close outcomes in several states. Of these 36, the FiveThirtyEight model had correctly predicted the winner in 34. One of the two misses was in Colorado, in which the incumbent Michael Bennet
(D) outpolled the challenger Ken Buck
(R) by less than 1 percentage point. The 538 model had forecast that Buck would win by 1 percentage point. The second miss was in Nevada, in which the incumbent Harry Reid
beat challenger Sharron Angle
by 5.5 percentage points, whereas the 538 model had forecast Angle to win by 3.0 percentage points. Silver has speculated the error was due at least in part to the fact that polling organizations underrepresented Hispanic voters by not interviewing in Spanish.
In the remaining contest for U.S. Senate, in Alaska
, the electoral outcome was not yet determined as of November 4, pending a count of the write-in ballots, but in the end the FiveThirtyEight forecast of GOP
nominee Joe Miller as winner ultimately proved to be wrong, as write-in candidate, incumbent Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski
, prevailed.
The 538 model had forecast a net pickup of 7 seats by the Republicans in the Senate, but the outcome was a pickup of 6 seats.
Furthermore, there was much less available public polling for individual House districts than there is for Senate or gubernatorial races. By the end of the 2010 election season, public polls were available for only about 25% of the districts. This is one reason why some analysts rely principally on making global or macro-level projections of the number of seats to be won by each party rather than trying to forecast the outcome in every individual district. Silver's FiveThirtyEight model, however, while weighting the generic partisan division as one factor, focused on developing estimates for each district. For this purpose he used information on past voting in the district (the Cook PVI
), the quality of the candidates (in particular whether one was an incumbent), fundraising by each candidate, "expert ratings" of the races, public polls of the given race (if they were available), and, in the absence of public polls a cautious use of private polls (i.e., polls conducted by or for partisan organizations or a candidate's own campaign organization).
In response to some concerns that he was hedging his projection, Silver contended that in his model the uncertainty of the outcome was a feature, not a flaw. In comparison with previous Congressional elections, a far larger number of seats were being contested or were "in play" in 2010. While his model, which relied on simulating the election outcomes 100,000 times generated a projected "most likely" net gain of 53 seats by the Republicans (two days before the election), he emphasized that the 95% confidence interval
was ± 29-30: "Tonight, our forecast shows Republicans gaining 53 seats — the same as in recent days, and exactly the same answer you get if you plug the generic ballot average into the simple formula. Our model also thinks the spread of potential outcomes is exceptionally wide: its 95 percent confidence interval runs from a 23-seat Republican gain to an 81-seat one".
On election eve, he reported his final forecast as follows:
In final vote tallys as of December 10, 2010, the Republicans had a net gain of 63 seats in the House, 8 more than the total predicted on election eve though still within the reported confidence interval
.
Just before election day (October 31), the FiveThirtyEight projection was that there would be 30 Republican governors in office (counting states where there was no gubernatorial election in 2010), 19 Democratic governors, and 1 (actually 0.8) Other (Lincoln Chaffee, who was leading in the polls running as an Independent in Rhode Island
).
Of the 37 gubernatorial races, FiveThirtyEight correctly predicted the winner of 36. Only in Illinois, in which the Democratic candidate Pat Quinn defeated the Republican Bill Brady 46.6% to 46.1%, was the FiveThirtyEight prediction wrong – by just half a percentage point.
a political advisor to Barack Obama, which stimulated a response by Silver followed by another article by Klain.
Nate Silver
Nathaniel Read "Nate" Silver is an American statistician, psephologist, and writer. 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...
. Sometimes colloquially referred to as 538 dot com or just 538, the website takes its name from the number of electors in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
electoral college. Established on March 7, 2008 as FiveThirtyEight.com, in August 2010 the blog became a licensed feature of The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
online and was renamed FiveThirtyEight: Nate Silver's Political Calculus.
During the presidential primaries
United States presidential primary
The series of presidential primary elections and caucuses is one of the first steps in the process of electing the President of the United States of America. The primary elections are run by state and local governments, while caucuses are private events run by the political parties...
and general election of 2008
United States presidential election, 2008
The United States presidential election of 2008 was the 56th quadrennial presidential election. It was held on November 4, 2008. Democrat Barack Obama, then the junior United States Senator from Illinois, defeated Republican John McCain, the senior U.S. Senator from Arizona. Obama received 365...
, the site compiled polling data through a unique methodology derived from Silver's experience in baseball sabermetrics
Sabermetrics
Sabermetrics is the specialized analysis of baseball through objective, empirical evidence, specifically baseball statistics that measure in-game activity. The term is derived from the acronym SABR, which stands for the Society for American Baseball Research...
to "balance out the polls with comparative demographic data" and "weighting each poll based on the pollster's historical track record, sample size, and recentness of the poll".
For the 2008 Presidential Election
United States presidential election, 2008
The United States presidential election of 2008 was the 56th quadrennial presidential election. It was held on November 4, 2008. Democrat Barack Obama, then the junior United States Senator from Illinois, defeated Republican John McCain, the senior U.S. Senator from Arizona. Obama received 365...
, FiveThirtyEight.com also used computer models to simulate the election 10,000 times per day in order to provide a continually up-to-date assessment of probability for electoral outcomes. The method proved to be highly accurate, as Silver correctly predicted the winner of 49 of the 50 states in the presidential election, as well as every Senate race
United States Senate
The United States Senate is the upper house of the bicameral legislature of the United States, and together with the United States House of Representatives comprises the United States Congress. The composition and powers of the Senate are established in Article One of the U.S. Constitution. Each...
in 2008.
After the 2008 election, the site 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 U.S. Senate; federal economic policies; Congressional support for legislation; public support for health care reform
Health care reform in the United States
Health care reform in the United States has a long history, of which the most recent results were two federal statutes enacted in 2010: the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act , signed March 23, 2010, and the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 , which amended the PPACA and...
, global warming
Global warming
Global warming refers to the rising average temperature of Earth's atmosphere and oceans and its projected continuation. In the last 100 years, Earth's average surface temperature increased by about with about two thirds of the increase occurring over just the last three decades...
legislation, gay rights; elections around the world; marijuana legalization; and numerous other topics.
On June 3, 2010, Nate 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.
History
When Silver started FiveThirtyEight.com in early March 2008 he initially published under the name "Poblano", the same name that he had used when publishing a diary on the political blogPolitical blog
A political blog is a common type of blog that comments on politics. In liberal democracies the right to criticize the government without interference is considered an important element of free speech...
Daily Kos
Daily Kos
Daily Kos is an American political blog that publishes news and opinions from a progressive point of view. It functions as a discussion forum and group blog for a variety of netroots activists, whose efforts are primarily directed toward influencing and strengthening the Democratic Party...
since November 2007. Writing as Poblano on Daily Kos, he had gained a following especially for his primary election forecast on Super Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Super Tuesday, 2008
Super Tuesday 2008, Super Duper Tuesday, Mega Tuesday, Giga Tuesday, Tsunami Tuesday, and The Tuesday of Destiny are names for February 5, 2008, the day on which the largest simultaneous number of state U.S. presidential primary elections in the history of U.S. primaries were held...
. From that primary election day, which included contests in 24 states plus American Samoa
American Samoa
American Samoa is an unincorporated territory of the United States located in the South Pacific Ocean, southeast of the sovereign state of Samoa...
, "Poblano" predicted that Barack Obama would come away with 859 delegates, and Hillary Clinton 829; in the actual contests, Obama won 847 delegates and Clinton 834. Based on this result, New York Times op-ed
Op-ed
An op-ed, abbreviated from opposite the editorial page , is a newspaper article that expresses the opinions of a named writer who is usually unaffiliated with the newspaper's editorial board...
columnist William Kristol
William Kristol
William Kristol is an American neoconservative political analyst and commentator. He is the founder and editor of the political magazine The Weekly Standard and a regular commentator on the Fox News Channel....
cited "Poblano" thus: "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.com gained further national attention for beating out most pollsters' projections in the North Carolina
North Carolina Democratic primary, 2008
The 2008 Democratic presidential primary in North Carolina took place on May 6, 2008, one of the last primary elections in the long race for nomination between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Obama won the primary....
and Indiana
Indiana Democratic primary, 2008
Clinton narrowly defeated Obama to win the primary.The Indiana Democratic Presidential Primary took place on May 6, 2008. It was an open primary with 72 delegates at stake. The winner in each of Indiana's nine congressional districts was awarded all of that district's delegates, totaling 47....
Democratic party primaries on May 6, 2008. As Mark Blumenthal wrote in National Journal
National Journal
National Journal is a nonpartisan American weekly magazine that reports on the current political environment and emerging political and policy trends. National Journal was first published in 1969. Times Mirror owned the magazine from 1986 to 1997, when it was purchased by David G. Bradley...
, “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. “I think it is interesting and, in a lot of ways, I’m not surprised that his predictions came closer to the result than the pollsters did”, said Brian F. Schaffner, research director of American University
American University
American University is a private, Methodist, liberal arts, and research university in Washington, D.C. The university was chartered by an Act of Congress on December 5, 1892 as "The American University", which was approved by President Benjamin Harrison on February 24, 1893...
’s Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies
Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies
The Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies is an integrated teaching, research, and study program of the School of Public Affairs at American University, focusing on the United States Congress and the presidency and the interactions between them.-Institutes:Campaign Management...
.
On May 30, 2008, Silver revealed his true identity for the first time to his FiveThirtyEight.com 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
General election
In a parliamentary political system, a general election is an election in which all or most members of a given political body are chosen. The term is usually used to refer to elections held for a nation's primary legislative body, as distinguished from by-elections and local elections.The term...
race. This model, too, relied in part on demographic information but mainly involved a complex method of aggregating polling results. On June 13, Rasmussen Reports
Rasmussen Reports
Rasmussen Reports is an American media company that publishes and distributes information based on public opinion polling. Founded by pollster Scott Rasmussen in 2003, the company updates daily indexes including the President's job approval rating, and provides public opinion data, analysis, and...
began partnering with FiveThirtyEight.com in order to include this unique methodology for generating poll averages in their "Balance of Power Calculator". At the same time, FiveThirtyEight.coms daily "Today's Polls" column began to be mirrored on "The Plank," a blog published by The New Republic
The New Republic
The magazine has also published two articles concerning income inequality, largely criticizing conservative economists for their attempts to deny the existence or negative effect increasing income inequality is having on the United States...
.
By June 25, 2008, entering "FiveThirtyEight" in a Google search
Google search
Google or Google Web Search is a web search engine owned by Google Inc. Google Search is the most-used search engine on the World Wide Web, receiving several hundred million queries each day through its various services....
generated a list of more than 150,000 articles that mentioned FiveThirtyEight.com; by October 13 the same search yielded more than 400,000 articles; by November 5, more than 580,000. By December 29, 2008, after the excitement of the election had died down, this search still yielded 480,000 articles; then interest in the site gradually rebuilt so that by August 14, 2009, it yielded 496,000; by September 27 it yielded 512,000; by November 17 (roughly a year after the 2008 election), 568,000.
By early October 2008, FiveThirtyEight.com 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 view
Page view
A page view or page impression is a request to load a single HTML file of an Internet site. On the World Wide Web a 'page' request would result from a web surfer clicking on a link on another 'page' pointing to the 'page' in question. This should be contrasted with a hit, which refers to a...
s. On Election Day, November 4, 2008, the site had nearly 5 million page views.
Weighting of polls
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 demographicsDemographics
Demographics are the most recent statistical characteristics of a population. These types of data are used widely in sociology , public policy, and marketing. Commonly examined demographics include gender, race, age, disabilities, mobility, home ownership, employment status, and even location...
and prior voting patterns. “I did think there was room for a more sophisticated way of handling these things,” Silver said.
FiveThirtyEight.com weighs pollster's historical track record through a complex methodology and assigns them a value to indicate "Pollster-Introduced Error (PIE)".
Polls on FiveThirtyEight.com are weighted using a half-life
Half-life
Half-life, abbreviated t½, is the period of time it takes for the amount of a substance undergoing decay to decrease by half. The name was originally used to describe a characteristic of unstable atoms , but it may apply to any quantity which follows a set-rate decay.The original term, dating to...
of thirty days using the formula 0.5P/30 where 'P' is the number of days transpired since the median date that the poll was in the field. The formula is based on an analysis of 2000, 2004, 2006 and 2008 state-by-state polling data.
Smoothing the poll results
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 LOESSLocal regression
LOESS, or LOWESS , is one of many "modern" modeling methods that build on "classical" methods, such as linear and nonlinear least squares regression. Modern regression methods are designed to address situations in which the classical procedures do not perform well or cannot be effectively applied...
.
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
PECOTA
PECOTA, an acronym for Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm, is a sabermetric system for forecasting Major League Baseball player performance. The word is a backronym based on the name of journeyman major league player Bill Pecota, who with a lifetime batting average of .249...
: using nearest neighbor analysis
Nearest neighbor search
Nearest neighbor search , also known as proximity search, similarity search or closest point search, is an optimization problem for finding closest points in metric spaces. The problem is: given a set S of points in a metric space M and a query point q ∈ M, find the closest point in S to q...
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 election
Democratic Party (United States) presidential primaries, 2008
The 2008 Democratic presidential primaries were the selection process by which voters of the Democratic Party chose its nominee for President of the United States in the 2008 U.S. presidential election...
s 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
North Carolina Democratic primary, 2008
The 2008 Democratic presidential primary in North Carolina took place on May 6, 2008, one of the last primary elections in the long race for nomination between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Obama won the primary....
and Indiana
Indiana Democratic primary, 2008
Clinton narrowly defeated Obama to win the primary.The Indiana Democratic Presidential Primary took place on May 6, 2008. It was an open primary with 72 delegates at stake. The winner in each of Indiana's nine congressional districts was awarded all of that district's delegates, totaling 47....
, 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
General election
In a parliamentary political system, a general election is an election in which all or most members of a given political body are chosen. The term is usually used to refer to elections held for a nation's primary legislative body, as distinguished from by-elections and local elections.The term...
projections for each state, in addition to relying in the available polls in a given state and "similar states," Silver estimated a "538 regression
Regression analysis
In statistics, regression analysis includes many techniques for modeling and analyzing several variables, when the focus is on the relationship between a dependent variable and one or more independent variables...
" using historical voting information along with demographic
Demography
Demography is the statistical study of human population. It can be a very general science that can be applied to any kind of dynamic human population, that is, one that changes over time or space...
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.
Additional aspects of the methodology are described in a detailed FAQ
FAQ
Frequently asked questions are listed questions and answers, all supposed to be commonly asked in some context, and pertaining to a particular topic. "FAQ" is usually pronounced as an initialism rather than an acronym, but an acronym form does exist. Since the acronym FAQ originated in textual...
on the FiveThirtyEight.com website.
Senate races
In July 2008, the site began to report projections of 2008 U.S. Senate races. Special procedures were developed relying on both polls and demographic analysisDemographic analysis
Demographic analysis includes the sets of methods that allow us to measure the dimensions and dynamics of populations. These methods have primarily been developed to study human populations, but are extended to a variety of areas where researchers want to know how populations of social actors can...
. The projections were updated on a weekly basis.
Swing state analysis
The site presents an analysis of the swing stateSwing state
In United States presidential politics, a swing state is a state in which no single candidate or party has overwhelming support in securing that state's electoral college votes...
s, focusing on so-called "Tipping Point States". 'Tipping Point States' are those states that tip the outcome of the election from one candidate to the other. In each simulation run, the winner's states won are lined up in reverse order of victory margin by percentage. A simple algorithm selects the minimum closest states that, if switched to the loser's side, would change the election outcome, then weights that run's significance based on the margin of victory in the popular vote. Thus, the closer the popular vote, the fewer the number of tipping point states and the greater the significance of that run in assessing tipping point importance. For example, the 2004 election's sole tipping point state was Ohio by this method, while 1960's were Illinois
Illinois
Illinois is the fifth-most populous state of the United States of America, and is often noted for being a microcosm of the entire country. With Chicago in the northeast, small industrial cities and great agricultural productivity in central and northern Illinois, and natural resources like coal,...
, Missouri
Missouri
Missouri is a US state located in the Midwestern United States, bordered by Iowa, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska. With a 2010 population of 5,988,927, Missouri is the 18th most populous state in the nation and the fifth most populous in the Midwest. It...
, and New Jersey
New Jersey
New Jersey is a state in the Northeastern and Middle Atlantic regions of the United States. , its population was 8,791,894. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York, on the southeast and south by the Atlantic Ocean, on the west by Pennsylvania and on the southwest by Delaware...
— even though Hawaii
Hawaii
Hawaii is the newest of the 50 U.S. states , and is the only U.S. state made up entirely of islands. It is the northernmost island group in Polynesia, occupying most of an archipelago in the central Pacific Ocean, southwest of the continental United States, southeast of Japan, and northeast of...
was the closest state race.
Final projections of 2008 election
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 ObamaBarack Obama
Barack Hussein Obama II is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. Obama previously served as a United States Senator from Illinois, from January 2005 until he resigned following his victory in the 2008 presidential election.Born in...
and electoral vote totals of 349 (based on a probabilistic projection) or 353 (based on fixed projections of each state). Silver's predictions matched the actual results everywhere except in Indiana
Indiana
Indiana is a US state, admitted to the United States as the 19th on December 11, 1816. It is located in the Midwestern United States and Great Lakes Region. With 6,483,802 residents, the state is ranked 15th in population and 16th in population density. Indiana is ranked 38th in land area and is...
and the 2nd congressional district of Nebraska
Nebraska
Nebraska is a state on the Great Plains of the Midwestern United States. The state's capital is Lincoln and its largest city is Omaha, on the Missouri River....
, which awards an electoral vote separately from the rest of the state. His projected national popular vote differential
United States presidential election, 2008
The United States presidential election of 2008 was the 56th quadrennial presidential election. It was held on November 4, 2008. Democrat Barack Obama, then the junior United States Senator from Illinois, defeated Republican John McCain, the senior U.S. Senator from Arizona. Obama received 365...
was below the actual figure of 7.2 points.
The forecasts for the Senate
United States Senate
The United States Senate is the upper house of the bicameral legislature of the United States, and together with the United States House of Representatives comprises the United States Congress. The composition and powers of the Senate are established in Article One of the U.S. Constitution. Each...
proved to be correct for every race. But the near stalemate in Minnesota
Minnesota
Minnesota is a U.S. state located in the Midwestern United States. The twelfth largest state of the U.S., it is the twenty-first most populous, with 5.3 million residents. Minnesota was carved out of the eastern half of the Minnesota Territory and admitted to the Union as the thirty-second state...
led to a recount that was settled only on June 30, 2009. In Alaska
Alaska
Alaska is the largest state in the United States by area. It is situated in the northwest extremity of the North American continent, with Canada to the east, the Arctic Ocean to the north, and the Pacific Ocean to the west and south, with Russia further west across the Bering Strait...
, after a protracted counting of ballots, on November 19 Republican incumbent Ted Stevens
Ted Stevens
Theodore Fulton "Ted" Stevens, Sr. was a United States Senator from Alaska, serving from December 24, 1968, until January 3, 2009, and thus the longest-serving Republican senator in history...
conceded the seat to Democrat Mark Begich
Mark Begich
Mark Peter Begich is the junior United States Senator from Alaska and a member of the Democratic Party. A former mayor of Anchorage, he served on the Anchorage Assembly for almost ten years prior to being elected mayor in 2003...
, an outcome that Silver had forecast on election day. And in Georgia
Georgia (U.S. state)
Georgia is a state located in the southeastern United States. It was established in 1732, the last of the original Thirteen Colonies. The state is named after King George II of Great Britain. Georgia was the fourth state to ratify the United States Constitution, on January 2, 1788...
, a run-off election on December 2 led to the re-election of Republican Saxby Chambliss
Saxby Chambliss
Clarence Saxby Chambliss, Jr. is the senior United States Senator from Georgia. A member of the Republican Party, he previously served as a U.S. Representative ....
, a result that was also consistent with Silver's original projection.
The ground game and "On the Road"
During the 2008 electoral campaign, Sean QuinnSean Quinn (writer)
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....
, a second contributor, drew on his knowledge and experience with campaign organizations to evaluate the ground game
Grassroots
A grassroots movement is one driven by the politics of a community. The term implies that the creation of the movement and the group supporting it are natural and spontaneous, highlighting the differences between this and a movement that is orchestrated by traditional power structures...
and "get out the vote"
Get out the vote
"Get out the vote" are terms used to describe two categories of political activity, both aimed at increasing the number of votes cast in one or more elections.- Non-partisan contexts :...
strategies of the McCain and Obama campaign teams. A poker player, Quinn drew an analogy between Barack Obama's electoral strategy and a poker player having multiple "outs" for winning a hand.
In September, Quinn launched a series of essays under the name On the Road. Quinn traveled from state to state telling the story of the campaign from the electoral battleground, drawing on observations and interviews with grassroots
Grassroots
A grassroots movement is one driven by the politics of a community. The term implies that the creation of the movement and the group supporting it are natural and spontaneous, highlighting the differences between this and a movement that is orchestrated by traditional power structures...
campaign workers.
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 ChamblissSaxby Chambliss
Clarence Saxby Chambliss, Jr. is the senior United States Senator from Georgia. A member of the Republican Party, he previously served as a U.S. Representative ....
; recounts of votes in Alaska (won by Mark Begich
Mark Begich
Mark Peter Begich is the junior United States Senator from Alaska and a member of the Democratic Party. A former mayor of Anchorage, he served on the Anchorage Assembly for almost ten years prior to being elected mayor in 2003...
), and Minnesota (Al Franken
Al Franken
Alan Stuart "Al" Franken is the junior United States Senator from Minnesota. He is a member of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, which affiliates with the national Democratic Party....
vs. Norm Coleman
Norm Coleman
Norman Bertram Coleman, Jr. is an American attorney and politician. He was a United States senator from Minnesota from 2003 to 2009. Coleman was elected in 2002 and served in the 108th, 109th, and 110th Congresses. Before becoming a senator, he was mayor of Saint Paul, Minnesota, from 1994 to 2002...
); and the appointments of Senatorial replacements in Colorado, New York, and Illinois.
After President Obama's inauguration
Inauguration of Barack Obama
The inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States took place on Tuesday, January 20, 2009. The inauguration, which set a record attendance for any event held in Washington, D.C., marked the commencement of the four-year term of Barack Obama as President and Joe...
, 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
White House Press Corps
The White House Press Corps is the group of journalists or correspondents usually stationed at the White House in Washington, D.C. to cover the president of the United States, White House events and news briefings. Their offices are located in the West Wing....
. After that time, however, he contributed only a handful of articles to FiveThirtyEight.com.
During the post-2008 election period Silver devoted attention to developing some tools for the analysis of forthcoming 2010 Congressional elections
United States elections, 2010
The 2010 United States elections were held on Tuesday, November 2, 2010. During this midterm election year, all 435 seats in the United States House of Representatives and 37 of the 100 seats in the United States Senate were contested in this election along with 38 state and territorial...
, 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 makes 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 Strategic Vision, LLC (of Georgia), presenting an analysis that Silver said produced strong indirect evidence of fraud. FiveThirtyEight devoted more than a dozen articles to the Iranian presidential election in June 2009
Iranian presidential election, 2009
Iran's tenth presidential election was held on 12 June 2009, with incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad running against three challengers. The next morning the Islamic Republic News Agency, Iran's official news agency, announced that with two-thirds of the votes counted, Ahmadinejad had won the election...
, 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 Nate Silver, Andrew Gelman
Andrew Gelman
Andrew Gelman is an American statistician, professor of statistics and political science, and director of the Applied Statistics Center at Columbia University. He earned an S.B. in mathematics and in physics from MIT in 1986 and a Ph.D...
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
Massachusetts
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. It is bordered by Rhode Island and Connecticut to the south, New York to the west, and Vermont and New Hampshire to the north; at its east lies the Atlantic Ocean. As of the 2010...
special election to the U.S. Senate. The "538 model" once again aggregated the disparate polls to correctly predict that the Republican Scott Brown
Scott Brown
Scott Brown is a United States senator.Scott Brown may also refer to:-Sportsmen:*Scott Brown , American college football coach of Kentucky State...
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 Nate 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-US 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
Uniform national swing
Uniform national swing, or UNS is a system for translating opinion polls, which give overall vote proportions, to expected eventual parliamentary seats in a constituency based first past the post system, as in the UK general elections...
to predict the outcome of elections. However, by applying his own methodology, Silver produced very different results, which suggested that a Conservative
Conservative Party (UK)
The Conservative Party, formally the Conservative and Unionist Party, is a centre-right political party in the United Kingdom that adheres to the philosophies of conservatism and British unionism. It is the largest political party in the UK, and is currently the largest single party in the House...
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.
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. The new ratings came under criticism by Taegan Goddard in an article in his blog Political WirePolitical Wire
Political Wire is a political blog based in the United States. It was founded in 1999 and published by Taegan D. Goddard , a former policy adviser to a U.S...
on June 9 titled "Where's the Transparency in Pollster 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. Literally every detail of how the pollster ratings are calculated is explained. It's also here [referring to another article], in the form our 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
Daily Kos
Daily Kos is an American political blog that publishes news and opinions from a progressive point of view. It functions as a discussion forum and group blog for a variety of netroots activists, whose efforts are primarily directed toward influencing and strengthening the Democratic Party...
s use of Research 2000
Research 2000
Research 2000 is a U.S. opinion polling and marketing research company based in Olney, Maryland. It began doing research on upcoming elections in 1999 after its President, Del Ali, moved on from Mason-Dixon Political Media Research...
as its pollster.
Subsequently, on June 11, Mark Blumenthal also commented on the question of transparency in an article in the National Journal
National Journal
National Journal is a nonpartisan American weekly magazine that reports on the current political environment and emerging political and policy trends. National Journal was first published in 1969. Times Mirror owned the magazine from 1986 to 1997, when it was purchased by David G. Bradley...
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.
Partnership with The New York Times
On June 3, 2010, The New York Times and Nate 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.com were also archived for public access.
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: Nate Silver, Renard Sexton, and Hale Stewart. Andrew GelmanAndrew Gelman
Andrew Gelman is an American statistician, professor of statistics and political science, and director of the Applied Statistics Center at Columbia University. He earned an S.B. in mathematics and in physics from MIT in 1986 and a Ph.D...
contributed again in early 2011. Brian McCabe published his first article in January 2011. Why other writers played only a limited role in FiveThirtyEight/NYT was explained in February 2011 as follows:
"Before his partnership with the Times, Silver had five contributors who wrote about half the posts on the site. Now none of those contributors write regularly for the blog, meaning Silver writes about 85 percent of the posts with occasional guest contributions. The Times, Silver said, wasn’t comfortable allowing some of the contributors to continue writing because of their tone or political affiliations.
'That is one of the challenges — getting people that meet the Times’ standards of what it means to be a journalist. You can’t have too many conflicts of interest and you really have to write in a way that comes across as being not overly opinionated,' Silver said. 'I disagree with some of the decisions the Times made as far as what they considered disqualifying, but the fact is they do have a standard which is both high and in some ways kind of quirky'.
[Jim] Roberts, [Assistant Managing Editor of the Times], "explained that the Times decided contributor Ed Kilgore would stop writing for FiveThirtyEight because his work would have violated the Times’ ethics policy. Kilgore is also managing editor of The Democratic Strategist – 'a partisan connection that was a bit too close for comfort, Roberts said'.
Two of the contributors who used to write regularly for FiveThirtyEight — Renard Sexton who covered international politics and Hale Stewart who covered economics — have both written some pieces for the blog since the switch. But they’re doing so less frequently, Silver said, because the Times already has reporters who write about the same topics.
'One of the things that I have to think about now that I didn’t have to think about before is how FiveThirtyEight’s coverage relates to everything else The New York Times is doing,' said Silver, who hopes to add other contributors to balance out the workload and give him time to work on longer-term projects.
On the one hand, that can create opportunities to write about subjects that I might have skipped before. But in other circumstances, there can be issues with duplication or redundancy'”.
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 article for the previous couple of weeks, as well as reactions to it 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 outstanding blog The Monkey Cage, which was named the 2010 Blog of the Year by The Week
The Week
The Week, styled as THE WEEK, is a weekly news magazine.-History:It was founded in the United Kingdom by Jolyon Connell in 1995. In April 2001, the magazine began publishing an American edition; an Australian edition followed in October 2008. Dennis Publishing publishes the U.K. and Australian...
magazine".
Sports
While politics and elections remained the main focus of FiveThirtyEight, the blog also sometimes addressed sports, including American college athletic conference realignment, professional tennis, the 2011 NCAA Men's Basketball
NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championship
The NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championship is a single-elimination tournament held each spring in the United States, featuring 68 college basketball teams, to determine the national championship in the top tier of college basketball...
"March Madness", the B.C.S.
Bowl Championship Series
The Bowl Championship Series is a selection system that creates five bowl match-ups involving ten of the top ranked teams in the NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision , including an opportunity for the top two to compete in the BCS National Championship Game.The BCS relies on a combination of...
rankings in NCAA college football, NBA Basketball
National Basketball Association
The National Basketball Association is the pre-eminent men's professional basketball league in North America. It consists of thirty franchised member clubs, of which twenty-nine are located in the United States and one in Canada...
, and Major League Baseball
Major League Baseball
Major League Baseball is the highest level of professional baseball in the United States and Canada, consisting of teams that play in the National League and the American League...
matters ranging from Derek Jeter
Derek Jeter
Derek Sanderson Jeter is an American baseball shortstop who has played 17 years in Major League Baseball for the New York Yankees. A twelve-time All-Star and five-time World Series champion, Jeter's clubhouse presence, on-field leadership, hitting ability, and baserunning have made him a central...
's 2011 performance to 2011 attendance at the New York Mets
New York Mets
The New York Mets are a professional baseball team based in the borough of Queens in New York City, New York. They belong to Major League Baseball's National League East Division. One of baseball's first expansion teams, the Mets were founded in 1962 to replace New York's departed National League...
' Citi Field.
Economics and hurricanes
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)
Hurricane Irene (2011)
Hurricane Irene was a large and powerful Atlantic hurricane that left extensive flood and wind damage along its path through the Caribbean, the United States East Coast and as far north as Atlantic Canada in 2011...
.
Occupy Wall Street protests
FiveThirtyEight published a graph showing different growth curves of the news stories covering Tea Party
Tea Party movement
The Tea Party movement is an American populist political movement that is generally recognized as conservative and libertarian, and has sponsored protests and supported political candidates since 2009...
and Occupy Wall Street
Occupy Wall Street
Occupy Wall Street is an ongoing series of demonstrations initiated by the Canadian activist group Adbusters which began September 17, 2011 in Zuccotti Park, located in New York City's Wall Street financial district...
protests. Silver pointed out that conflicts with the police caused the sharpest increases in news coverage of the protests. And he assessed the geography of the protests by analyzing news reports of the size and location of events across the United States.
2010 U.S. mid-term elections
Shortly after 538 relocated to The New York Times, Silver introduced his prediction models for the 2010 electionsUnited States elections, 2010
The 2010 United States elections were held on Tuesday, November 2, 2010. During this midterm election year, all 435 seats in the United States House of Representatives and 37 of the 100 seats in the United States Senate were contested in this election along with 38 state and territorial...
to the U.S. Senate, the U.S. House of Representatives
United States House of Representatives elections, 2010
The 2010 United States House of Representatives elections, also known as the 2010 midterm elections, were held on November 2, 2010, at the midpoint of President Barack Obama's first term in office. Voters of the 50 U.S. states chose 435 U.S. Representatives. Voters of the U.S...
, and state Governorships
United States gubernatorial elections, 2010
The United States gubernatorial elections were held on Tuesday, November 2, 2010 in 37 states . As in most midterm elections, the party controlling the White House lost ground...
. Each of these models relied initially on a combination of electoral history, demographics, and polling.
U.S. Senate
Stimulated by the surprising win of Massachusetts Republican Scott BrownScott Brown
Scott Brown is a United States senator.Scott Brown may also refer to:-Sportsmen:*Scott Brown , American college football coach of Kentucky State...
in the special election in January 2010, Silver launched the first iteration of his Senate prediction model a few days later, using objective indicators including polling to project each state outcome in November. This model incorporated some elements of the 2008 presidential model. It was first published in full form in The New York Times on August 25, 2010. It relied basically on aggregating of public polls for each Senate race, with some adjustment for national trends in recognition of a correlation in poll movement across state lines, i.e., each race cannot be interpreted as entirely independent of all others.
In addition to making projections of the outcomes of each Senate race, FiveThirtyEight tracked the expected national outcome of the partisan division of the Senate. Just before election day (October 31), the FiveThirtyEight Senate projection was for the new Senate to have 52 Democrats and 48 Republicans. (The model did not address the possibility of party switching by elected candidates after November 2.)
Of the 37 Senate seats contested in the November 2, 2010 elections, 36 were resolved by November 4, including very close outcomes in several states. Of these 36, the FiveThirtyEight model had correctly predicted the winner in 34. One of the two misses was in Colorado, in which the incumbent Michael Bennet
Michael Bennet
Michael Farrand Bennet is an American businessman, lawyer, and politician. He is currently the junior United States Senator from Colorado, and a member of the Democratic Party...
(D) outpolled the challenger Ken Buck
Ken Buck
Kenneth R. "Ken" Buck is the District Attorney for Weld County, Colorado, and was the unsuccessful Republican challenger to Michael Bennet in the 2010 U.S. Senate race in Colorado.-Early life and education:...
(R) by less than 1 percentage point. The 538 model had forecast that Buck would win by 1 percentage point. The second miss was in Nevada, in which the incumbent Harry Reid
Harry Reid
Harry Mason Reid is the senior United States Senator from Nevada, serving since 1987. A member of the Democratic Party, he has been the Senate Majority Leader since January 2007, having previously served as Minority Leader and Minority and Majority Whip.Previously, Reid was a member of the U.S...
beat challenger Sharron Angle
Sharron Angle
Sharron Elaine Angle is an American politician who served as a Republican member of the Nevada Assembly from 1999 to 2007. She ran unsuccessfully as the 2010 Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate seat in Nevada, garnering 45 percent of the vote...
by 5.5 percentage points, whereas the 538 model had forecast Angle to win by 3.0 percentage points. Silver has speculated the error was due at least in part to the fact that polling organizations underrepresented Hispanic voters by not interviewing in Spanish.
In the remaining contest for U.S. Senate, in Alaska
United States Senate election in Alaska, 2010
The 2010 United States Senate election in Alaska took place on November 2, 2010, alongside 33 other U.S. Senate elections in other states, as well as elections in all states for Representatives to the U.S. House, and various state and local offices....
, the electoral outcome was not yet determined as of November 4, pending a count of the write-in ballots, but in the end the FiveThirtyEight forecast of GOP
Republican Party (United States)
The Republican Party is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Democratic Party. Founded by anti-slavery expansion activists in 1854, it is often called the GOP . The party's platform generally reflects American conservatism in the U.S...
nominee Joe Miller as winner ultimately proved to be wrong, as write-in candidate, incumbent Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski
Lisa Murkowski
Lisa Ann Murkowski is the senior U.S. Senator from the State of Alaska and a member of the Republican Party. She was appointed to the Senate in 2002 by her father, Governor Frank Murkowski. After losing a Republican primary in 2010, she became the second person ever to win a U.S...
, prevailed.
The 538 model had forecast a net pickup of 7 seats by the Republicans in the Senate, but the outcome was a pickup of 6 seats.
U.S. House of Representatives
The model for projecting the outcome of the House of Representatives was more complicated than those for the Senate and governorships. For one thing, House races are more subject to the force of national trends and events than are the other two. One way to account for this was to take into account trends in the "generic Congressional ballot." Use of such a macrolevel indicator, as well as macroeconomic indicators, is a common approach taken by political scientists to project House elections.Furthermore, there was much less available public polling for individual House districts than there is for Senate or gubernatorial races. By the end of the 2010 election season, public polls were available for only about 25% of the districts. This is one reason why some analysts rely principally on making global or macro-level projections of the number of seats to be won by each party rather than trying to forecast the outcome in every individual district. Silver's FiveThirtyEight model, however, while weighting the generic partisan division as one factor, focused on developing estimates for each district. For this purpose he used information on past voting in the district (the Cook PVI
Cook Partisan Voting Index
The Cook Partisan Voting Index , sometimes referred to as simply the Partisan Voting Index , is a measurement of how strongly an American congressional district or state leans toward one political party compared to the nation as a whole...
), the quality of the candidates (in particular whether one was an incumbent), fundraising by each candidate, "expert ratings" of the races, public polls of the given race (if they were available), and, in the absence of public polls a cautious use of private polls (i.e., polls conducted by or for partisan organizations or a candidate's own campaign organization).
In response to some concerns that he was hedging his projection, Silver contended that in his model the uncertainty of the outcome was a feature, not a flaw. In comparison with previous Congressional elections, a far larger number of seats were being contested or were "in play" in 2010. While his model, which relied on simulating the election outcomes 100,000 times generated a projected "most likely" net gain of 53 seats by the Republicans (two days before the election), he emphasized that the 95% confidence interval
Confidence interval
In statistics, a confidence interval is a particular kind of interval estimate of a population parameter and is used to indicate the reliability of an estimate. It is an observed interval , in principle different from sample to sample, that frequently includes the parameter of interest, if the...
was ± 29-30: "Tonight, our forecast shows Republicans gaining 53 seats — the same as in recent days, and exactly the same answer you get if you plug the generic ballot average into the simple formula. Our model also thinks the spread of potential outcomes is exceptionally wide: its 95 percent confidence interval runs from a 23-seat Republican gain to an 81-seat one".
On election eve, he reported his final forecast as follows:
Our forecasting model, which is based on a consensus of indicators including generic ballot polling, polling of local districts, expert forecasts, and fund-raising data, now predicts an average Republican net gain of 54 seats (up one from 53 seats in last night’s forecast), and a median net Republican gain of 55 seats. These figures would exceed the 52 seats that Republicans won from Democrats in the 1994 midterms.
In final vote tallys as of December 10, 2010, the Republicans had a net gain of 63 seats in the House, 8 more than the total predicted on election eve though still within the reported confidence interval
Confidence interval
In statistics, a confidence interval is a particular kind of interval estimate of a population parameter and is used to indicate the reliability of an estimate. It is an observed interval , in principle different from sample to sample, that frequently includes the parameter of interest, if the...
.
State governorships
The FiveThirtyEight model for state governors' races also relied basically on aggregating and projecting public polls in each race. However, Silver reported that gubernatorial elections in each state were somewhat more independent of what happened in other states than were either Senate or House of Representatives elections. That is, these races were somewhat more local and less national in focus.Just before election day (October 31), the FiveThirtyEight projection was that there would be 30 Republican governors in office (counting states where there was no gubernatorial election in 2010), 19 Democratic governors, and 1 (actually 0.8) Other (Lincoln Chaffee, who was leading in the polls running as an Independent in Rhode Island
Rhode Island
The state of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, more commonly referred to as Rhode Island , is a state in the New England region of the United States. It is the smallest U.S. state by area...
).
Of the 37 gubernatorial races, FiveThirtyEight correctly predicted the winner of 36. Only in Illinois, in which the Democratic candidate Pat Quinn defeated the Republican Bill Brady 46.6% to 46.1%, was the FiveThirtyEight prediction wrong – by just half a percentage point.
2012 U.S. presidential election
While FiveThirtyEight devoted a lot of time to coverage of the 2012 Republican party primaries throughout 2011, its first effort to handicap the 2012 Presidential general election was published a year in advance of the election: "Is Obama Toast? Handicapping the 2012 Election" in The New York Times Magazine. Accompanying the online release of this article, Silver also published online "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 Republic opponent would be. This article was criticized in an online article in Bloomberg News by Ron KlainRon Klain
Ronald A. "Ron" Klain is an American lawyer and political operative best known for serving as Chief of Staff to two Vice Presidents - Al Gore and Joseph Biden . He is an influential Democratic Party insider...
a political advisor to Barack Obama, which stimulated a response by Silver followed by another article by Klain.
Recognition
- In September 2008, FiveThirtyEight became the first blog ever selected as a Notable Narrative by the Nieman Foundation for JournalismNieman Foundation for JournalismThe Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University is the primary journalism institution at Harvard. It was founded in 1938 as the result of a $1 million bequest by Agnes Wahl Nieman, the widow of Lucius W. Nieman, founder of The Milwaukee Journal...
at Harvard UniversityHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
. 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 TimesThe New York TimesThe New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
described FiveThirtyEight.com in November 2008 as "one of the breakout online stars of the year".
- Huffington Post columnist Jason Linkins named FiveThirtyEight.com as No. 1 of "Ten Things that Managed to Not Suck in 2008, Media Edition".
- FiveThirtyEight.com is the 2008 Weblog Award Winner for "Best Political Coverage".
- FiveThirtyEight.com earned a 2009 "Bloggie" as the "Best Weblog about Politics" in the 9th Annual Weblog Awards.
- In April 2009 Nate Silver was named "Blogger of the Year" in the 6th Annual Opinion Awards of The WeekThe WeekThe Week, styled as THE WEEK, is a weekly news magazine.-History:It was founded in the United Kingdom by Jolyon Connell in 1995. In April 2001, the magazine began publishing an American edition; an Australian edition followed in October 2008. Dennis Publishing publishes the U.K. and Australian...
, for his work on FiveThirtyEight.com.
- In September 2009, FiveThirtyEight.coms predictive model was featured as the cover story in STATS: The Magazine for Students of Statistics.
- In November 2009, FiveThirtyEight.com was named one of "Our Favorite Blogs of 2009" ("Fifty blogs we just can't get enough of") by PC MagazinePC MagazinePC Magazine is a computer magazine published by Ziff Davis Publishing Holdings Inc. A print edition was published from 1982 to January 2009...
.
- In December 2009, FiveThirtyEight was recognized by The New York Times MagazineThe New York Times MagazineThe New York Times Magazine is a Sunday magazine supplement included with the Sunday edition of The New York Times. It is host to feature articles longer than those typically in the newspaper and has attracted many notable contributors...
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. HarrisJohn F. HarrisJohn F. Harris is an American political journalist and the editor in chief for Politico, an Arlington, Virginia based political news organization. With Politico executive editor, Jim VandeHei, Harris founded Politico for its launch on January 23, 2007...
, writing in Forbes Magazine, listed Nate Silver as one of seven bloggers among "The Most Powerful People on Earth": "The New York Times recently began hosting Nate Silver's delightfully granular blog about the numbers that underlie politics".
- In June 2011, Time'sTime (magazine)Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
"The Best Blogs of 2011" named FiveThirtyEight one of its Essential Blogs: "In 2010, political-numbers man Nate Silver moved his independent blog onto the big-time platform that is the New York Times' site. The new version of Five Thirty Eight has a more corporate look and feel, but the appeal — Silver's clever analysis of poll data and other information relating to political horse races — remains the same. And the Times' tougher moderation of comments has improved the quality dramatically. With Election Day 2012 on the horizon, this blog is going to get more essential in the months to come".
See also
- Statewide opinion polling for the United States presidential election, 2008Statewide opinion polling for the United States presidential election, 2008This article provides a collection of state-wide public opinion polls that were conducted relating to the United States presidential election, 2008....
- Electoral College (United States)
- Electoral-vote.comElectoral-vote.comElectoral-Vote.com is the website of computer scientist Andrew S. Tanenbaum. The site's primary content is poll analysis to project the outcome of U.S. elections. The site also includes commentary on related news stories. Well known for its color-coded electoral map of the United States, the...
- Real Clear Politics
External links
- FiveThirtyEight at The New York Times
- FiveThirtyEight on Twitter
- FiveThirtyEight.com archive
- Nate Silver interview on Bloggingheads.tvBloggingheads.tvBloggingheads.tv is a political, world events, philosophy, and science video blog discussion site in which the participants take part in an active back and forth conversation via webcam which is then broadcast online to viewers...