For months in
the run-up to the 2012 Presidential election, Nate Silver, editor of FiveThirtyEight, a blog hosted by the
New York Times, had been analyzing the polling data and calmly
explaining, to the contempt of pundits on Fox News and the gratitude of viewers
of MSNBC, why President Barack Obama had the election sewn up. His quiet
confidence—he bet MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough $2,000 that the president would win
re-election—attracted fans and haters alike and a bigger platform for the
budding media celebrity.
On the eve of Election Day, one in five people
going to the Times site were going to Silver’s blog. But even as the
flood broke over their heads, political veterans continued to resist Silver’s
spot-on analysis. There was Karl Rove on polling night, sputtering and spinning
on Fox News, insisting it was too soon to call Ohio. There was Wall Street
Journal columnist and Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan a day before the
election, writing of a near-certain Romney surge. “While everyone is looking at
the polls and the storm, Romney’s slipping into the presidency,” Noonan wrote
brashly—and rashly—before taking an obvious dig at Silver. Was it possible, she
asked, that we were too busy looking at data on paper “instead of what’s in
front of us"?
“Peggy Noonan is someone
who is very, very skilled at making bullshit look like some elegant soufflé,”
Silver says in response to Noonan’s dig. “She’s very good at rhetoric and
argument, but it’s still not grounded in the truth—it all falls apart every
four years, but I don’t think she’ll be out of a job any time soon.”
Even among Silver’s
critics on the left, there was palpable anticipation of seeing him exposed as a
quack, perhaps because his brand of analysis undermines their buffoonish
grandstanding. Under the headline “One-Term Celebrity,” Politico’s Dylan Byers
scoffed at Silver’s analysis, adding tartly, “this may shock the
coffee-drinking NPR types of Seattle, San Francisco, and Madison, Wis., [but]
more than a few political pundits and reporters, including some of his own
colleagues, believe Silver is highly overrated.”
“I think he’s a terrible
journalist,” he says bluntly, referring to an article in which Byers chastised
BuzzFeed reporter Michael Hastings for his antagonistic approach to
interviewing politicians. “Isn’t that the job of a journalist, to speak truth
to power? The fact that this Dylan Byers guy saw that as problematic is a
problem—we work in a world now where all these connections are so massaged; if
you talk to someone in the State Department or the Obama campaign, you have to
write three unquestioning fluff pieces for every real piece of information you
get.” (Byers did not respond to requests for comment.)
Outside of the political arena, Silver’s
pastimes—poker, baseball, debating Chinese-U.S. relations—seem atypical of the
average 20-something gay guy, perhaps it’s because gay nerds have a low profile
in our culture. “For me, I think the most important distinguishing
characteristic is that I’m independent-minded,” Silver says. “I’m sure that
being gay encouraged the independent-mindedness, but that same
independent-mindedness makes me a little bit skeptical of parts of gay culture,
I suppose…I don’t want to be Nate Silver, gay statistician, any more than I
want to be known as a white, half-Jewish statistician who lives in New York.”
As he looks to the future, Silver must decide
whether to keep his blog with the Times
– his deal with the publication ends next summer – and, of course, the role his
analysis will play in what seems to be an already-underway 2016 election cycle.
“I expect 2016 to be spectacular,” he says, before running a litany of
possibilities, including a Clinton candidacy and a field full of Republican
stars that held back in 2012. As for the talking heads and rent-a-mouths,
Silver’s not banking on any change there. “A lot of this is about values,” he
says. “I think I have a better value system than the pundits—I care about truth
and I care about informing people, and they care about ratings. So that’s where
I tend to play offense.”
