Nate Silver

Nathaniel Read Silver

• School University of Chicago
• High School East Lansing High School

• Born January 13, 1978 in Lansing, MI USA

Biographical Information

Nate Silver is one of the most famous political analysts in the United States, as the founder of the site FiveThirtyEight.com. He got his start as an amateur sabermetrician, however, and imported some of the methods he learned in that field to that of political analysis, where the use of actual data was often rudimentary until the 2000s. He also was a professional on-line poker player for a time.

As a baseball analyst, his main contribution was the development of the "PECOTA" player performance forecasting system, which he managed for a number of years and later sold to Baseball Prospectus. He was one of the site's main writers and one of its managing partners. His book on data-based predictive analysis, The Signal and the Noise (2012), includes a number of examples taken from a baseball context.

He first came to prominence in the field of politics when he correctly predicted the outcome of the 2008 presidential race in 49 of 50 states. He then did even better during Barack Obama's reelection in 2012, when he predicted the result of the race in every state and in the District of Columbia. He did this by aggregating polling data from all available sources in order to derive a range of probabilities, allowing him to make accurate predictions, while discounting many of the usual bugbears of traditional analysts, such as performance of a candidate in a debate, or giving outsize weight to a particular statement. This track record made him one of the most sought-after political analysts in the country, and his site became very popular. It was not limited to politics, and included also analysis of social trends, the entertainment industry, and sports, including baseball, for which he never lost interest.

He was one of the analysts who were disparaged after Donald Trump's surprise win in the 2016 Presidential Elections, as no mainstream analyst had seen it coming. However, to his defense, he did give Trump a 30% chance of winning on the eve of the election, higher than just about any other independent observer, and correctly identified the key states it was possible for him to win in order to come out on top, which put him ahead of most of his peers. He then issued very accurate predictions of the results of the 2018 mid-term elections.

In addition to his web site, Nate Silver has been a special correspondent for ABC News. He has also authored a number of books and articles.

Further Reading

• David A. Graham: "Can you still trust Nate Silver?", The Atlantic, March 2020, pp. 18-20.
• Nate Silver: The Signal and the Noise: Why Most Predictions Fail – but Some Don't, Penguin Books, New York, NY, 2012. ISBN 978-0143125082

Related Sites

• FiveThirtyEight.com