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Nate Silver Dethroned as King of Political Stats

November 7, 2016 at 10:29 pm EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Wired: “Forget Nate Silver. There’s a new king of the presidential election data mountain. His name is Sam Wang, Ph.D.”

“Haven’t heard of him just yet? Don’t worry. You will. Because Wang has sailed True North all along, while Silver has been cautiously trying to tack his FiveThirtyEight data sailboat (weighted down with ESPN gold bars) through treacherous, Category-Five-level-hurricane headwinds in what has easily been the craziest presidential campaign in the modern political era.”

“When the smoke clears on Tuesday—and it will clear—what will emerge is Wang and his Princeton Election Consortium website and calculations (which have been used, in part, to drive some of the election poll conclusions at The New York Times’ Upshot blog and The Huffington Post’s election site). What will be vindicated is precisely the sort of math approach that Silver once rode to fame and fortune.”

Filed Under: 2016 Campaign, Polling Tagged With: Nate Silver, Sam Wang

Nate Silver Gave Paid Presentation to GOP Donors

September 12, 2016 at 3:14 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Nate Silver gave a presentation on the 2016 battleground map to a group of powerful Republican donors in Manhattan last week, The Hill reports.

“Silver was paid to give the presentation by the American Opportunity Alliance, a group led by some of the biggest Republican donors in the country, including hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer and the Ricketts family, which owns the Chicago Cubs.”

Filed Under: 2016 Campaign Tagged With: Nate Silver

When Predictions Go Bad

May 22, 2016 at 7:04 am EDT By Taegan Goddard 67 Comments

Matt Lewis: “As of this week, Nate Silver — FiveThirtyEight founder, political prognosticator, and wunderkind — is giving Donald Trump just a 25 percent chance of defeating Hillary Clinton in November. I’m considering putting a few benjamins down on Trump.”

“Keep in mind, it’s not just the Trump nomination that he botched. In recent years, he has gotten Super Bowls wrong, the Oscars wrong, the 2014 Scottish independence referendum wrong and the 2015 U.K. elections wrong.”

“We all make mistakes, of course. The difference is that Silver’s entire raison d’etre — and he has been wildly celebrated for this — rests on his ability to make picks. But really, his track record for the last, I don’t know, four years, is spotty on some pretty big things. Now, if Silver were known for his flowery prose or for cultivating terrific sources on the House Budget Committee, we might forgive him for botching a big prediction. But this is his bread and butter. This is what he does.”

Filed Under: 2016 Campaign Tagged With: Nate Silver


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Wrong on Trump

May 4, 2016 at 10:13 am EDT By Taegan Goddard 43 Comments

Nate Silver: “If you’d told me a year ago that Trump would be the nominee, I’d have thought you were nuts. Don’t just take my word for it: Read what I wrote about Trump in July or August or even in November. Those pieces variously treated Trump’s nomination as being somewhere between improbable and extremely unlikely. You can also read pieces from October, December or January that were less skeptical of Trump’s chances and show how our opinion of him evolved over time. Still, other than being early skeptics of Jeb Bush, we basically got the Republican race wrong.”

Nate Cohn: What I got wrong about Donald Trump

Filed Under: 2016 Campaign Tagged With: Donald Trump, Nate Silver

When Nate Silver Said Trump Had No Chance

January 26, 2016 at 8:11 am EST By Taegan Goddard 26 Comments

Slate: “Everyone makes mistakes—even Nate Silver. It’s also entirely possible that the Trump collapse is still to come and that as soon as we see the actual voting process play out, the hollowness of his popularity will reveal itself. Still, Silver is right that his assumptions are worth revisiting. Maybe the Trump phenomenon is so unprecedented that no statistical model could have foreseen it. Or maybe it took a candidate as unique as Donald Trump to reveal the flaws and limitations of Silver’s prediction machine.”

Filed Under: 2016 Campaign Tagged With: Donald Trump, Nate Silver

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About Political Wire

goddard-bw-snapshotTaegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.

Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.

Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.

Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.

Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.

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