A fox who represents the now-defunct ABC News polls analysis website, FiveThirtyEight. He premiered as part of the site's 2020 election forecast rollout, and amassed quite the number of fans. But who can blame them? He's a cute, nerdy lil fox. Perhaps his website is dead now, and wasn't that particularly well-liked when it was active, but at least they got one thing right: making an adorable lil guy for us to enjoy!
---
There is no nuance button, if your answer is some variation of ‘I would if X’ then the answer is yes.
FiveThirtyEight came back online this morning, and ...
... they estimate that Kamala Harris has a 58% chance of winning in November. Fifty-eight percent and rising fast. Based on a 62% chance of winning Michigan, 61% chance of winning Wisconsin, and a 55% chance of winning Pennsylvania. And rising, in all three states.
And within-the-margin-of-error chances of winning Arizona, North Carolina, and Georgia, and trend lines going in the direction of possible November wins in Florida and potentially Texas.
Not only is despair an expensive luxury that we can't afford, this time it's bullshit. Yes, I know that Democrats have a long history of (sometimes) snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, but right now the odds are in our favor. Don't let yourself get complacent but definitely let yourself get fired up.
In Canto 20 of Inferno, Dante confronts a pit where the sinners have had their heads twisted around backwards; they trudge, naked and weeping, through puddles of cooling tears. Virgil informs him that these are the fortunetellers, who tried to look forwards in life and now must look backwards forever.
In a completely unrelated subject, how about those election pollsters, huh?
Writing for The American Prospect, historian Rick Perlstein takes a hard look at characteristic failure modes of election polling and ponders their meaning:
Apart from the pre-election polling chaos we're living through today, Perlstein's main inspiration is W Joseph Campbell 2024 University of California Press book, Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in US Presidential Elections:
In Campbell's telling, US election polling follows a century-old pattern: pollsters discover a new technique that works spookily well..for a while. While the new polling technique works, the pollster is hailed a supernaturally insightful fortune-teller.
In 1932, the Raleigh News and Observer was so impressed with polling by The Literary Digest that they proposed replacing elections with Digest's poll. The Digest's innovation was sending out 20,000,000 postcards advertising subscriptions and asking about presidential preferences. This worked perfectly for three elections – 1924, 1928, and 1932. But in 1936, the Digest blew it, calling the election for Alf Landon over FDR.
The Digest was dethroned, and new soothsayers were appointed: George Gallup, Elmo Roper and Archibald Crossler, who replaced the Digest's high-volume polling with a new kind of poll, one that sought out a representative slice of the population (as Perlstein says, this seems "so obvious in retrospect, you wonder how nobody thought of it before").
Representative polling worked so well that, three elections later, the pollsters declared that they could predict the election so well from early on that there was no reason to keep polling voters. They'd just declare the winner after the early polls were in and take the rest of the election off.
That was in 1948 – you know, 1948, the "Dewey Defeats Truman" election?
If this sounds familiar, perhaps you – like Perlstein – are reminded of the 2016 election, where Fivethirtyeight and Nate Silver called the election for Hillary Clinton, and we took them at their word because they'd developed a new, incredibly accurate polling technique that had aced the previous two elections.
Silver's innovation? Aggregating state polls, weighting them by accuracy, and then producing a kind of meta-poll that combined their conclusions.
When Silver's prophecy failed in 2016, he offered the same excuse that Gallup gave in 1948: when voters are truly undecided, you can't predict how they'll vote, because they don't know how they'll vote.
Which, you know, okay, sure, that's right. But if you know that the election can't be called, if you know that undecided voters are feeding noise into the system whenever you poll them, then why report the polls at all? If all the polling fluctuation is undecided voters flopping around, not making up their mind, then the fact that candidate X is up 5 points with undecided means nothing.
As the finance industry disclaimer has it, "past performance is no guarantee of future results." But, as Perlstein says, "past performance is all a pollster has to go on." When Nate Silver weights his model in favor of a given poll, it's based on that poll's historical accuracy, not its future accuracy, because its future accuracy can't be determined until it's in the past. Like Dante's fortune-tellers, pollsters have to look backwards even as they march forwards.
Of course, it doesn't help that in some cases, Silver was just bad at assessing polls for accuracy, like when he put polls from the far-right "shock pollster" Trafalgar Group into the highly reliable bucket. Since 2016, Trafalgar has specialized in releasing garbage polls that announce that MAGA weirdos are way ahead, and because they always say that, they were far more accurate than the Clinton-predicting competition in 2016 when they proclaimed that Trump had it in the bag. For Silver, this warranted an "A-" on reliability, and that is partially to blame for how bad Silver's 2020 predictions were, when Republicans got pasted, but Trafalgar continued to predict a Democratic wipeout. Silver's methodology has a huge flaw: because Trafalgar's prediction history began in 2016, that single data-point made them look pretty darned reliable, even though their method was to just keep saying the same thing, over and over:
Pollsters who get lucky with a temporarily reliable methodology inevitably get cocky and start cutting corners. After all, polling is expensive, so discontinuing the polls once you think you have an answer is a way to increase the enterprise's profitability. But, of course, pollsters can only make money so long as they're somewhat reliable, which leads to a whole subindustry of excuse-making when this cost-cutting bites them in the ass. In 1948, George Gallup blamed his failures on the audience, who failed to grasp the "difference between forecasting an election and picking the winner of a horse race." In 2016, Silver declared that he'd been right because he'd given Trump at 28.6% chance of winning.
This isn't an entirely worthless excuse. If you predict that Clinton's victory is 71.4% in the bag, you are saying that Trump might win. But pollsters want to eat their cake and have it, too: when they're right, they trumpet their predictive accuracy, without any of the caveats they are so insistent upon when they blow it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jDlo7YfUxc
There's always some excuse when it comes to the polls: in 1952, George Gallup called the election a tossup, but it went for Eisenhower in a landslide. He took out a full-page NYT ad, trumpeting that he was right, actually, because he wasn't accounting for undecided voters.
Polling is ultimately a form of empiricism-washing. The pollster may be counting up poll responses, but that doesn't make the prediction any less qualitative. Sure, the pollster counts responses, but who they ask, and what they do with those responses, is purely subjective. They're making guesses (or wishes) about which people are likely to vote, and what it means when someone tells you they're undecided. This is at least as much an ideological project as it is a scientific one:
But for all that polling is ideological, it's a very thin ideology. When it comes to serious political deliberation, questions like "who is likely to vote" and "what does 'undecided' mean" are a lot less important than, "what are the candidates promising to do?" and "what are the candidates likely to do?"
But – as Perlstein writes – the only kind of election journalism that is consistently, adequately funded is poll coverage. As a 1949 critic put it, this isn't the "pulse of democracy," it's "its baby talk."
Today, Tor Books publishes VIGILANT, a new, free LITTLE BROTHER story about creepy surveillance in distance education. It follows SPILL, another new, free LITTLE BROTHER novella about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Silver Bulletin will begin publishing some new features soon — including Trump approval ratings. But the media just lost an extremely valuab
Nate Silver at Silver Bulletin:
Last night, as President Trump delivered his State of the Union address1, the Wall Street Journal reported that ABC News would lay off the remaining staff at 538 as part of broader cuts within corporate parent Disney. Having been through several rounds of this before, including two years ago when the staff was cut by more than half and my tenure expired too2, I know it’s a brutal process for everyone involved. It’s also tough being in a business while having a constant anvil over your head, as we had in pretty much every odd-numbered (non-election) year from 2017 onward at 538/FiveThirtyEight.3 I don’t know all of the staffers from the most recent iteration of the site, but the ones I have met or who I overlapped with are all extremely conscientious and hard-working people and were often forced to work double-duty as jobs were cut but frequently not replaced. My heart goes out to them, and I’m happy to provide recommendations for people I worked with there.
Beyond that, I wasn’t inclined to say too much more, but it felt weirder not to say anything at all. And it’s easier to say something here than filter it through a reporter or something.
For more extended thoughts on the environment at Disney — plus plenty of self-reflection/self-criticism — you can see the item at the bottom of SBSQ #12.4 But the basic issue is that Disney was never particularly interested in running FiveThirtyEight as a business, even though I think it could have been a good business. Although they were generous in maintaining the site for so long and almost never interfered in our editorial process, the sort of muscle memory a media property builds early in its tenure tends to stick. We had an incredibly talented editorial staff, but we never had enough “product” people or strategy people to help the business grow and sustain itself. It’s always an uphill battle under those conditions, particularly when it comes to recruiting and retaining staff, who were constantly being poached by outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post.
“Data journalism” has a bad name but a bright future
It also doesn’t quite feel like the end, exactly. “Data journalism” may have been a dumb name for what we were doing — that one’s on me — and Fivey Fox aside, the FiveThirtyEight brand was never warm and cuddly. But it always found a huge audience, and coverage of polls and political data is now much smarter. Compare the extremely analytical polling deep dives that Nate Cohn is doing at the New York Times, for instance, to the vibes-based coverage of the Boys on the Bus era. That trend may get even more entrenched as former 538ers form a diaspora that filters out to the rest of the media.
Also, I’d like to think we’re carrying a piece of the FiveThirtyEight torch here at Silver Bulletin. So, just two more quick beats. One about our near-term plans here — in slightly awkward timing, we’re launching our Trump approval ratings dashboard tomorrow. But first, a shout-out to one of the extremely valuable functions that FiveThirtyEight provided.
Collecting and maintaining a database of public polls is a lot of work, requiring diligence, meticulousness, and dealing with constant complaints about edge cases from readers and pollsters. But it’s also a public service. Polling has its challenges, but I believe it’s vital in a democracy. People only get to vote every two to four years — if they’re lucky enough to live in a state where their vote even matters. While being too “poll-driven” has pitfalls, the alternative isn’t necessarily enlightened governance. Rather, left to their own devices, elected officials are often inclined to follow some combination of (i) narrow self-interest, (ii) the loudest voices in the room, and (iii) elite opinion, which often doesn’t match broader public opinion.
FiveThirtyEight had long made its data publicly available through APIs and other tools. At Silver Bulletin, I hope we’re upholding that tradition too — although admittedly with a twist. For instance, not only are our pollster ratings (which apply the methodology I originally developed for FiveThirtyEight5) publicly available, but so is the underlying database of more than 12,000 polls that populates them. And for our presidential election forecast last year, our polling averages were free for everyone — though, here’s the twist, of course — the probabilities that the model spat out were paywalled. Even so, there were literally dozens of data visualizations and downloadable files just beyond that paywall — we’re not giving away the cow (the model code), but you’re getting basically everything else.
Nate Silver, the creator behind FiveThirtyEight, touches on ABC News’s shutting down of the venerable data site on the same night as 47’s address to the nation. Seeing a poll aggregator like 538 going away is sad in many ways (just like HuffPost eliminating Pollster).
I would really like to encourage people not to use or cite the 538 forecasts if you have other options. It's pretty misleading, because there's (Genuinely! Literally!) zero continuity with FiveThirtyEight forecasts from previous years, and also because I don't trust their models.
Unfortunately Nate Silver's model—which is the one with continuity to past FiveThirtyEight forecasts!—is paywalled, so I can't encourage people to look at it. (And I haven't paid for it either, to be fair.) So 538 might be the best product that's freely available, unfortunately.
Ann Selzer, the undisputable Queen of polling, has seen fit to grace us with an Iowa poll that, even if it were off by Selzer's all-time worst polling error (7 points), would spell genuine doom for Trump's chances in the midwest and, as follows, the election.
If there is any truth whatsoever to her poll, which is the absolute best in the game, Harris will be president-elect in a few days. It's not a guarantee, but it's a good omen if there ever was one. If I had to make a prediction right now, I'd guess that Harris wins a convincing, of close, victory. I bet she'll get like 5/7 swing states, probably missing AZ and NC. This is just my wildest shot in the dark, and will probably be extremely incorrect.
Also, for the hell of it, I think Dems will win the house and end up with a 51R-49D Senate.
The data-driven site, founded by Nate Silver in 2008, gained prominence for its near-perfect forecast of Barack Obama’s victory that year
538 (2008 – 2025) R.I.P.
The polling site FiveThirtyEight has been shut down by ABC News which, of course, is owned by Disney. .
The Wall Street Journal’s Joe Flint reported that Disney was cutting about 6% — or 200 people — from ABC News and Disney Entertainment Networks. But here’s where the political drama played out: The cuts include shutting down FiveThirtyEight, the political and data-driven news site known for its focus on election polling and predictions. It employed 15 staffers.
Thus ends a site launched in 2008 by Nate Silver, best known for its near-perfect prediction of Barack Obama’s victory in that year’s presidential election. (The site was correct in 49 of 50 states and nailed every senate race that year.)
Silver took FiveThirtyEight to The New York Times in 2010. The site, which also included sports content, moved over to ESPN in 2013 and then was moved under ABC News in 2018. Silver left his role as the top editor in 2023.
Silver tweeted late Tuesday night, “Oh geez, I just saw the news about 538. My heart goes out to the people there. They were tremendously hard-working and produced a lot of extremely valuable data and insight for everyone who wants to understand politics better. They deserved much better.”
This is what happens when you sell your company to a larger entity. You make money on the deal but you lose control over its direction and future. The rug can be pulled out from under you at any time and for any reason. In the long run it's better to be independent and have a modest income.
