Nate Silver is giving Donald Trump a 19 percent chance of becoming president — and that makes him a little nervous, as well it should.

No, it’s not because he failed to predict Trump’s albino-swan victory in the Republican primaries (after nailing Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 wins when others were calling both tossups, or worse). It’s because he’s running with the pack, and that makes him suspect something’s a little off.


Silver was at the bar the night before sitting down for POLITICO’s “Off Message” podcast last week after releasing his general-election forecast showing Hillary Clinton as the prohibitive favorite — and Twitter was, more or less, agreeing with him. This made him happy-queasy, which, best I can tell, is Silver’s natural resting state.

“It makes me a little worried that nobody was like, ‘You are wrong,’” the former New York Times political sabermetrician and founder of the website FiveThirtyEight told me just before we pushed the record button at his office across from New York’s Lincoln Center.

The truth is that 2016 is a paradoxical prediction year, with variables aplenty. On one hand, political demographics and Trump’s unwillingness to create (until recently) a nominally competent campaign seems to have set the result in the Democrats’ favor. On the other, the fact that a huge number of voters deeply dislike both candidates — and 20 percent of the electorate is currently opting for neither — increases volatility, especially if a third-party candidate like Libertarian Gary Johnson can sustain double digits nationwide.

“My gut is that there is going to be a fairly significant third- and fourth-party vote, and people undervoting the top of the ballot,” Silver said — and that’s why Clinton is leading recent polls with a modest 43 percent of the vote to Trump’s godawful 37 percent.

The unusually large number of undecideds and third-party voters this year threatens to throw off his model, Silver allowed: “That’s a big thing that we’re looking at.”

But Silver’s confidence wasn’t much shaken by his big Trump miss — if anything, it’s only reinforced his belief in the superiority of his math-driven methods over shoot-from-the-lip punditry.





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“It’s a crazy world, and sooner or later a 5 percent likelihood is going to come through,” said Silver, who is cuddlier and more self-effacing in person than he can be on TV, where he sometimes projects a pitiless, fire-eyed empiricism. “And in some sense I would defend the notion that, you know what? … It was a fairly sane and very defensible and kind of, in some cosmic sense, correct forecast. I think the problem was that we never built a model for this until pretty late. … So I kind of learned how I make all the same mistakes as people I criticize unless I have some organized way of looking at things, right?”

That mistake came last July, in an article that labeled Trump “The World’s Greatest Troll.” In it, Silver declared, “In the long run — as our experience with past trolls shows — Trump’s support will probably fade.” That, of course, didn’t happen, and the “traditional” media types he’s often hammered for their innumeracy were happy he’d gotten his comeuppance — and he was kind of in their camp. The burden of being the Linus blanket of the jittery left, cosseting liberals every four years with statistical reassurance a Democrat would win, was getting to be a bit much.

“You know, in some sense, I mean, having kind of been identified with this early call I made on Trump that was very wrong. … In some sense, I'm glad that, like, that bubble has burst a little bit,” said Silver, who wrote a mea culpa in May explaining why he had misread the GOP primary.

“Because it was never about me being the guy who's right about everything,” he explained. “So on an intellectual level I'm kind of like, you know, well, fuck it, we do the best work that we can. On a kind of emotional level, it's never fun to read criticism about you, and also we have — I have a staff now that I manage and it's 30 people — so they will read it. And so, you know, so it's never fun, but it kind of comes with the territory.”

Everything comes down to Silver’s algorithms — formulas he’s created (modeled on the systems he created to predict player performance in the annual Baseball Prospectus) that mix polling data and other factors (like endorsements, a polling firm’s past performance and the behavior of undecided voters) to guesstimate November’s result.

On June 29, Silver issued not one, but two forecasts that predicted a debacle for the presumptive GOP nominee. The first, relying solely on poll data, gave Trump a 19 percent shot at winning, with Clinton at 79 percent. (It was remarkably in line with Vegas odds and gut-feeling checks I’ve made. Two weeks earlier, I asked a senior Clinton campaign official for an estimate — and the person blurted out “78 percent.”) A second “polls-plus” formula that weighs other factors, including the country’s all-important economic performance, put Trump at a better but still-crummy 26 percent chance.

The formula, the 39-year-old University of Chicago grad and Michigan native told me, is inalterable — no changing algorithms in midstream — but the forecast will shift as the poll data do.

One of the most difficult variables to analyze in baseball is the impact of a good or bad manager on the outcome of a team’s season — so I ask Silver to compare Trump and Clinton as leaders. “I think Trump is Pete Rose or something,” referring to the volatile and supercompetitive Cincinnati Reds legend who was banned from baseball for betting on sports in the 1980s.

Clinton? “Maybe [longtime Yankees manager] Joe Torre, like part of a dynasty — kind of does the basic stuff well — kind of a subject of frequent criticism but ultimately pretty good in her job, and isn’t going to — is not going to screw up in new ways. … And resilient.”

One of the less-appreciated facts about Silver is that he is, in a sense, a scion, and his unconventional career path represents a nearly perfect hybrid of his parents’ vocations and interests, which broke down along roughly left brain-right brain lines.

His father, a Michigan State political science professor, spent the 1970s and 1980s working on a series of data-sifting projects tangentially similar to Silver’s own formula-based sabermetric and analytical work in baseball and politics. Think stacks of IBM punch cards and volumes of semi-fake demographic data — in Cyrillic.

“He was a Sovietologist back when there was a Soviet Union — which I was always afraid to tell people. I always thought, ‘Oh, they’ll think, like, does that mean he’s a communist or something?’” he told me. “He studied the USSR, and he studied official statistics in the USSR, which, of course, were not always accurate, right? You know, the Soviet government would claim that, ‘Oh, we have a very low abortion rate. There are very few abortions in the USSR,’ and he came up with clever ways to find out that actually, of course, the abortion rate was quite high in the Soviet Union.”

Silver often talks about how he became hooked on baseball — with its rationality, its clean and quantifiable data sets, its scientifically scrutinized trivialities — when he was in elementary school. His father’s work introduced him to something different: dirty data, and the need to create ways of using fractured facts to draw useful conclusions.

“I remember like when I was really young he would use, like, punch cards to run regression analyses and stuff like that,” he added. “I got a little spoiled by, in starting out, working in baseball statistics or in sports statistics where you don’t have those challenges. There, the data is generally very good.”





“I remember like when I was really young he would use, like, punch cards to run regression analyses and stuff like that,” he added. “I got a little spoiled by, in starting out, working in baseball statistics or in sports statistics where you don't have those challenges. There, the data is generally very good.”

Sally Thrun Silver, his mother, was a neighborhood activist in the college town of East Lansing who ran the Bailey Community Newsletter and served as a local power broker of sorts. She was the person to go to “if they needed a new stop sign that was going to be put up or something like that,” he told me. “It was all that very local politics stuff that people have to do on the ground, and in some ways kind of affects people's lives at a practical level, much more than -- sometimes more than national politics does.”

Since ESPN bought Fivethirtyeight.com from The Times three years ago, Silver, its founder and editor-in-chief, has branched out into analyses of economics, pop culture and non-baseball sports like soccer — and commissioned conventional reporting on issues beyond politics like the causes of police brutality, the impact of marijuana legalization and the safety of the blood supply.

Silver, who savaged the political hack trade in 2008 for failing to heed the numeric reality behind the horse race, has made a point of spending lots of time in the field in 2016. When I ran into him in New Hampshire at a Marco Rubio rally earlier this year, the bête noire of political journalism was kibitzing in the back of the room with reporters and craning his head, just like the rest of us, to absorb the scene (the Rubio-ites, he noted, all looked like they fell out a “Benetton” ad).

“You realize there are humans behind the campaigns and kind of a lot of smart people thinking about stuff,” Silver said of his time on the trail. “You know, the flip side … you see the candidates are more human sometimes. Whenever a candidate does something, particularly Trump, people are kind of trying to, like, kind of think through, oh, you know, what's the strategy behind this decision? Well, maybe the guy just woke up and felt like doing a certain thing.”

Silver’s 2016 travels, inevitably, brought him face-to-face with the man who is attempting to rewrite every rule he lives by as a numbers man. Fivethirtyeight.com, like POLITICO, The Washington Post and other organizations have had their official credentials nixed — so he had to slip into a couple of Trump’s Iowa events as a civilian.

So there was Silver, the nerd-cool prince of data junkies, sitting in the bleachers listening to the eventual GOP nominee touting his good polls and ignoring his bad ones.

“This was in the phase where he was spending so much time talking about his polls — I think he bragged about, like, this rally he bragged about how ‘I made polling famous,’” he said with a laugh.

“Of all the problems Trump has, maybe it's not his worst one, but I do wonder if his kind of ability to unskew the polls to his own satisfaction could also be working to his detriment,” Silver mused. “He doesn't feel the need to adapt and adjust. … I wonder if he still believes some Gravis poll from five months ago showing him doing well among Hispanics. I wonder if kind of deep down he believes his own BS. A little bit too much.”