What Nate Silver's learned about forecasting elections

The Gray Area with Sean Illing

Vox Media Podcast Network

Politics, News, News Commentary, Philosophy, Society & Culture

4.5 • 11.1K Ratings

🗓️ 22 October 2018

⏱️ 81 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This close to an election, who do I want to hear from? Nate Silver, of course. I sat down with the FiveThirtyEight founder and math wizard to talk about how he builds his forecasting models, what they’re saying about 2018, how big the Democrats’ structural disadvantage in the House and Senate really is, whether there's a purpose to predicting election outcomes, which campaign reporters he reads, and whether Trump is the favorite for 2020. Silver and I also share the experience of building journalism outlets trying to do things a bit differently over the past five years, so we discuss what he’s learned along the way, what he wishes he knew at the beginning, and how he hires. Silver brings unusual clarity and rigor to the topics he focuses on, and right now, given the speed and intensity of the elections news cycle, a bit of rigor is a welcome thing. Enjoy! Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman Bad Blood by John Carreyrou Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for the show comes from Into the Mix, a Ben and Jerry's podcast about joy and justice produced with Vox Creative.
0:07.0	Thousands of Afghans were forced to flee their homes and fear for their lives when the Taliban took control of Afghanistan in 2021.
0:14.0	The UK government pledged to take in 20,000 of them as refugees.
0:19.0	But in the first year, only 22 Afghans have been approved for asylum in the UK.
0:23.0	So what happened?
0:25.0	And what does this mean for the tens of thousands of people left behind?
0:28.0	Hear that story on the latest episode of Into the Mix. Subscribe now.
0:58.0	What do you see the role of these forecasts as doing in American politics or in voter information?
1:05.0	I think they come at bullshit media narratives, basically.
1:29.0	Hello, welcome to the Zirclan Show on the Vox Media podcast network.
1:34.0	We're a couple weeks out of an election. You may have noticed.
1:38.0	And so I was thinking, who do I want to talk to about the election?
1:41.0	Who would I like to know what they're thinking right now, what they're feeling, what their assessment of the state of the race is?
1:47.0	And the answer to that, of course, is Nate Silver, the founder of not just 538, but of model-based thinking about elections.
1:55.0	Political scientists have done that before, but Nate really brought that to journalism, brought it in a different way.
2:00.0	This is a very, very useful conversation to just level set yourself before the election.
2:05.0	There's a lot of not great punditry out there and a lot of confusion and Nate brings really unusual clarity to it all.
2:11.0	We talk about how his models are built, what they're telling us, how to interpret them.
2:16.0	And we also talk about data journalism and the election and what the democratic disadvantage on the house level is.
2:22.0	And how the numbers he runs help us understand what the baseline levels of American politics are and how they've shaped the competition between the two parties.
2:32.0	So it's great conversation as always. You can email me with guest requests, feedback, whatever it may be, at as reclineshowadbox.com.
2:38.0	Again, as reclineshowadbox.com. If you are not, you should be checking out future perfect, our new podcast.
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