The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Why Has the ‘Valuable Resource’ Known as 538 Been Summarily Discarded?

Posted on | March 6, 2025 | Comments Off on Why Has the ‘Valuable Resource’ Known as 538 Been Summarily Discarded?

Nate Silver (left); G. Elliott Morris (right)

While I await the arrival of Sidney Blumenthal’s book The Permanent Campaign — ordered from Amazon yesterday, because I need to reference it for a future American Spectator column — permit me to climb aboard the bandwagon of those celebrating this happy news:

Disney axed Nate Silver’s once-influential FiveThirtyEight on Wednesday as part of sweeping job cuts at ABC News, ending the data-driven political site’s seven-year run at the network.
FiveThirtyEight gained national prominence for its statistical approach to political forecasting but drew criticism for misses in key elections, most notably giving Hillary Clinton a 71.4% chance of winning the 2016 presidential election.
FiveThirtyEight’s editorial director of data analytics, G. Elliott Morris, confirmed the layoffs on Bluesky on Wednesday, writing, “As reported, the entire staff of 538 was laid off this morning. This is a severe blow to political data journalism, and I feel for my colleagues.” . . .
Silver, who founded the site in 2008 and left ABC in May 2023, wrote on X, “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.”
Silver left ABC amid reports of tension with network executives over resource allocation and editorial direction. . . .
FiveThirtyEight began as an independent polling aggregation platform before being licensed to The New York Times, then acquired by ESPN in 2013, and later transferred to ABC News.
Despite shuttering the project, ABC News said it would “continue to provide the best-in-class polling and political data analysis that it has offered for decades.”

Well, there’s a lot to work through here and I suppose the best place to begin is with ABC News claiming to offer “best-in-class polling,” to which my reply can be summarized briefly: LOL, are you kidding me?

In August, after Kamala Harris had replaced Joe Biden as the Democratic candidate, ABC News and the Washington Post sponsored a poll by Ipsos that had Harris leading Trump by 4 points, 49% to 45%, among registered voters. Two weeks later, ABC News alone sponsored the Ipsos poll, which again had Harris leading by 4 points, 50% to Trump’s 46%. Then in mid-September, the ABC/Ipso poll reported: “This poll finds the race at 51-46 percent, Harris-Trump, among all adults; 51-47 percent among registered voters; and 52-46 percent among likely voters.”

Harris SIX POINTS AHEAD among likely voters!

This was the last 2024 poll published under the aegis of ABC News, and when the votes were all counted in November — including the suspiciously long count in California — Trump won by a margin of 1.5%, meaning that ABC News was off by more than 7 points in the wrong direction. So much for ABC News and their “best-in-class polling.”

As for Nate Silver and the history of FiveThirtyEight, it began as a pseudonymous blog on Daily Kos in 2007. Silver’s background was doing economic analysis in the business world and, with great success, doing statistical analysis of baseball. Silver has never been a pollster — that is to say, he has no experience in “field work” — and the methods by which he deduces electoral probability from public polling data are rather opaque. Nevertheless, his prediction for the 2008 election was so spot-on that it made him an overnight celebrity in the world of politics, and landed him a book contract reportedly worth $700,000 in advance.

In 2010, FiveThirtyEight began publishing under the New York Times masthead. This arrangement continued for about three years, until mid-2013, when ESPN announced it had bought the FiveThirtyEight franchise and that “Silver will serve as editor-in-chief of the site and will build a team of journalists, editors, analysts and contributors.” ESPN is a sports network, and made mention of Silver’s baseball analysis skills in their announcement. They also mentioned that Silver would be appearing on their sister network, ABC News (both being properties of Disney). In 2018, FiveThirtyEight was transferred to the ABC News division, and five years later, Silver left ABC News, with FiveThirtyEight then being taken over by G. Elliott Morris, who had become “the new hotness” because of his predictions about the 2018 midterm elections.

So, in the 2024 cycle, Silver was doing his election probability thing on his own Substack blog, while Morris was running FiveThirtyEight for ABC News, and did either one of them predict a Trump victory?

NO, MA’AM, THEY DID NOT.

The fact that Trump not only won the Electoral College (as he had done in 2016) but also won the nationwide popular vote by a margin of 2.3 million votes — which he had not done in 2016 — means that predicting a Trump win in 2024 should have been easier than eight years earlier. Yet somehow these two statistical wizards managed to miss this one.

The reason I call attention to this glaring failure of both FiveThirtyEight (under ABC News and G. Elliott Morris) and the site’s founder Nate Silver, is because in noting the demise of FiveThirtyEight, Professor Glenn Reynolds links to Nate’s blog post bemoaning the sad fate of his brainchild and — oh, boy! — let me remind you that denial is not the name of a river in Egypt. Silver declares that “the media just lost an extremely valuable resource,” raising the obvious question, “Valuable to whom?” If FiveThirtyEight’s stock-in-trade was predicting election outcomes, how are they so “valuable” when they got it wrong in 2024?

Perhaps a better metric of FiveThirtyEight’s value would be the fact that ABC News didn’t sell the site — for which their parent company paid a pretty penny, years ago — but rather shut it down. Had there been any market value to the site, why weren’t there any other media operations offering cash to acquire it from ABC News? The obvious answer is that FiveThirtyEight was always a money-losing operation, first for the New York Times, and then under Disney ownership, first at ESPN and then at ABC News. The salaries of the staff always exceeded whatever revenue was generated by FiveThirtyEight. Nate Silver goes on to say that there is a “bright future” for the kind of “data journalism” that FiveThirtyEight did, by which I suppose he means that there’s always a market for predicting elections wrong, so long as your error favors Democrats.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! And also, linked by John Nolte at Breitbart.com — thanks!

UPDATE II: Linked at Real Clear Politics — thanks!



 

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Category: ABC, Media Bias, Polls

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