Nate Silver and the Future of Polling
Nate Silver is becoming quite the celebrity. The stats wiz
correctly predicted the outcome of all 50 states in the 2012 presidential election, and missed the mark on just two Senate races. In 2008,
he correctly predicted the outcome of the presidential race in every state but
Indiana, and correctly predicted every outcome in the Senate. The website “Is Nate Silver a Witch?” went up
sometime on Wednesday this past week.
Silver first grew interested in politics around 2006, while
following Congress’ attempt to ban online poker—he was pretty good at that
too, and it was “then one of [his] main sources of income,” he explains
in his recent book, The Signal and the
Noise. It was around that year that he started publishing his political predictions. Silver has a clear, consistent methodology
laid out on his blog, explaining the way he simulates various potential
outcomes day after day with poll data and draws his predictions from the aggregate results of
these simulations. While he’s received a fair amount of criticism, his
accuracy, as we saw again Tuesday, is a force to be reckoned with.
Silver has his own methods of combating different polls’
potential biases, but he’s also acknowledged problems with current polling
methods in general. With more people using only cell phones and otherwise
screening their calls, samples inevitably wind up skewed. In a recent interview
with Reuters, Silver praised Ipsos, a partner of Reuters’ that conducted
polls online this election season. It’s becoming increasingly clear to
pollsters that they must find a way to reach people, and not just people with
landlines who don’t use caller ID; they need a sample that can represent the
electorate.
With Twitter, Facebook, and other social media outlets,
blogs like “Five Thirty Eight” spread like wildfire. Silver has proved himself
and his methods at this point, so given the accessibility of the information, we
should expect to see increased use of similar statistical methods in the
future. It will be interesting as well to see how polling on the whole changes
and adapts with our lifestyles; at least in the next few years, more online
polling seems inevitable.
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