Readers only knew him as “poblano.”
A baseball statistician by day, the mysterious writer started dipping his toes in the political waters in a data-filled Daily Kos blog post published at 2:10 a.m., Nov. 1, 2007, titled “HRC Electability in Purple States.”
“Clinton is very polarizing. In fact, she is George W. Bush polarizing,” poblano wrote. “Think about the degree of hatred that you feel for Shrub. That is how many voters of every shade of purple and red feel about Hillary Clinton.”
He soon had a loyal audience, and started FiveThirtyEight — named for the number of votes in the electoral college — in March 2008. That May, he revealed his identity.
“It just ain’t very professional to keep referring to yourself as a chili pepper,” Nate Silver wrote in an article headlined, “No, I’m not Chuck Todd,” referencing the NBC host and political editor.
Now, 15 years and many iterations later, Silver appears to be headed out the door of ABC News and FiveThirtyEight, which he has been running since its founding.
“My contract is up soon and I expect that I’ll be leaving at the end of it,” he tweeted Tuesday.
That Silver is thinking of leaving FiveThirtyEight was first revealed by the Hollywood Reporter.
The move comes as news organizations have faced layoffs amid economic uncertainty, with BuzzFeed News recently shuttering and other outlets cutting dozens of jobs. In the tweet, Silver said he was “sad and disappointed” by layoffs at ABC’s parent company, Disney.
Silver did not respond to a request for comment from The Washington Post.
In blog posts, model projections and frequent social media posts over the past 15 years, Silver built up an increasingly public profile, first as a baseball analyst, as an election forecaster — he predicted 49 of 50 states correctly in the 2008 presidential election — and later as a frequent commenter on covid-19.
His first notable work with statistics began in the early 2000s, when he developed the Player Empirical Comparison and Organization Test Algorithm (Pecota). He sold it to Baseball Prospectus, a statistical organization, and eventually predicted the Chicago White Sox would lose 90 games one season while working for the group, according to the New York Times.
After he revealed his true identity before the 2008 presidential election, he gained more fame, appearing for the first time nationally on CNN in June 2008. He developed a database aggregating hundreds of state and national polls starting in 1952, weighing them for accuracy and whether certain ones tended to favor Republicans or Democrats.
On Election Day that year, FiveThirtyEight drew nearly 5 million page views, according to the New York Times, as Silver, then 30, became an in-demand analyst. He stopped working for Baseball Prospectus in 2009 and focused on his up-and-coming website.
By 2010, Silver struck a deal with the Times, which would host the FiveThirtyEight blog on a three-year contract. In the 2010 midterms, Silver successfully predicted most of the gubernatorial, Senate and House races.
In the lead-up to the 2012 presidential election, Margaret Sullivan, then the public editor for the Times — and later a Washington Post opinion columnist — described Silver as “probably (and please know that I use the p-word loosely) its most high-profile writer.”
Silver was scorned by some for his polling methods, but his national reputation kept growing after he correctly predicted the winner in every state and the District of Columbia in the 2012 presidential election.
The New Republic at the time reported that 20 percent of visitors to the Times, one of the most trafficked news sites in the country, visited FiveThirtyEight.
That same year, he published “The Signal and The Noise,” which was on the nonfiction hardback top 15 list for 13 straight weeks and focused on building models with statistics and probability.
ESPN acquired the FiveThirtyEight brand and website in 2013, relaunching it in 2014.
“We are going to screw things up,” Silver wrote just before the blog relaunched, noting that his staff expanded from two to 20 full-time journalists. “We hope to demonstrate the value of data journalism as a practical and sustainable proposition.”
By 2016, with a large, well-defined national presence, some looked to Silver’s model on FiveThirtyEight for who would win the presidential election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. In his final article before the election, he gave Clinton a 71 percent chance of winning.
Trump won, and some pundits decried the polling industry as a whole, including FiveThirtyEight’s polling aggregation, as inept. Silver defended his model, saying it gave Trump a better chance than other polls.
“We strongly disagree with the idea that there was a massive polling error,” he wrote at the time.
Silver faced questions over his 2016 predictions for years. In a 2020 interview with The Post, he said those results did not change the way he looked at polling or his data collection methods.
“To us, the fact that Trump won this kind of narrow electoral college victory was exactly the scenario that our model identified as the reason he was more likely to win than people assumed,” Silver said at the time.
Eventually, FiveThirtyEight moved from ESPN to its sister company ABC News and continued publishing articles using data about sports, economics, current events and politics.
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At the beginning of the pandemic, Silver entered several debates surrounding covid despite his inexperience in public health. He dismissed the opinion of some epidemiologists, suggesting that Americans were fearful of breakthrough cases of covid because of mixed messages from public health officials. He later questioned the covid policy of the government and earned the criticism of some public health experts for debating the precautions taken by a field in which he has little expertise.
“There’s no strategy, there’s no endgame, there’s no philosophy, there’s no internal consistency, there’s no cost-benefit analysis, there’s no metrics to define success, there’s no consensus on what we want to accomplish,” Silver wrote.
More recently, he joined the covid origins debate, criticizing journalists for labeling the lab-leak discussion as misinformation.
With the end of Silver’s contract and his time running out at FiveThirtyEight “soon,” it is unclear what he will do next. More than half the FiveThirtyEight newsroom was laid off Tuesday, according to the outlet’s own reporters. Silver said he’s had “great initial conversations about opportunities elsewhere.”
In the 15 years since he started his blog, Silver has reached his core goal: making data journalism popular.
“It’s time for us to start making the news a little nerdier,” he wrote in 2014.
A baseball statistician by day, the mysterious writer started dipping his toes in the political waters in a data-filled Daily Kos blog post published at 2:10 a.m., Nov. 1, 2007, titled “HRC Electability in Purple States.”
“Clinton is very polarizing. In fact, she is George W. Bush polarizing,” poblano wrote. “Think about the degree of hatred that you feel for Shrub. That is how many voters of every shade of purple and red feel about Hillary Clinton.”
He soon had a loyal audience, and started FiveThirtyEight — named for the number of votes in the electoral college — in March 2008. That May, he revealed his identity.
“It just ain’t very professional to keep referring to yourself as a chili pepper,” Nate Silver wrote in an article headlined, “No, I’m not Chuck Todd,” referencing the NBC host and political editor.
Now, 15 years and many iterations later, Silver appears to be headed out the door of ABC News and FiveThirtyEight, which he has been running since its founding.
“My contract is up soon and I expect that I’ll be leaving at the end of it,” he tweeted Tuesday.
That Silver is thinking of leaving FiveThirtyEight was first revealed by the Hollywood Reporter.
The move comes as news organizations have faced layoffs amid economic uncertainty, with BuzzFeed News recently shuttering and other outlets cutting dozens of jobs. In the tweet, Silver said he was “sad and disappointed” by layoffs at ABC’s parent company, Disney.
Silver did not respond to a request for comment from The Washington Post.
In blog posts, model projections and frequent social media posts over the past 15 years, Silver built up an increasingly public profile, first as a baseball analyst, as an election forecaster — he predicted 49 of 50 states correctly in the 2008 presidential election — and later as a frequent commenter on covid-19.
His first notable work with statistics began in the early 2000s, when he developed the Player Empirical Comparison and Organization Test Algorithm (Pecota). He sold it to Baseball Prospectus, a statistical organization, and eventually predicted the Chicago White Sox would lose 90 games one season while working for the group, according to the New York Times.
After he revealed his true identity before the 2008 presidential election, he gained more fame, appearing for the first time nationally on CNN in June 2008. He developed a database aggregating hundreds of state and national polls starting in 1952, weighing them for accuracy and whether certain ones tended to favor Republicans or Democrats.
On Election Day that year, FiveThirtyEight drew nearly 5 million page views, according to the New York Times, as Silver, then 30, became an in-demand analyst. He stopped working for Baseball Prospectus in 2009 and focused on his up-and-coming website.
By 2010, Silver struck a deal with the Times, which would host the FiveThirtyEight blog on a three-year contract. In the 2010 midterms, Silver successfully predicted most of the gubernatorial, Senate and House races.
In the lead-up to the 2012 presidential election, Margaret Sullivan, then the public editor for the Times — and later a Washington Post opinion columnist — described Silver as “probably (and please know that I use the p-word loosely) its most high-profile writer.”
Silver was scorned by some for his polling methods, but his national reputation kept growing after he correctly predicted the winner in every state and the District of Columbia in the 2012 presidential election.
The New Republic at the time reported that 20 percent of visitors to the Times, one of the most trafficked news sites in the country, visited FiveThirtyEight.
That same year, he published “The Signal and The Noise,” which was on the nonfiction hardback top 15 list for 13 straight weeks and focused on building models with statistics and probability.
ESPN acquired the FiveThirtyEight brand and website in 2013, relaunching it in 2014.
“We are going to screw things up,” Silver wrote just before the blog relaunched, noting that his staff expanded from two to 20 full-time journalists. “We hope to demonstrate the value of data journalism as a practical and sustainable proposition.”
By 2016, with a large, well-defined national presence, some looked to Silver’s model on FiveThirtyEight for who would win the presidential election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. In his final article before the election, he gave Clinton a 71 percent chance of winning.
Trump won, and some pundits decried the polling industry as a whole, including FiveThirtyEight’s polling aggregation, as inept. Silver defended his model, saying it gave Trump a better chance than other polls.
“We strongly disagree with the idea that there was a massive polling error,” he wrote at the time.
Silver faced questions over his 2016 predictions for years. In a 2020 interview with The Post, he said those results did not change the way he looked at polling or his data collection methods.
“To us, the fact that Trump won this kind of narrow electoral college victory was exactly the scenario that our model identified as the reason he was more likely to win than people assumed,” Silver said at the time.
Eventually, FiveThirtyEight moved from ESPN to its sister company ABC News and continued publishing articles using data about sports, economics, current events and politics.
ADVERTISING
At the beginning of the pandemic, Silver entered several debates surrounding covid despite his inexperience in public health. He dismissed the opinion of some epidemiologists, suggesting that Americans were fearful of breakthrough cases of covid because of mixed messages from public health officials. He later questioned the covid policy of the government and earned the criticism of some public health experts for debating the precautions taken by a field in which he has little expertise.
“There’s no strategy, there’s no endgame, there’s no philosophy, there’s no internal consistency, there’s no cost-benefit analysis, there’s no metrics to define success, there’s no consensus on what we want to accomplish,” Silver wrote.
More recently, he joined the covid origins debate, criticizing journalists for labeling the lab-leak discussion as misinformation.
With the end of Silver’s contract and his time running out at FiveThirtyEight “soon,” it is unclear what he will do next. More than half the FiveThirtyEight newsroom was laid off Tuesday, according to the outlet’s own reporters. Silver said he’s had “great initial conversations about opportunities elsewhere.”
In the 15 years since he started his blog, Silver has reached his core goal: making data journalism popular.
“It’s time for us to start making the news a little nerdier,” he wrote in 2014.
