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Nate Silver goes after Huffington Post writer, calling him ‘so f**king idiotic and irresponsible’

FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver has heard these criticisms before.

Photo of Chris Tognotti

Chris Tognotti

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Don’t look now, but we’ve got a big data fight on our hands. On Saturday, just three days prior to Election Day, some of the simmering pressures and tensions in the world of poll aggregation exploded into a public feud on social media, with one of the biggest names in polling data pulling no punches. 

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FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver unloaded on Ryan Grim of the Huffington Post over an article accusing him of “unskewing” the 2016 polls and needlessly “panicking the world” about the prospect of a Donald Trump victory.

Silver was so incensed he tweeted that the article was “so fucking idiotic and irresponsible.”

Silver, 38, is no newcomer to this game, having earned plaudits for his successful presidential election forecasts in 2008 and 2012. He’s also absorbed a lot of heated (and often ill-informed) criticism along the way from the likes of partisan poll-truthers like Dean Chambers. 

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In the run-up to the 2012 election, Chambers devoted a lot of time to “unskewing” the mainstream media’s polling numbers, to make them more favorable to Republican nominee Mitt Romney. Chambers also hurled some thinly-veiled homophobia toward Silver, calling him “of very small stature,” “thin and effeminate,” and comparing him to a castrated character on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show.

Needless to say, Chambers was wrong and Silver and his polling model were right, a fact Chambers himself acknowledged after it was all over. But it’s fair to guess that having the old “unskewing” accusation thrown at him irritated Silver from the get-go. The reasoning in Grim’s piece—that Silver’s trend line adjustments, which account for previous pollster performance and national trends, amounted to “putting his thumb on the scales”—clearly infuriated him. So much so that he put Grim on blast on Twitter.

What followed was a 14-part tweetstorm from the polling maven, excoriating the article, Grim, and FiveThirtyEight’s rival polling models for failing to reflect the levels of uncertainty he sees in the 2016 data. It culminated in a pretty sharp paraphrasing of Michelle Obama.

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When Silver acknowledges a “reasonable range of disagreement” before calling models that show Clinton as a 98 or 99 percent favorite as “indefensible,” it’s not hard to guess who he’s talking about. While some polling models like The New York Times‘ The Upshot have pegged Clinton as a much stronger favorite than FiveThirtyEight (she currently has an 84 percent chance of winning in its model, compared to FiveThirtyEight’s 64.2 percent), others have been far more certain. 

In particular, the Princeton Election Consortium, run by longtime Silver rival Dr. Sam Wang, currently places Clinton’s odds at a staggering 99 percent. Wang has also pledged to eat a bug if Trump nets more than 240 electoral votes.

In short, it seems like the looming Election Day is bringing mounting pressure on some of the people who make these calls and interpret this data for a living, and in the case of Silver, his outrage at Grim’s article caused a bit of a boil-over. Fortunately, it won’t be much longer until the results are finally in, and all the arguing can be buttressed by some hard, concrete numbers.

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The Daily Dot