Nate Silver faces backlash for pro-Trump model skewing

Nate Silver, the celebrity statistician who gained notoriety for his FiveThirtyEight election models, is facing backlash over alleged skewing in his new model.

Silver left the ABC-owned company and launched his own Substack, the Silver Bulletin, last year. Since then, he’s become increasingly critical of the FiveThirtyEight projection and its behind-the-scenes assumptions and adjustments.

“There’s a fine line between an “objective” statistical model and “just some dude’s opinion,” Silver wrote in mid-July, a month after launching his own competing election model. “But the 538 model falls somewhere on the wrong side of this line, in my view.”

Some social media users have denounced his complaints as not based in math, especially as he makes similar adjustments to his data. Silver has adopted the FiveThirtyEight system of weighting polls differently, ostensibly based on reliability. He's facing criticism for allegedly favoring junk polls over respected pollsters.

“Patriot Polling is literally run by two right wing high school students that is ranked 240th on FiveThirtyEight,” former pollster Adam Carlson noted on X, asking why that poll was weighted more highly than a YouGov poll, which they called “an internationally respected pollster that is ranked 4th on FiveThirtyEight.”

Some users believe that Silver’s methods of weighting polls are dubious, especially as his swing state calculated “polling averages” move in the opposite direction as recently released swing state polls.

Silver's now being scrutinized for a potential conflict of interest after joining the crypto-based gambling company Polymarket as an advisor in July, and pushed his model while promoting election betting opportunities.

“Feels like it should be a bigger deal that Nate Silver is employed by Polymarket, a site that allows you to bet on political outcomes, and also runs a “prediction model” that has the ability to directly affect betting behavior,” journalist Brett Meiselas wrote on X.

Silver’s model gives Trump a greater chance of winning than most forecasts, which has earned him fans in MAGA World. Those new boosters include former President Trump, who used Silver's model as evidence that he wasn’t losing as badly as polling averages suggested.