Since arriving on the scene in 2008, psephologist Nate Silver has been widely hailed as a “statistics guru.” That phrase is a good fit for what Silver does. While his writing style often mimics the technical wonkery one sees in political science journals, his work differs from science in important ways. One big difference is that scientific work is supposed to be replicable. Though he dedicates a great many words to his methodology, Silver rarely provides enough details to enable the industrious skeptic to reproduce and critique it.
This is not a criticism, per se. A blog at the New York Times is quite different than a scholarly article in the Journal of Politics. The point is that: with Silver, it comes down to trust. Do you trust that he is ahead of the curve, that he has plucked an insight out of the data that others have missed?
This is why I was extremely troubled by this revelation, courtesy of BuzzFeed:
Obama’s polling analysts, Issenberg writes, wanted to test their internal polls against Silver’s model. And so — in an unusual step for the closely-held campaign, and for the analyst, who was then running his own website, FiveThirtyEight.com — the Obama campaign offered Silver access to thousands of its own internal polls, on the condition Silver sign a confidentiality agreement, which he did…
“We wanted a little external validation that what we were seeing is what was actually going on,” Michael Simon, a former Obama aide, told Issenberg.
Contrast this extraordinary relationship with Obama ‘08 to what Silver has said about himself in the past. In 2010 he criticized Scott Rasmussen for offering an “absurdly lawyerly” statement that Rasmussen Reports had never done partisan work. Toward the end of the post, he made what turned out to a very lawyerly claim of his own:
But I do believe in open disclosure, both as a branding and an ethical matter. That’s why I tell you in the FAQ who I voted for (Barack Obama). I have never conducting polling or paid consulting on behalf of a political client, nor am I actively (or even passively, for the time being) soliciting such business. I have conducted consulting and polling on behalf non-political clients, and I have also advised political clients on an informal, unpaid basis. FiveThirtyEight is independently owned and operated.
Two points in response. First, and most obviously, it takes an awful lot of lawyerly nuance to square the idea that an “informal” arrangement can also be formalized by a confidentiality agreement.
Second, and more important, is this issue of payment. Even if no cash changed hands for Silver’s consulting, he still received a veritable windfall as a researcher. As a hardcore data junkie I can assure you that “thousands” of internal polls to analyze would be a fantastic in-kind payment. It is impossible to put a cash value on this because virtually nobody ever gets this kind of data.
Overall, the impression of independence that Silver offers here, while technically consistent with his transaction with Obama, is extremely misleading on a causal read. In 2008, Silver received priceless insider information from the Obama campaign, with which he was free to do…what, exactly? Refine his predictive models? Discount contrary information? Use to stay ahead of the curve and build his reputation? Keep his largely left-leaning readership amped up ahead of an election where turnout counted more than ever?
And not only did all of this go undisclosed, his statements about independence certainly gave the impression that he was outside the Democratic loop – when in fact he was charged with analyzing reams of data to help Team Obama understand the lay of the electoral land. A pretty valuable service, if you ask me!
All of this matters because, at the end of the day, you have to take Silver or leave him. You cannot evaluate his work on your own, because essential parts of it are tucked away in a kind of statistical “black box.” That makes him similar to a journalist like Bob Woodward. Would you trust Woodward to offer you an accurate reflection of the Bush administration’s foreign policy deliberations if you knew that he had been a campaign consultant to John Kerry? I sure wouldn’t.
This is part of a much larger story about the mainstream media: the line between independent analysis and Democratic activism is getting blurrier by the day. A few years ago we learned of the JournoList – a massive email network of liberal pundits, scholars, and supposedly straight journalists that facilitated off-the-record conversations, where talking points were often refined and pro-Democratic messages were developed. We have a revolving door between the Democratic party and high-profile media figures like George Stephanopoulos and Jay Carney. We have Public Policy Polling, a Democratic firm that does polling for hyper-partisan unions like the Services Employees International Union and the National Education Association, flooding the zone with pro-Obama polling that has fed this largely erroneous sentiment that he has been in the lead. We have MSNBC — a part of the once-venerable NBC News — becoming, for all intents and purposes, a communications arm of the Democratic National Committee. And now we have this, Nate Silver – the country’s top psephologist working for the nation’s most prominent newspaper – having access to insider info from the Democratic campaign that virtually nobody will ever enjoy.
This is not about mere ideological bias – the old truism that straight journalists lean left and their reporting inevitably favors their own side. This is about the growing integration of supposedly independent news outlets with the broader Democratic party apparatus.
Conservatives need to be aware of this trend as we move forward, and keep it close in mind when the press inevitably favors Barack Obama over Mitt Romney in the next eight weeks.
Jay Cost is a staff writer for THE WEEKLY STANDARD and the author of Spoiled Rotten: How the Politics of Patronage Corrupted the Once Noble Democratic Party and Now Threatens the American Republic, available now wherever books are sold.
