Is Nate Silver tweaking his projections because ESPN is pressuring him to generate more revenue?
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This has been asserted a number of times in the comments at LGM, and a quick trip around the interwebs reveals that some version of it is at least being entertained as a hypothesis by Sam Wang and others.
Like Scott, I think the probability that this hypothesis is true is very low.
Silver’s website FiveThirtyEight is owned by ESPN, which is a subsidiary of Disney. ESPN’s revenues last year were around $11 billion, which represented a quarter of Disney’s total revenues.
FiveThirtyEight is a wonky website for people interested in statistical projections about politics and to a lesser extent sports. I don’t know what its revenues are, but I’m pretty sure that they represent something that barely constitutes a rounding error on ESPN’s (let alone Disney’s) accounting spreadsheets.
I assume ESPN bought FiveThirtyEight because for many years now it has had a license to print money, which means that, per the terms of Article VII of the United States Constitution & General Corporate Charter, it has to piss away a couple of million here and there every other week on some bullshit or the other that makes no sense in economic terms, but which a bunch of suits decided would synergistically leverage some combination of “prestige” or “eyeballs” or “exposure” or “credibility” or whatever for the benefit of said printing press.
Yes ESPN’s revenue model is currently under some stress, which inevitably means they’re getting rid of an extra pantomime horse or two, and so maybe they’ll dump FiveThirtyEight after Silver’s contract expires, but the notion that somebody is actually pressuring Silver to come up with sexier projections seems implausible on its face.
Nate Silver is a young guy who has been wildly successful at what he does, and continuing to be successful at what he does requires maintaining close to 100% confidence among his potential audience (i.e. consumers of wonkery, whether political or sporting) that he’s not a hack. Any actual evidence that he has been massaging his models to generate clicks would ruin him, so, leaving questions of personal ethics aside (I don’t know him and have no opinion on that score), it would be nuts for him to do so, even in terms of pure self-interest. His corporate superiors may or may not understand this, but even if they don’t I’m pretty confident that he would tell them to go to hell if they were to ever try to twist his arm. (Of course the argument can always be made that Silver is unconscious of his actual motivations, and thus that he’s unconsciously trying to please his employers. That argument has the advantage of being by its nature irrefutable).
The far more plausible explanation for why Silver’s presidential election projections have been such outliers is that he got egg on his face when he ignored what his models were telling him when he kept estimating that Trump had little chance of winning the GOP nomination, and so now he’s even more committed to sticking with his model for the general. That model may well be flawed, but it’s understandable and he’s not willing to try to re-work it on the fly, to make it more congruent with what the other prestige predictors are predicting, since that too would be perceived, fairly or not, as a hackish move on his part.