In baseball, and in politics, the numbers don’t lie
In baseball, and in politics, the numbers don’t lie By Jim Caple
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Updated: November 7, 2008, 11:32 AM ET
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Forget Cole Hamels and the Phillies. No one in baseball had a more impressive fall than Nate Silver.
Silver is the Baseball Prospectus managing partner who applied his baseball statistical analysis and forecasting models to the 2008 presidential election with his Web site, fivethirtyeight.com (the name refers to the total of 538 electoral votes). He started the site, he says, because of “an annoyance at how polls were covered by the mainstream media, cherry-picking the numbers.” Convinced he could do better, Silver used his sabermetric models to correctly forecast some Barack Obama victories in key primaries, and went on to predict that Obama would be elected president with 52.3 percent of the popular vote and 349 electoral votes. With a few votes still being counted, Obama won with 53 percent and 364.
“We worked hard to get the media to treat numbers in baseball in a serious manner and it was fives times worse in politics,” Silver said. Yet he convinced them. The site became must-reading for political fans — Silver says it had three million hits on Election Day — and was considered one of the most reliable sources of information on the campaign.
So what’s easier, predicting how Kosuke Fukudome will play in Chicago, or how John McCain will perform in Virginia?
“I think politics is easier,” Silver said. “It’s less complex. In baseball, you have 750 players who are active at any one time and each have 30 statistical categories and each have a season. If you look at the matrix of numbers, there are just so many permutations. In politics, there is only one election and a limited number of polls.”
Silver says one similarity to baseball forecasting was comparing states that had similar demographics, such as Ohio and Pennsylvania. If McCain or Obama was doing well in one state, you could expect the same trend in the other state as well. “It’s like comparing similar players and applying that algorithm,” he said. “But there is always the Ichiro Suzuki problem. He’s unlike any other player and there are certain states, like Florida, or West Virginia, that aren’t like any other state.”
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AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais
Nate Silver nailed the election results on his Web site.
Asked for baseball comparisons, he said McCain’s campaign reminded him a lot of this year’s Houston Astros. “Start out slow, get ridiculously hot in August, and then completely blow it at the end. Obama, conversely, might be the White Sox, who consistently overachieve expectations but never make it look easy.”
More importantly, what would Sarah Palin’s VORP be?
“Sarah Palin, I think, would have to have a VORP of -10 or so. Somewhere in the Neifi Perez range; she tangibly hurt that ticket. A replacement level, do-no-harm VP candidate would have been more someone like a Tim Pawlenty or an Evan Bayh.”
Silver said the fivethirtyeight site was so successful he’s going to keep it alive, even though there isn’t another presidential election for four years and another midterm election for two. “We’ll have something to say,” he said. “We’ll look at Congress. If you want to see Chase Utley’s stats, you go to ESPN.com and look at his player card. Or you look at his player card on Baseball Prospectus. But if you want to look at Ted Kennedy’s player card, where do you go? And we’ll look at random things, like why do airlines charge for bottled water?”
A Ted Kennedy player card? A Ted Stevens player card? I can’t wait. Unfortunately, we’ll have to wait, because right now Silver is exhausted. He barely slept the last couple weeks of the campaign — “By the end, it was full-time plus” — and for that matter, he says he couldn’t have kept it up had the campaign lasted two days longer. Plus, he has his Baseball Prospectus duties.
“We write our book from now through the first of the year,” he said. “I have a week to relax and then it gets just as busy again. In February of 2009 I will just have to find an island in the Caribbean and throw my BlackBerry in the ocean.”
One thing Silver hopes people learned from fivethirtyeight.com is how to more intelligently analyze polls. “If there is an outlier that doesn’t make sense, you should question it,” he said. “But people take the most unusual of the poll results and take them the most seriously. Democrats are like Cubs fans, they expect the worst.”
(By the way, Silver is a Democrat, as well as a Detroit Tigers fan by birth, and he says his team was the equivalent of Fred Thompson in 2008 — though I think they were probably more similar to Rudy Giuliani. Which begs the question: Which team was the Dennis Kucinich of baseball — the Royals or the Pirates?)
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