Nate Silver

American Statistician, Writer, Special Correspondent , ABC News

About This Expert

Nate Silver is an American statistician and writer who analyzes baseball and elections. He is currently the editor-in-chief of ESPN’s FiveThirtyEight blog and a Special Correspondent for ABC News.

Nate first gained public recognition for developing PECOTA, a system for forecasting the performance and career development of Major League Baseball players, which he sold to and then managed for Baseball Prospectus from 2003 to 2009.

In 2007, writing under the pseudonym “Poblano”, Nate began to publish analyses and predictions related to the 2008 United States presidential election. At first this work appeared on the political blog Daily Kos, but in March 2008 Nate established his own website, FiveThirtyEight.com. By summer of that year, after he revealed his identity to his readers, he began to appear as an electoral and political analyst in national print, online, and cable news media.

The accuracy of his November 2008 presidential election predictions—he correctly predicted the winner of 49 of the 50 states—won Nate further attention and commendation. The only state he missed was Indiana, which went for Barack Obama by one percentage point. He correctly predicted the winner of all 35 U.S. Senate races that year.

In April 2009, he was named one of The World’s 100 Most Influential People by Time.

In 2010, Nate’s FiveThirtyEight blog was licensed for publication by The New York Times. The newly renamed blog, FiveThirtyEight: Nate Silver’s Political Calculus, first appeared in The Times on August 25, 2010. In 2012 and 2013, FiveThirtyEight won Webby Awards as the “Best Political Blog” from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences.

Nate’s book, The Signal and the Noise, was published in September 2012. It subsequently reached The New York Times best seller list for nonfiction, and was named by Amazon.com as the #1 best nonfiction book of 2012. The Signal and the Noise won the 2013 Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science. The book has been published as well in nine foreign languages: Chinese (separate editions in traditional and simplified characters), Czech, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, and Romanian.

In the 2012 United States presidential election between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, he correctly predicted the winner of all 50 states and the District of Columbia. That same year, Silver’s predictions of U.S. Senate races were correct in 31 of 33 states; he predicted Republican victory in North Dakota and Montana, where Democrats won.

In July 2013, it was revealed that Nate and his FiveThirtyEight blog would depart The New York Times and join ESPN. In his new role at ESPN, Silver would become editor-in-chief of the FiveThirtyEight site. ESPN would own the FiveThirtyEight site and the brand. The ESPN-owned FiveThirtyEight launched on March 17, 2014. Nate’s lead article explained that the site would focus on a broad range of subjects under the general rubric of “data journalism”.

Having earned a bachelor’s degree from The University of Chicago in 2000, he has since been awarded four honorary doctoral degrees: from Ripon College, The New School, The University of Leuven, and Amherst College.