Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

5/19/2026 at 7:57:37 PM

>The Times was also in the midst of a leadership transition, and new management tends to want to move on from the old regime’s pet projects, even if they were successful.

Learning about B2B sales over the years, the size of this leadership-change factor has been among the most eye-opening (and among the most disappointing).

It cuts both ways: You can have a successful pilot that doesn't proceed because this-or-that VP was replaced, and to show off their bold new direction, the new VP cancels almost everything novel the previous person started. Or you can reach out just at the moment the new guy or gal comes in, right when they're looking for the pieces of their bold new direction, and you become part of that.

I would love to have later learned that leaders who evaluate opportunities separate from personal attachment are seen as more efficient, better, and selected favorably; that more successful companies are less subject to this sort of political/careerist whimsy. Alas. At least I have been fortunate enough to experience both directions in quantities that roughly balance out.

by chao-

5/19/2026 at 8:49:04 PM

> I would love to have later learned that leaders who evaluate opportunities separate from personal attachment are seen as more efficient, better, and selected favorably; that more successful companies are less subject to this sort of political/careerist whimsy.

My experience is that it's the opposite: the more successful the company is, the more prone it is to flights of executive whimsy. At more successful companies, it basically doesn't matter what the executives do, because the company's moat is so big that it can tolerate grotesque mismanagement and still make money. (This is the converse of the old aphorism "When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact."). Executives seem extremely uncomfortable with the idea that they are being paid tens of millions of dollars and yet nothing they do matters, and so they're intent on leaving their mark. Thus, they cancel all the pet projects of the past management, instill their own ideas, and boldly take the company in a new direction. Except not really, because the fundamental parts of the business that make it work are all handled by people 8 levels down in the org chart whose job functions are considered common sense by everybody and never really up for discussion.

At least, this was my experience at Google, which is perhaps the best money-making machine ever invented and yet is grotesquely mismanaged by mid-level VPs that cancel every promising new product that comes out, only to start their own initiatives that themselves get canceled by their successors.

by nostrademons

5/20/2026 at 7:48:31 PM

This is also my experience at Google, and I have not really figured out the incentives. Plenty of people seem _perfectly comfortable_ with the idea that they are being paid tens of millions of dollars when nothing that they do matters. And it takes enormous effort to get anything actually done in the face of our enormous bureaucracies. I have a few hypotheses:

  - Career progression is still a motivation. If there are enough sufficiently motivated people in the organization (whether they come from upper management, middle management, or frontline workers), leaders need to harness that motivation and move it in a direction and potentially dole out career rewards. Otherwise, that motivation that is not properly harnessed can be destructive.
  - Similar to the previous hypothesis, they might axed _because_ nothing they do matters. So they may thrash about, making enough noise and movement to convince enough people that they might actually be doing something important, and it would be risky to dismiss them from their position.
  - Turf wars/politics/etc. If you do "nothing", then you look replaceable. If you're just a very expensive paper-weight, someone may try to usurp your highly-paid paperweight position. Thus, the nash equilibrium is to do something that makes your position less likely to be usurped by making it look difficult or that you are uniquely qualified to do it.

by etruong42

5/19/2026 at 10:18:01 PM

> the more successful the company is, the more prone it is to flights of executive whimsy

Apple's Liquid Glass comes to mind.

The design exec responsible suddenly left Apple for Meta, a company rather less esteemed for design, and Apple still hasn't acknowledged this failure or backtracked.

by robotresearcher

5/19/2026 at 11:27:14 PM

Admit wrong, from Apple? Was there acknowledgement of say butterfly keyboards? Seems on brand to quietly walk back an unpopular decision.

by 3eb7988a1663

5/20/2026 at 9:49:24 AM

> butterfly keyboards

Bear in mind that they forced the butterfly keyboard for years despite loads of users complaining. It took Johnny Ive to leave for Apple to finally fix the keyboard, that's how powerful the detrimental leadership can be at times.

by egorfine

5/20/2026 at 4:34:25 AM

Took them years to move on from their terrible keyboard design without a proper acknowledgement

by stogot

5/20/2026 at 1:46:14 AM

Unlikely they’ll be walking back the UX and UI changes specifically for their push into spatial and convergent computing.

by DANmode

5/20/2026 at 6:10:05 PM

Yeah I do understand that. It occurred to me right away that getting people used to partial transparency might be explained by the difficulty of doing opaque drawing on heads-up displays.

by robotresearcher

5/19/2026 at 11:05:00 PM

Apple has strategically retreated a few times but it always puts on a show of doing it in a “forward” direction. Look for much of the annoyances of Liquid Glass to quietly be lost.

by bombcar

5/19/2026 at 10:23:30 PM

partial backtrack in some ways.

by kranke155

5/20/2026 at 1:32:11 AM

I saw this up close once.

My job involves service contracts for the cloud. We get to know workloads and optimize them and learn how to troubleshoot them to reduce mitigation time.

I had a big customer go from "must have, non-negotiable" for my team to a non-renewal in weeks when a new CTO came in. Within a month, they had an outage we could have mitigated quickly and had our yearly contract pay for itself.

by RajT88

5/20/2026 at 3:35:04 AM

Having been on both sides of this: Often, one of the purposes of the leadership change was to start shedding the old regime's pet projects. Even semi-successful pet projects can be a distraction from the direction the company wants to go.

I've been unlucky enough to work under several executives who thought they could resist direction from the CEO and board. They pushed their pet projects and thought leadership would eventually see the light. Instead they got ejected from the company and replaced with someone who knew how to follow orders.

My cynical assumption when I first saw this was that it was all just politics, but I have to admit that life is so much easier when your management chain isn't fighting uphill all the time. If the CEO and board want the company working on some things and not others, you're on thin ice if your manager is assigning you to go against the company's direction. It's scarier when you may not even know what they're doing to you.

For this specific case, completely pulling the content offline feels like a loss across the board. I could see it happening as an overreaction, to send a message that the new management is serious about not repeating the (perceived or otherwise) mistakes of their predecessors with an unmistakable signal

by Aurornis

5/20/2026 at 2:03:16 PM

I imagine people won't like the comparison, but this is exactly how changes in leadership work for developing countries.

Anyone tied to the old regime that isn't immediately, obviously, and hugely beneficial to the top of the new ranks is scrapped. Business arrangements and government contracts have to be re-negotiated to cut in new leadership. If business owners don't hedge on both sides, and get in there immediately after the election, they become castigated as loyal to the old regime, leading to more friction, costs, and work to simply get back to normal operations.

by 3RTB297

5/19/2026 at 10:49:00 PM

"Sometimes you have to change things that are perfectly good just to make them your own." --Jack Donaghy, 30 Rock

by jcheng

5/19/2026 at 9:42:59 PM

Once you look, you see this all the time when new CEOs join large companies, they feel the need to mark their territory by taking a dump on it.

by daedrdev

5/19/2026 at 10:03:20 PM

At this point in my life I have zero patience or sympathy for the story of a man selling his company to a massive conglomerate and then feeling betrayed or somehow sad/regretful when said conglomerate destroys it or weaponizes it. I'm simply tired of this hindsight virtue signaling. They don't care about us. That means even you, Nate Silver. Btw was a big fan back then! Signal and the Noise was a great book.

by zombittack

5/19/2026 at 10:14:20 PM

There's value in making more people aware of something, even if it appears obvious to you. It's possible that someone who doesn't share your views on Disney, or corporations more broadly, might have been familiar with FiveThirtyEight and will have their views changed by Nate Silver's account of the situation. There's also nothing wrong with someone reflecting on something they worked on for over a decade and identifying things they could have done differently.

Ironically, your comment adds nothing to the discussion other than virtue signaling that you're "in the know" on this subject.

by fasterik

5/19/2026 at 11:15:30 PM

I'll disagree. As an open forum, all responses are allowed, even telling someone to sleep in the bed they made.

But it does bring up a good point. That too many people are trying to have their cake and eat it too. Any reasonable person does, or ought to know, the cycle 538 went through. And we need to stop giving the benefit of the doubt to reasonable people who say "well I'm the one who didn't"

by halJordan

5/20/2026 at 12:16:20 AM

Maybe I'm old but this smells like a new generation coming to terms with the concept of a sellout. It's not new.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selling_out

"While this perceived inauthenticity is viewed with scorn and contempt by members of the subculture, the definition of the term and to whom it should be applied is subjective. While the term is most associated with the 1970s- and 1980s-era punk and hardcore subculture, English use of the term originates in the late 19th century."

by _carbyau_

5/20/2026 at 12:27:02 PM

As GenX and to bring the usual generation discussion, it appears the more recent ones are too fluffy, like expecting everything nice, do no harm, feel betrayed when it was already obvious from the start how it would end up, and so on.

by pjmlp

5/19/2026 at 11:47:22 PM

Cue the Mad Men meme: "THAT'S WHAT THE MONEY'S FOR!"

by freediddy

5/20/2026 at 6:46:49 AM

This comment is maybe a little too aggressive but I kind of share the sentiment. Mostly, after reading this long article, I'm surprised he never quite explains why he never tried to go at it independently? He says

> I’ve always had a fairly entrepreneurial spirit

but that doesn't square well with being a cog in the huge Disney machine.

by bambax

5/20/2026 at 11:55:33 PM

He's been independent since 2023

by Bratmon

5/19/2026 at 10:07:44 PM

> I'm simply tired of this hindsight virtue signaling.

Virtue signalling is a funny term. What, exactly, does it mean here? In what way is reminiscing about a venture that lasted 15 years of your life "virtue signalling"? It seems to be that word is trotted out as a meaningless cliche, something in the sense of "I don't like this thing, but I'll sound more sophisticated if I accuse it of this nebulous bad thing rather than just saying I don't like it".

The man is allowed to write a blog post about the final conclusion of a huge phase of his life. You don't have to give him your sympathy, but there's nothing wrong with writing about it.

by applfanboysbgon

5/20/2026 at 12:09:22 AM

The "virtue signaling" is signaling being a scrappy creative type who regrets/disliked the path he followed when he actually sold out to a big conglomerate at the first possible opportunity. The virtues being signaled are things like independence and grit.

by pclmulqdq

5/20/2026 at 12:39:45 AM

Perhaps you read a different blog post than I did, but that's not what he signalled at all. He regrets getting involved with ESPN specifically because it was a poor fit for him as a television network that didn't have a suitable business model for 538, and would have preferred if he had taken the competing offers from NYT or Bloomberg in 2013 and then wanted to move to The Athletic in 2018. At no point did he say anything like "I wish I didn't sell 538 and stuck it out alone".

by applfanboysbgon

5/20/2026 at 7:20:32 AM

It kind of ended up being a funny dance between 538, the NYT and The Athletic. The original sale to The Athletic probably would've made the most sense for 538 (in hindsight). Then the NYT obviously realised what they'd lost with 538 departing, and end up buying The Athletic a few years later.

by matt_daemon

5/20/2026 at 4:25:40 AM

I don't understand the use of the word "actually" in this sentence. The second half does not stand in contrast to the first half. In fact, it explains the first half.

And portraying oneself as having independence and grit when one doesn't actually (which I don't concede happened here) is not what virtue signaling is. "Virtue" here more closely means "morality" than "admirable or sympathetic qualities". Virtue signaling is disingenuously behaving like you are a moral person because it is advantageous, when in fact you lack such morals.

I feel the need to belabor this because accusations of virtue signaling are too often unfounded and amount to a cheap trick to shut down more thoughtful discussion.

by cvoss

5/19/2026 at 10:25:40 PM

[dead]

by cindyllm

5/19/2026 at 11:54:51 PM

“Virtue signaling” has become a thought-terminating cliche.

All it really amounts to is an accusation of insincerity motivated by vanity, which is a two-for-one ad hominem attack that allows the accuser to avoid responding to the actual point.

by shermantanktop

5/20/2026 at 1:39:16 AM

It is a statement on a culture that values insincere "feelgoodery" over truth. We can decry the downfall of common sense even if it comes at the expense of pointing out the obvious. Imo this is a good trend.

by burritoAlPast0r

5/20/2026 at 1:44:06 AM

> insincere "feelgoodery" over truth

This has literally nothing to do with the article, and really nothing to do with almost any usage of the term I've seen. I pretty much always see it as a kind of incoherent insult that, like this usage here, isn't based in any kind of reality but instead just makes the person writing it feel good about themselves for some reason.

by applfanboysbgon

5/20/2026 at 4:19:36 AM

Easy phrase for rude folks to trot out when someone raises ethical/moral/legal concerns. Quick little rationalization:

_other person says they care about thing I don't that admittedly does sound good, so it has to be wrong to have mentioned it - I can't just say I don't care about the good-sounding thing_

(Of course, on the internet, people will end up playing make believe with their values, but it shouldn't be the first assumption. Or maybe it should, but with a hard second look.)

by Barbing

5/20/2026 at 12:15:04 PM

But I could accuse you (to be clear, I'm not) of making that statement out of a desire to "virtue signal."

You are stating your opposition to feelgoodery, thereby currying favor with those in your anti-feelgoodery camp by showing how anti-feelgoodery you are. But secretly of course I'm saying you don't really believe that. You are not that opposed to feelgoodery, you're just trying to get brownie points and make yourself feel good (ironically).

Again, that's not what I think, but IMO that's what the use of the phrase has mostly become.

by shermantanktop

5/20/2026 at 11:36:00 AM

His book is really good reads indeed.

Sometimes you get an offer that is financially irresistible. And after thousands of hours of hard work you finally get some reward.

Betrayed? That’s why people have lawyers to let them draft really good contract proposal so they aren’t ripped off.

But public whining is somehow a common tactic for getting attention online :)

by sixtyj

5/20/2026 at 6:49:22 PM

> But public whining is somehow a common tactic for getting attention online :)

Because it works. Not all the time, but a significant number of times. Public backlash from a fanbase is a lot cheaper than a legal battle.

We're well into the attention economy these days. I don't blame someone for using the tools society dealt out to its effect.

by johnnyanmac

5/20/2026 at 2:12:43 AM

I think you can both be sad that something you built was destroyed, and also aware that you already sold it and are not somehow personally a victim.

by jredwards

5/19/2026 at 10:21:36 PM

I wrote this exact comment elsewhere on the thread and got downvoted for it. Business is business! It sucks for Nate but he's acting like a sore loser, when this is a totally normal and expected outcome. Businesses acquire other businesses and sunset them all the time. Zero sympathy from me.

by panda888888

5/20/2026 at 12:55:48 AM

Sore losers don’t generally write at length about their own mistakes and poor decisions that led to the ultimate demise of their baby.

by macintux

5/21/2026 at 5:26:15 AM

Sore losers absolutely complain. It's one of the biggest traits of being a sore loser.

A mature person would be disappointed, vent to their close friends/spouse, and then shut up about it. They wouldn't publish a long blog post to air their grievances.

by panda888888

5/20/2026 at 4:19:58 AM

they do since Substack was invented because it turns out a digital rehabilitation facility for whiny and overly wordy sore losers is a fantastic subscription business.

Might want to think about selling that one to Disney as well and then writing about your great regrets of selling your substack on substack v2 in ten years, that's gotta be amazing content for another ten posts

by Barrin92

5/20/2026 at 4:59:30 AM

What are your criteria for recognizing a useful insightful blog into a poster's previous business ventures?

Few tellers are neutral and objective, many writers get accused of selectively editing things: Philip Greenspun's account of the demise of Ars Digita springs to mind. Or Jerry Kaplan on Go (mobile startup). Or Joel Spolsky on the last decade of StackOverflow.

by smcin

5/21/2026 at 5:35:31 AM

Maybe it's just a stylistic choice, but if this happened to me, I wouldn't write a long post about it. I'd tweet, "They deleted the archive; what a sad end to this chapter of my life" (or something like that to let the world know what happened & that I was disappointed), but I wouldn't write a long rant. Maybe a short blog post, maybe.

I don't view his post as useful or insightful, but instead view it as demonstrating a lack of understanding of normal business practices. It's like he didn't anticipate that this could happen, whereas it's always a risk when you sell out. The exact same thing has happened to lots of other small blog/media outlets, like Kara Swisher's Re/code. This isn't an unexpected situation, but he's acting like it is. And that simply demonstrates a lack of maturity.

by panda888888

5/19/2026 at 10:48:18 PM

You don't need to have sympathy to accept that these chimp outs are virtuous for entirely pedagogical reasons.

by mohamedkoubaa

5/20/2026 at 12:22:38 AM

I think Nate Silver is off the mark as to what Disney wanted to get out of this. Entertainment companies like Disney make plays where they buy a huge portfolio of entertainment assets and see which ones manage to hit it big. They invest resources and they help quite a lot, but it does come down to the entertainer to take it all the way. In other words, a Disney executive probably bought 538 expecting that it might become the next CNN or Fox - the next big secondary source news analysis platform. Note that Disney doesn't have one of those in their portfolio right now. Instead, 538 continued to produce wonkish articles about esoterica of sports and politics statistics, and did not expand to the grand role that Disney may have imagined. The ad revenue from some wonkish articles isn't going to cover the cost of a number of writers and statisticians, which is why Nate Silver went to a bigger player in the first place.

The core problem here seems to be that the visions of the buyers were not aligned with Nate Silver's vision. He wanted to continue having a blog on esoteric statistics, but with the resources of a news network. They may have wanted to have a news network, and acquire it at the price of a blog on esoteric statistics. This wasn't a loss-leading "feather in the cap" for Disney, but a bet that simply didn't pay off and needed to be put out to pasture.

by pclmulqdq

5/20/2026 at 3:27:27 AM

This is the wrong level of analysis. Disney owns ABC, ABC owned 538. The relevant decisions were made by ABC’s leadership.

And the firing of the staff happened years ago and people broadly understood even if they did not agree with it.

The recent decision was to take down an archive that cost $8 in server resources and was still bringing in page views and ad revenue.

by shalmanese

5/20/2026 at 10:15:55 AM

Nothing costs $8 in a corporate setting.

by Gud

5/20/2026 at 8:37:38 AM

This plus to be "Disney-level" successful means if it doesn't make 10s/100s of millions in profit, it's not worth doing. Something that's ordinarily successful (even making steady millions each year) is going to get the chop.

by rwmj

5/20/2026 at 12:16:01 PM

The real problem is that FiveThirtyEight wasn’t run as an independent P&L. They didn’t have autonomy to make business / product decisions like as Nate says putting up a paywall etc. they were treated as pure creatives.

The real lesson for both sides is to not divorce “creatives” from the business. Arguably that’s one of the biggest mistakes of legacy media and why platforms like YouTube have been so successful: creatives run the business. There’s not a long complicated feedback loop between creatives / business decisions.

by softwaredoug

5/20/2026 at 12:52:37 AM

Same effect as Killed By Google.

by pixl97

5/19/2026 at 8:12:46 PM

> Founder Nate Silver left in 2023, taking the rights to his forecasting model with him to his website Silver Bulletin.[7][8][9] The site's new owner, Disney, hired G. Elliott Morris to develop a new model.[7][8] On September 18, 2023, the original website domain at fivethirtyeight.com was closed, with web traffic becoming redirected to ABC News pages, and its logo was replaced, with the name 538 used instead of FiveThirtyEight.[2] On March 5, 2025, 538 was shut down by ABC News and its staff were laid off.[10] On May 15, 2026, ABC redirected thousands of archived 538 articles to the politics section of their news website, making them inaccessible.

From Wikipedia.

by nashashmi

5/19/2026 at 9:48:19 PM

The more I read about how big businesses operate the more I think it resembles the weather. There's no intelligence in there, it's just random fluctuations. FiveThirtyEight never made any sense at Disney and seems to have been passed around there more like a trinket than a decades work of dozens of people.

by Traster

5/19/2026 at 11:03:11 PM

One of the most frustrating things about getting older — besides all the fun stuff that happens to your knees and hair — is the fact that younger generations just take what has been normal their whole lives and say “yes this is the normal state of affairs.”

We used to have laws and limits regarding media ownership. One company couldn’t own every radio station in most of America. Distributors couldn’t own studios. Etc.

Disney should never have been allowed to buy 538 in the first place. ABC, possibly…? But Disney shouldn't be allowed to own ABC!! (And if you’re left-leaning, you can’t pin this mess on the “corporation-friendly” Republican Party because it was Bill Clinton who put his signature on this mess!)

The state we’re in is not normal and it wasn’t necessary and we don’t have to just live with it if we don’t want to.

by Eric_WVGG

5/20/2026 at 2:14:18 PM

> (And if you’re left-leaning, you can’t pin this mess on the “corporation-friendly” Republican Party because it was Bill Clinton who put his signature on this mess!)

I would argue Clinton's presidency moved the Democrats from a center-left party to a center-right party, given its platform of welfare reform and free trade at the expense of labor rights and the social safety net.

by ascagnel_

5/20/2026 at 6:58:07 PM

Yeah, we've only had 3 dem presidents in 30 years and they all collectively moved the dial a certain way. That's an entire generational upbringing of leadership that's a dim shadow of what Carter, FDR, and the ghost of JFK managed to do for its people.

Neoliberal ideals are really good at keeping a machine running in the direction it's already going. And we arguably needed that with Biden for a short spell. It's never going to change the direction of the machine, though. And we're heading off a cliff

by johnnyanmac

5/20/2026 at 1:38:26 PM

Interesting in learning more - what bill is this that was passed by Clinton?

by satiric

5/20/2026 at 2:17:10 PM

The Telecommunications Act of 1996.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996

It passed with support from both parties in both the House and Senate.

by ascagnel_

5/19/2026 at 8:24:12 PM

> I did too much bragging in the media and didn’t anticipate the extent to which public opinion toward FiveThirtyEight would shift once we became a corporate-backed incumbent rather than an eccentric upstart

Can’t speak for everyone else, but it wasn’t this for me. It was about 2016 presidential that lost me.

He tries to justify this later about how theirs was better than other outlets but I don’t care. Call it emotional, naive, unfair or whatever you want, but regardless I had zero interest in reading any of their predictions or analyses after that.

Not even mad, just that to my experience they had one job and they didn’t fulfill it at the most important time. They went from appearing insightful to just one opinion amongst so many others.

by ninth_ant

5/19/2026 at 8:33:44 PM

I had complaints about 538, especially the early days, but don't understand this critique at all. A 30% chance hitting is completely unremarkable, and it was a perfectly reasonable reading of the evidence at the time. Nate isn't wrong that conventional wisdom was way off, with even supposedly statistical models giving Hillary a 99% chance of winning.

Elections, like many things, have some inherent uncertainty. A several point polling error is normal, so a candidate who is down a couple points on election day has a decent shot of winning.

by rurp

5/19/2026 at 8:57:07 PM

Discussion of stats models is always complicated by the fact that a lot of people will read "30%" as a "no" prediction and claim your model is wrong if the thing happens. On the one hand, one strategy is to "hide" the numbers a bit behind a blaring headline that says "we are not sure!!" It's a bit of an art to decide when to be "sure" or not. On the other hand, in research for example you can just say screw it, I care if the correct people are correct, not if a bunch of wrong people are wrong.

I feel like the correct strategy for 538 when it was actually niche was to be precise, but then it went viral and maybe should've hit the IDK button much harder and more often after that.

by ngriffiths

5/19/2026 at 9:34:47 PM

The real caveat is that 538 was a Monte Carlo model, and is only as good as its inputs. "Here's what the current spread in polling numbers is *given our model and the current polling and their reported uncertainties.*" Polling uncertainties are themselves computed under certain models, and those models are subject to errors. I don't think 538 hid this, but it's a difficult caveat for people to reason about because the sorts of modeling errors that have the most influence usually represent "unknown unknowns".

by gh02t

5/20/2026 at 12:45:16 AM

Building a model for predicting the ultimate winner of a US presidential election is particularly difficult, because you are dealing with noisy input data and nonlinear effects, i.e. just a few thousand votes in a few key states can completely flip the outcome. If you then have poorly calibrated polls with a large margin of error, there is really nothing much you can do.

On the other hand, it does raise the question how valuable the 538 models for something like this really are if the outcome is a coin flip anyway.

by this_user

5/20/2026 at 1:44:35 AM

Exactly, and correlated errors, where a polling error in one state predicts similar errors across the board.

I disagree that it's all pointless though. Most basically it's smart for campaigns to have a good model and let that inform strategy where appropriate. Since the president is a big deal other people's decisions are also impacted, and in the long run it pays to have good predictions of those chances. Also, the outcome sometimes is fairly certain and that isn't always easy to see.

by ngriffiths

5/20/2026 at 4:43:30 PM

I agree, it's far from pointless. The 538 model is arguably close to the best you can do considering how difficult the task is, but it's important to understand it as purely a reflection of the polling data (and 538's reliability scores for polls), and that polling data is inherently flawed. After all, there are only 2 ways to perform a perfectly accurate poll: either know the outcome a priori, or run the election. We shouldn't be too surprised when models like 538 fail to correctly predict the outcome, because that's not what they represent. It's an analytical tool for understanding the current state of polling.

by gh02t

5/20/2026 at 12:30:32 AM

Regularly referring to that ~30% spread as "one polling error" made this a lot more understandable than most statistics for many people.

by bryanlarsen

5/19/2026 at 10:13:59 PM

That's a core mechanic in games like Dispatch.

People don't like seeing a 95% chance of winning and then losing. The game tweaks the odds, so certain thresholds become gimmes (something like "if the displayed odds are better than 75%, treat them as 100%").

by bsimpson

5/19/2026 at 10:42:01 PM

That's stupid. That would piss me off.

by tantalor

5/20/2026 at 4:24:25 AM

Seems weird that it would piss you off, if you were really that invested in the cold hard stats you'd know that if it was fair rng you could still have been the 1 in 100,000 player that got lucky on 75% 40 times in a row.

by greycol

5/20/2026 at 1:37:14 AM

Conversely weather forecasters report a 40% chance of rain when the actual chance is 10% or similar.

So I have a bit of sympathy for people who don't have a good intuition for probabilities, given that the world is constantly gaslighting them.

by lmm

5/19/2026 at 11:41:33 PM

Fire Emblem does something complex with averaging random numbers to do the same thing - a 95% chance to hit becomes 99.5, and the reverse for low percentages.

by a_t48

5/19/2026 at 11:16:53 PM

> Discussion of stats models is always complicated by the fact that a lot of people will read "30%" as a "no" prediction and claim your model is wrong if the thing happens.

I've even heard things like "70% chance of Hillary winning means she gets 70% of the votes!" (and tangentially, my far-too-long argument with someone on Reddit who insisted "there is no way in hell 50% of the people in this town make above the median income"...)

by FireBeyond

5/19/2026 at 8:55:10 PM

I don't understand why this is surprising. People didn't go to FiveThirtyEight to marvel the science behind it. The science was just supposed to give you what you came there for: the actual election results.

In the end, it turned out that predicting elections is still very hard, and that for all the fanfare, FiveThirtyEight performed only slightly better than what you could find in any other reputable newspaper, so it kinda lost its appeal.

by lacewing

5/19/2026 at 9:37:03 PM

> FiveThirtyEight performed only slightly better than what you could find in any other reputable newspaper

FiveThirtyEight gave Trump double the odds of the next highest reputable prediction, which was The New York Times Upshot (15%). Princeton Election Consortium gave Trump less than 1%.

That is not "only slightly better" to anyone who's statistically literate.

A FiveThirtyEight reader in 2016 was significantly better calibrated regarding Clinton’s chances than a reader of other reputable newspapers.

by akio

5/19/2026 at 10:10:35 PM

This embodies what 538 and its defenders miss about 538's appeal:

People didn't come to 538 for explanations on subtle points of statistical literacy (although those were provided). They came because, for whatever reason, they wanted to know who would win the election.

People not trained in statistics treated like the scoreboard at a football game- it's always better to be winning, but score is a near perfect predictor in the last minute.

Once 538 stopped delivering perfect predictions and started delivering "Actually the difference between 1% and 30% are way bigger than you think" lectures, the appeal disappeared. There are better places to learn math from.

by Bratmon

5/19/2026 at 10:36:03 PM

Speak for yourself. That's not why I read FiveThirtyEight.

The purpose of FiveThirtyEight was never to be an oracle for the average person. It was always a deliberately wonky site for a wonky audience. They were very clear about that in the articles they published and topics they covered.

by akio

5/19/2026 at 11:08:15 PM

If we’re brutally honest the vast majority of 538 readers read it to be assured that the right outcome was outcoming.

by bombcar

5/19/2026 at 11:26:50 PM

They went to the wrong place then.

----

Nov. 1, 2016 — Election Update: Yes, Donald Trump Has A Path To Victory — https://archive.is/kwdab

> Tuesday was another pretty good day of polling for Donald Trump.

> Trump remains an underdog, but no longer really a longshot: His Electoral College chances are 29 percent in our polls-only model — his highest probability since Oct. 2 — and 30 percent in polls-plus.

> This isn’t a secure map for Clinton at all. In a race where the popular vote is roughly tied nationally, Colorado and New Hampshire are toss-ups, and Clinton’s chances are only 60 to 65 percent in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

> If you want to debate a campaign’s geographic planning, Hillary Clinton spending time in Arizona is a much worse decision than Trump hanging out in Michigan or Wisconsin.

----

Sept. 16, 2016 — How Trump Could Win The White House While Losing The Popular Vote — https://archive.is/rxP5l

> Using a prototype of a demographic election calculator that FiveThirtyEight will be unveiling in the next few weeks, I decided to simulate a few election scenarios.

> The result? Clinton would carry the popular vote by 1.5 percentage points. However, Trump would win the Electoral College with 280 votes by holding all 24 Romney states and flipping Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Iowa and Maine’s 2nd Congressional District from blue to red.

----

Jun 29, 2016 — Donald Trump Has A 20 Percent Chance Of Becoming President — https://archive.ph/ryIkP

> A 20 percent or 25 percent chance of Trump winning is an awfully long way from 2 percent, or 0.02 percent. It’s a real chance: about the same chance that the visiting team has when it trails by a run in the top of the eighth inning in a Major League Baseball game. If you’ve been following politics or sports over the past couple of years, I hope it’s been imprinted onto your brain that those purported long shots — sometimes much longer shots than Trump — sometimes come through.

----

FiveThirtyEight was probably the worst reputable source to read if you were looking for maximum assurances that Clinton would win.

by akio

5/19/2026 at 9:11:45 PM

538 was never about magically making polls more reliable, and only people that don't understand what polls are could think that (caveat: lots of people don't understand how polls work).

538 was about analyzing and communicating the information from those polls in an easily accessible form. If you came to the site for that, you weren't mad that they "predicted poorly something that was impossible to predict from the data sources they used" ... you were just mad at Trump for winning (despite polls suggesting otherwise).

by hungryhobbit

5/19/2026 at 9:40:54 PM

Again, I don't think any of this matters. People were not coming there to have "information communicated to them". They were coming there for the satisfaction of knowing the results before everyone else. And FiveThirtyEight couldn't realistically deliver on that.

by lacewing

5/19/2026 at 9:58:24 PM

That makes as much sense as visiting ESPN and expecting them to tell you who will definitely win the Super Bowl next year. Anyone expecting that is going to be disappointed often no matter what.

I thought it went without saying but a good analyst can't predict the future in politics, sports, or anything else. What they can do is make good probabilistic estimates of what is likely to happen. 538 wasn't pretending to do anything more than that.

If people want magic predictions there are plenty of touts and scammers willing to offer them, they don't need to waste time with charts and numbers though.

by rurp

5/20/2026 at 1:45:29 AM

> a good analyst can't predict the future in politics, sports, or anything else. What they can do is make good probabilistic estimates of what is likely to happen. 538 wasn't pretending to do anything more than that.

Well, sure, but how big is the market for that, really? Particularly for a binary outcome like an election, knowing who's going to win is fun, reading a pundit telling you who's going to win can be fun, but ultimately the man in the street is going to take whatever the pundit said and reduce it to candidate X or candidate Y, and you can only do so much better than replacement level at that.

by lmm

5/19/2026 at 9:50:03 PM

I think anyone who actually operates that way is very misguided, but it’s a fair point. But either way, 538 was such a nice site for just looking at the data in a fresh way at the time, and it’s a shame that went away.

If people are expecting anyone to have a magic prediction algorithm for things like this… I mean there’s only so much one can say. It’s not realistic.

by anon7000

5/19/2026 at 9:48:53 PM

I'm very curious to see how polymarket fairs, compared to the news agencies. I suspect prediction markets will be the norm, going forward. Polls can't fully capture the element of anonymity that's required for an accurate poll of something controversial.

by nomel

5/19/2026 at 11:10:15 PM

My experience was that prediction markets were lagging indicators and basically followed something akin to an aggregate opinion of polls.

This is especially viewable if you watch them during the 2020 election.

by bombcar

5/20/2026 at 3:04:52 AM

> it turned out that predicting elections is still very hard

So maybe we shouldn't be doing it. The value of predicting an election in the large out in public seems kind of dubious, and it's more like gambling than actually being useful. A candidate only runs, and continues running, if they think they can win. All predictions like these do is confuse voters leading up to election day and while they are voting. It keep candidates from making strong cases for their platform, keeps the voters from listening to the candidates' platforms, and encourages team-based partisan politics.

by thwarted

5/20/2026 at 4:24:12 AM

Predictions are like exit polls, aren't they, in that they're both able to provide a check on official election results?

Think that's outweighed by the negatives?

by Barbing

5/20/2026 at 9:21:27 AM

No. They can’t be used to verify election results. There’s too many confounding factors.

by mulmen

5/19/2026 at 9:23:11 PM

Polls became much less interesting as an Entertainment category once we all had experience with how unreliable they are.

by ghostbrainalpha

5/19/2026 at 9:41:15 PM

I can't find the source anymore since 538 is no more, and I recall Nate even describing what could (and did) happen, which was that one swing state moving to the right had a high likelihood of them all moving to the right.

by Sparkle-san

5/19/2026 at 10:02:56 PM

Yeah, Nate has talked a number of times about polling errors being correlated across states. In fact that's probably one of the most common mistakes models can make, treating correlated inputs as independent. There's a long history of that mistake in financial markets as well.

In 2024 the single most likely outcome his model had was trump winning all 7 swing states. The second most likely was Harris winning all 7.

by rurp

5/19/2026 at 8:38:58 PM

Not just that, predictions also impact voter participation.

by Retric

5/19/2026 at 8:53:43 PM

I think this is all true, but it dodges the bigger issue. A presidential election has a binary outcome: yes/no, win/lose. If your statistical model doesn’t contain this single bit in its output, then it doesn’t meet the minimum requirement for being a prediction.

Now you might say that it was on me as a consumer to understand this in 2016, but I remember the look of total shock on Nate Silver’s face when he called the winner on live TV that night, so clearly he didn’t really understand it either. Lesson learned for all of us, I guess.

by munchler

5/20/2026 at 8:39:11 AM

> If your statistical model doesn’t contain this single bit in its output, then it doesn’t meet the minimum requirement for being a prediction.

I would be fascinated to know how you model a coin flip.

by causalmodels

5/20/2026 at 1:11:32 PM

Well, that’s my point. You can model a coin flip, but you can’t predict it. A model and a prediction are two different things.

by munchler

5/19/2026 at 9:43:59 PM

It was 30% in the end, before the nomination it famously gave him a 2% chance of getting nominated. All the talk about 30% is disingenuous

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FiveThirtyEight#2016_U.S._elec...

by FergusArgyll

5/20/2026 at 11:38:49 AM

From the article:

> Being dismissive of Trump’s chances early on in the Republican primary was the biggest analytical mistake of my career, and I think I deserved a lot of blame for that.

He went on to write a whole retrospective, which is exactly what you'd want to see:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160527093831/https://fivethirt...

So unless your standard is "pollsters must be perfect at all times", I dunno what else should be asked of Silver here.

by Brendinooo

5/20/2026 at 12:19:36 PM

I'm fine with him[0]. I don't like the apologists who explain patronizingly that 30% odds happen 3/10 times. He gave Trump much much lower odds early on and only put it at 30 in the last few weeks.

[0] I'd say the better defense of him is: the whole model is built on polls, the pollsters stink, people should complain about pollsters, not their aggregators.

by FergusArgyll

5/20/2026 at 1:47:03 AM

They had him at 30% at a time when most reputable media had him in single digits at best. You might not remember now, but the result of that election was a real shock.

by lmm

5/19/2026 at 8:34:31 PM

If I say you have a 50% chance to win a coin flip and you lose it, that doesn't mean I'm wrong.

A key thing though is 538 did regularly test the calibration their models: https://web.archive.org/web/20190410030104/https://fivethirt...

> "What you’ll find, though, is that our calibration has generally been very, very good. For instance, out of the 5,589 events (between sports and politics combined) that we said had a 70 chance of happening (rounded to the nearest 5 percent), they in fact occurred 71 percent of the time. Or of the 55,853 events that we said had about a 5 percent chance of occurring, they happened 4 percent of the time."

by legitster

5/19/2026 at 10:54:12 PM

Huh. I first started listening to 538 in the run-up to the 2016 election and started really paying attention to them precisely because their 30% figure was so much higher than all the other polls. It was shocking to me then (and still is now reading your comment) that people didn’t seem to understand that 30% in the context of that particular election and that particular candidate suggested a remarkably high chance of winning, not a really low chance of winning. It’s a strange thing where people seem to think that less than 50% = not happening.

by baubino

5/19/2026 at 8:47:43 PM

I really think a majority of NYTimes and ABCnews consumers don't know the difference between a 2/3 chance (super close) of winning and 2/3 of the vote (a landslide).

by jp57

5/19/2026 at 9:37:13 PM

Apparently neither do a big chunk of HN readers.

by Traster

5/19/2026 at 9:58:51 PM

That’s like saying “there was only a 30 percent chance of rain today and it rained, so I will never look at the weather forecast again.”

by reed1234

5/19/2026 at 9:04:34 PM

We should have a drinking game in Nate Silver thread anyone complains about 2016 prediction. Then everyone piles on to point out how probabilities work.

by softwaredoug

5/20/2026 at 4:39:30 AM

I long ago stopped commenting on threads (in /r/CFB) about the SP+ college football model because it go so, so, so tiring correcting the exact same misunderstandings about things as fundamental as what the model was even purporting to do let alone, how it worked. It is incredibly disheartening to me to see the staggering level of statistical illiteracy on display in any online conversation about a statistical model. I've come to the conclusion that it's not worth my, or any one else's time. I'm glad these things exist, and the communities who want them will self select. It's not use trying to convert haters.

by MostlyStable

5/20/2026 at 9:28:12 PM

I've long resigned myself to the fact that a lay audience will usually struggle to understand basic statistics. On HN though I don't expect to see those same issues much but have been surprised to see how many posters have trouble differentiating between 30%, 50%, and 99% probabilities.

by rurp

5/19/2026 at 9:59:39 PM

It wasn't even a complaint, just a personal anecdote to help share some context as to why the site may have failed to retain consumer interest post-2016.

But yes I'll join you with the liver damage and drink 17 shots.

by ninth_ant

5/19/2026 at 8:28:06 PM

Because they said trump only had a 30% chance to win?

What if they had said 49%? Would that have made their prediction worthless?

by shawabawa3

5/19/2026 at 8:32:12 PM

I mean everyone said he had a snowball’s chance in hell and then we ended up with him for two terms because the Democrats can’t stop fighting over the worse possible candidates to back that no one is asking for.

by bellowsgulch

5/19/2026 at 8:43:29 PM

Everyone said that except for 538. That's why 538 was worth reading.

by ntonozzi

5/19/2026 at 8:42:25 PM

I find it interesting to blame it on the democrats. We ended up with him because enough people voted for him.

by palata

5/19/2026 at 10:10:58 PM

The Democrats reliably back the color "beige" as a candidate. Obama was different, and he won back to back. Biden succeeded, barely, because Trump was fresh in everyone's mind. But for some reason the Democrats have been allergic to charisma for far too long.

Voting in the US, it feels like I am forced to choose between evil and incompetence.

by xmcp123

5/20/2026 at 1:00:19 AM

Your description sounds more like evil vs boring, which is an easy choice for me.

And frankly I’ll vote for incompetence over evil too. Because, y’know, evil.

by macintux

5/20/2026 at 12:40:34 PM

Hell, when it comes to government, I easily prefer boring to not-boring in an executive all else being equal. Which it wasn't here, but still.

I want the firebrands with big ideas to improve things in the legislature, and steady hands on the tiller in the executive. Unfortunately it seems that my compatriots want firebrands in both places.

by amalcon

5/20/2026 at 12:58:50 PM

I don’t think the choice is necessarily boring vs firebrands.

Obama is a great example. He was not a firebrand, not boring, and was elected twice in a row.

Charisma matters.

by xmcp123

5/20/2026 at 1:16:52 PM

Obama is a very unique case. I wouldn't exactly call him a firebrand, but his public persona managed to give the perception of being a steady hand on the tiller who also had big ideas. The only other presidential candidate in my lifetime to give a similar impression was Al Gore, but he leaned more into the "steady hand" thing to his detriment. He also, as you note, had far less charisma than Obama.

by amalcon

5/20/2026 at 1:47:08 PM

I think you would be surprised by how not completely unique Obama was!

The Democrats have had a number of pretty high quality, charismatic candidates, but for some reason they never receive the party backing on the national stage, at least not for the presidency.

The Democrats seem to lean in to almost inheriting nominations. Hillary Clinton, Biden, Kamala, etc.

“The heir apparent”.

Honestly the most unique thing about Obama Was that they broke from “the heir apparent” and ran someone who had risen up from the state level and was merely a high quality congressman for a short period of time.

by xmcp123

5/20/2026 at 4:46:23 PM

I mean, I followed the 2020 primary. Basically everyone who thought they had an outside chance seemed to be running there. I liked Buttigeg and Booker then, because they most fit the Obama mold -- well-spoken, charismatic, unifying rhetoric, credible claims (at the time) that they could take on the establishment, no serious baggage. Realistically, both were closer to Al Gore than Obama in execution, but still.

Booker clearly never had a chance in the primary to begin with, even moreso than Harris. Buttigeg suffered from never finding a strong enough constituency -- he wasn't loud enough to pull from the populist wing (who went to Bernie), but never made a serious play for any of the other major wings. He couldn't do that the way Biden did (by calling in favors with other popular Democrats) because he didn't have the connections, but didn't even try to do it the way Warren did (by advocating specific policies).

Meanwhile, Bernie never really tried to expand his coalition outside the populist and leftist wings (which he basically took all of). It turns out that those groups are not enough to win a democratic primary on their own. He was also perceived as a liability in the general -- remember, Democrats hadn't totally given up on Florida yet, and embracing the term "socialism" is a massive liability there.

Warren was somewhat effective in building a broad coalition, and had a similar strategy to Obama. She maybe could've pulled off that style of insurgent campaign. Her candidacy was doomed because of two factors: first, she is just not charismatic enough to compete with Bernie for the populist and leftist wings, but they are absolutely required for an insurgent campaign. Second, even if she had won the primary, she is a massive liability in the general election for a lot of reasons -- which ensured she was never going to win a primary when the primary concern was stopping the bleeding that Donald Trump was seemingly-deliberately causing.

Once you've ruled out Booker, Buttigeg, Sanders, and Warren, you're basically left with Biden vs. a crowd of other boring people. Is it really surprising that the guy who can barter for endorsements and trade on Obama's legacy managed to beat people like Klobuchar?

Now, you might say it's possible that those people (Booker, Buttigeg, Sanders, Warren) would have all made better candidates than Harris in 2024, and could have succeeded with Biden out of the field. I'd agree with that! I am not trying to argue that none of these people are better than Harris; I'm trying to argue that none of them are what Obama is. They were either trying to do something very different than what he did, or much worse at it. They all also lost significant "outsider" cred by 2024 for various reasons.

by amalcon

5/20/2026 at 12:57:35 PM

I call it incompetent because this style of uncharismatic beige has repeatedly failed to be elected, but keep being run in general elections.

I vote for the incompetence too, it’s just very fucking frustrating.

by xmcp123

5/20/2026 at 1:50:54 AM

Yes and no. It's a two-party system and a lot of people vote for candidate X to stop candidate Y getting in. Indeed IIRC a lot of democrat messaging around the previous election was explicitly about stopping Trump rather than the merits of whoever their guy was.

by lmm

5/20/2026 at 6:42:34 AM

Enough people did not vote against Trump is my point. "The democrats" voted against Trump, otherwise they don't really count as part of "the democrats" for this election, right?

by palata

5/20/2026 at 12:00:03 PM

> Enough people did not vote against Trump is my point.

The argument is that there were enough people who voted against Biden-Harris, or against the DNC process, to swing it.

by lmm

5/19/2026 at 9:28:29 PM

And he won the popular vote if you believe that all U.S. elections are secure and sacrosanct. He is diabolical at getting people to talk about him and think about him constantly.

Joe Biden on the other hand was a senile wrecker for Build Back Better and the party finally made "the switch" to unelected Harris far too late in the process. Even if she was a great candidate, with her odd laughter and fascination with buses, there was not enough time to shape her candidacy. Her VP candidate choice was hobbled by rising anti-semitism in the party against Shapiro and perhaps concerns of being outshined by him. No, the Democrats did not do themselves any favors in the '24 election.

Carter, Clinton and Obama were media creations, vaulting to national prominence out of nowhere. It helped that Clinton and Obama were great, charismatic choices.

Now the traditional media is fragmented and weak. You're not seeing furtive vaulting attempts for potential phenoms like Newsome gain any traction. Who is the media going to be stuck with next time? Will it be take-two for Harris?

WHEN, not if, Harris loses bigly to Vance, then the Democrats will absolutely be to blame. Where are their all new shiny, beautiful, erudite candidates that would need all four years to gestate and promote? Shouldn't we be getting acquainted with them now? I wager they're not going to appear, and we'll get more flunkies. My theory as to why is that those currently in power in the party do not share; they're aging out and hollowing out the party in the process. We're to the point now of collapse. I'm surprised a third party on the left hasn't yet formed.

by dwoldrich

5/20/2026 at 7:27:58 AM

> Even if she was a great candidate, with her odd laughter and fascination with buses, there was not enough time to shape her candidacy.

I don't think anyone who would have ever voted for her actually cared at all about her laugh. I do think that she'd have done much better with more time though. I also agree that Democrats are too invested in themselves and the status quo to put forward a candidate who will make the kinds of meaningful changes that Democratic voters actually want. If a third party were viable I think a lot of registered democrats would be eager to jump ship, but in order for that to happen we'd need elected officials willing to make major voting reforms which at this point would take a third party.

by autoexec

5/20/2026 at 2:33:38 PM

> I also agree that Democrats are too invested in themselves and the status quo to put forward a candidate who will make the kinds of meaningful changes that Democratic voters actually want.

The old saying "the customer doesn't know what they want" seems true of the average Democratic voter. I look at the Democratic party planks as primarily boomer-era causes increasingly misaligned with technological progress and social evolution.

I see average Democratic voters as wistful and earnest, but ultimately not (yet? ever?) grounded with a cohesive vision for modern/future American society _at scale_. In my opinion, the moment for a legitimate new vision to emerge was Occupy Wall Street. All that movement seemed to yield for the grassroots was an acquaintance with homelessness culture.

by dwoldrich

5/20/2026 at 6:45:46 AM

Yeah I think the presidential election system may be the one to blame. Only two parties, both very much "to the right", doesn't feel like a sane system anymore. IMO the better way is to have the government represent the people, and representing the people generally means enough politicians and having to go for a consensus.

by palata

5/20/2026 at 2:51:16 PM

Somehow "centrist" has taken on a negative connotation in Democratic circles, but I don't understand it. Far left politics are wrecker politics that have their moments and then (hopefully) get sent back to the political desert for a generation.

Governing in a sustainable way usually means big tent politics with give and take on the small stuff. Bill Clinton epitomized that style.

by dwoldrich

5/19/2026 at 9:00:18 PM

The blame is put on democrats because when they lose its because they don’t turn out and when they win its because they do. It is quite simple really. Republicans are far more reliable voters. You can look at vote totals and see this pattern. Massive delta for democrats election over election and usually half that delta for republicans.

by kjkjadksj

5/20/2026 at 12:54:43 AM

Every politician is to blame for their losses, just as every politician own their wins. The people voted for Trump because the Dems failed to get the people to vote for them.

by jojobas

5/19/2026 at 8:42:48 PM

do you think nate silver is part of the problem or part of the solution?

the turnout-of-demographic-groups-based election model is surely the underlying intelligence failure here.

by doctorpangloss

5/19/2026 at 9:09:44 PM

Democrats will not let people choose candidates because that may be too dangerous for their interests. We'll never get good candidates as long as the current leadership is in control.

by coliveira

5/19/2026 at 9:13:29 PM

Do you not have primaries where you are?

by amanaplanacanal

5/19/2026 at 9:47:48 PM

What position was Kamala Harris in the DNC Primaries before she was appointed as the General Election Candidate? First place? Second Place?

Surely she must have been in the top 3?

by oceanplexian

5/19/2026 at 11:46:10 PM

Not sure what you think they should have done? There is no way to reorganize primaries that late in the year.

It totally sucks that nobody tried to convince Biden not to run again before the primaries started though.

by amanaplanacanal

5/20/2026 at 5:46:53 AM

Plenty tried, old Joe thought he’ll clutch it out again. People were trying to dissuade him from running in 2023 already.

by adamors

5/19/2026 at 11:15:32 PM

Denying that the democrats had two high-profile situations where the “wrong” candidate ended up running is denying the obvious. It’s manifest that Obama wasn’t to win the primary, and that the superdelegates exist for reasons.

by bombcar

5/19/2026 at 8:59:47 PM

When pressed before the election, Silver did not explain where Trump's much higher probability of winning came from. He predicted a Trump loss, Trump won, and he claimed victory because he gave Trump a better chance of winning. There's no way that strategy could have failed.

by bachmeier

5/19/2026 at 9:40:37 PM

Silver claimed that his model was better because it predicted a high correlation between PA/MI/WI.

A model that predicts a 30% chance of winning the election will be wrong 1 out of 3 times, which is not quite a coin flip but close enough.

by bonzini

5/19/2026 at 9:17:03 PM

Nate Silver is not a magician! He can't magically make polls reliable!

All he (or anyone) can do is interpret or analyse poll results, and then surface their findings in a way a larger audience can understand. 538 did that better than any other poll analyst ... but they all got it wrong because the polls themselves were faulty.

TLDR; You can't get water from a stone, and no one (not even Nate Silver) can get perfectly accurate predictions from (inherently flawed) polls!

by hungryhobbit

5/19/2026 at 11:22:27 PM

> All he (or anyone) can do is interpret or analyse poll results, and then surface their findings in a way a larger audience can understand.

He (or anybody) can make adjustments to the data. He was challenged to explain why his predictions were so different, but he wouldn't do it.

> 538 did that better than any other poll analyst

He made a binary prediction, and it was wrong. There's no such thing as "better" when you only have one outcome. Your prediction is either right or wrong. If by "better" you mean he was wrong but assigned a higher probability to a Trump victory, the best forecaster would have been someone that mechanically changed the probability of a Trump victory to slightly less than 50% no matter what the data said.

by bachmeier

5/19/2026 at 8:54:17 PM

538 used the example of Trump having approximately the same chance of winning the 2016 presidential election as the Cavaliers had of winning the NBA championship round vs the Warriors. Both Trump and the Cavaliers won with a ~25% predicted chance.

538 made very clear with this analogy that both Trump and the Cavs were underdogs, and that both had a solid chance of winning.

by bryanlarsen

5/20/2026 at 5:47:35 PM

Hard to believe that even 10 years later, people who don’t understand probability are still hung up on an event with a 30% chance of happening, happening.

by NeutralCrane

5/19/2026 at 8:31:12 PM

FiveThirtyEight gave Trump a 30% chance. Their reporting did make clear that with margin was within the range of a normal polling error. And sometimes you get more than a normal polling error.

It doesn't help that the US has a terrible election system that often leads to small margins in some states being decisive.

by fabian2k

5/19/2026 at 8:47:19 PM

> FiveThirtyEight gave Trump a 30% chance.

I know I'm being super conspiratorial here but why wouldn't all forecasters predict just between 30% - 70%? That way if they're "right" they can take the credit for it and if they're wrong they can say "well, we weren't that wrong". That's probably what I'd do anyway...

by kypro

5/19/2026 at 9:01:22 PM

It implies a close race or a strong reason to believe there's some sort of systemic polling miss, and if it's a blowout you still look pretty bad. Especially if you don't have some kind of good explanation for the miss/you keep making those kinds of misses frequently.

Also there's more going in those forecasts besides just the "% chance to win". There's expected results in terms of %'s of the vote for the candidates, and that's what people tend to focus on for actually analyzing your performance and credibility after the fact.

You getting the outcome correct but being off by 20 points on the margin is a much worse performance than you getting the outcome wrong but being within 0.5 points of the margin. (ex: Results are 49.75/50.25, you predicted 30/70, another outlet predicted 50.25/49.75).

by volkl48

5/19/2026 at 11:18:46 PM

538 claimed that they post-checked thousands of elections and their percentages were pretty close. (E.g., 30% chances happened about 30% of the time, million to one chances happened every single time)

by bombcar

5/19/2026 at 8:49:09 PM

Of course there's more than that. Predicting higher uncertainty than warranted would be a different failure in the model. But that didn't really happen in that election.

by fabian2k

5/20/2026 at 1:35:53 AM

> I know I'm being super conspiratorial here but why wouldn't all forecasters predict just between 30% - 70%? That way if they're "right" they can take the credit for it and if they're wrong they can say "well, we weren't that wrong". That's probably what I'd do anyway...

For anyone making many predictions, you can analyze the outcomes to see how accurate those percentages are.

For anyone making few predictions, you should never trust their track record even if it's technically perfect.

by Dylan16807

5/19/2026 at 9:12:15 PM

You're completely right, although I believe this number was not decided personally. They just happened to pick algorithms that have this "nice" property because it will lead to the same result.

by coliveira

5/19/2026 at 8:59:15 PM

I think this gets to the core of why a lot of this election prediction stuff doesn't work. People just don't parse the numbers the way the authors intend.

FiveThirtyEight had Trump at a 30% chance of winning, and he won. The model wasn't wrong. The less likely of two outcomes occurred. Even if they'd had him at 1% they still wouldn't technically have been wrong though I think complaints might be more warranted.

If they had Trump at 49% would you have still been angry? What about at 51%? Would it have been okay then?

by afavour

5/19/2026 at 9:04:43 PM

Technically this is right. But if that is the case (and it seems to be), then a coin flip is better than their models. Because we only care about the current election, not a sequence of 1000 elections (which will not happen, by the way).

by coliveira

5/19/2026 at 9:59:55 PM

So use a coin flip to predict the weather then

by reed1234

5/19/2026 at 10:25:11 PM

We already do that in Denver.

by thederke

5/19/2026 at 9:13:44 PM

> But if that is the case (and it seems to be), then a coin flip is better than their models.

If a coin flip is the necessary mental model to remind you both things can happen, then sure.

People just love horse race coverage. Silver gave us the most accurate horse race coverage. Maybe the lesson is stop following horse race coverage.

But most people went back to the tea leave readers. That way when the election was over, it can justifiably be the charlatan's fault that viewers got over-invested in their predictive capabilities.

by dogleash

5/19/2026 at 9:11:02 PM

I don’t disagree, I think the tea leaf reading is ultimately pretty futile.

But at the same time I do think it’s valid to say it’s more than a coin flip. The polling data over the election cycle showed that Trump had a smaller but still legitimate chance of winning. The data was different in 2020, when he lost.

by afavour

5/19/2026 at 8:47:51 PM

A dice roll has a 16.6% chance of landing on any given side, meaning an 83% chance of not landing on that side.

If you guessed a "two", and it landed on "two, I wouldn't really be that impressed, even though there was an 83% probability going against you.

by tombert

5/19/2026 at 10:41:25 PM

As a younger man I would have been with the commenters mansplaining probability, but I've aged into realizing that thinking of the election like a marble pulled from an urn whose contents we have probed with polling is just as bad as thinking of it as deterministic. The reason people read fivethirtyeight, probability-savvy or not, was almost entirely to be told what was going to happen, which is sort of incompatible with feeling you can do anything about it. In that way it's probably worse than old-fashioned pundit-driven horse race coverage because it has an air of scientific authority.

by topaz0

5/19/2026 at 8:39:09 PM

> Call it emotional, naive, unfair or whatever you want

Yep definitely all those.

Why is it so hard to admit 30% is not 0%?

by tekla

5/20/2026 at 12:18:28 AM

If you use 538 data, on average you make money betting. Its more correct than not

by cm2012

5/19/2026 at 11:28:30 PM

> Call it emotional, naive, unfair or whatever you want

We would need a pass from the mods lol.

by albedoa

5/19/2026 at 8:44:11 PM

Nate was a huge outlier in that prediction, he gave trump a better chance than almost anyone else that I can recall, so why are you mad at him about that?

What made me mad is Nate seemed to turn into a MAGA troll himself after that election.

by jackmott42

5/19/2026 at 8:16:29 PM

In situations like this I always wonder if there's a decision maker somewhere in the pipeline who just has values and a mental model of the world that's entirely foreign to me - for whom the idea of deleting a decade+ of content from the web doesn't strike them as bad in the slightest.

by simonw

5/19/2026 at 10:23:56 PM

I can easily see the argument that once an election is over, people don't read the content anymore. Granted, storage is cheap so this is kinda silly, but I bet the old articles weren't getting very much traffic.

by panda888888

5/19/2026 at 8:24:18 PM

I would actually say that for most business people this is all "about numbers" and aren't in the slightest worried about deleting something.

This is why efforts like Internet Archive and others are so important. Whatever you think of 538, it _is_ history, and in this digital world it needs to be preserved.

by outside1234

5/19/2026 at 8:20:08 PM

> The thinking at Disney is presumably that they invested a lot of money in FiveThirtyEight and were left with nothing to show for it. But to my mind, however much they spent on FiveThirtyEight, they never invested a dollar in it. There was never really any effort, or even any pretense of trying, to make it a profitable unit of the company. At one point, other senior staffers and I basically begged Disney to turn on a paywall, figuring this could provide some security, and were told, essentially, that it just wasn’t worth Disney’s bandwidth to figure out the mechanics of one.

I cannot tell you how much of my professional career I have seen this play out again and again and again.

There is an "executive class" in this country that has never had a real job or done real work. They were born to privilege, they went to elite schools, got their first check from a major consultancy, and then spend their whole career bouncing from C-suite to C-suite. They stare at slides all day, occasionally make a meaningful decision, and more or less spend their time insulating themselves from failure.

This may not describe everyone in charge at every major company, but it describes enough to explain why everything in our economy just feels like it's piggybacking off of a handful of actually good businesses.

by legitster

5/19/2026 at 10:32:36 PM

It's remarkably ironic that we are slowly returning to aristocracy.

Only it's worse this time. Say what you want about those French poofs and British lords: they were expected to do their duty on the battlefield.

by TitaRusell

5/20/2026 at 1:55:22 PM

To be fair, this is the second time the US has done a "trial run" on this sort of oligarchy. The Robber Barons of the First Gilded Age left their names on a lot of buildings in the country and left a lot of scars in several major industries.

by WorldMaker

5/19/2026 at 8:25:28 PM

Insulation in our society has gone all the way up and down.

by forshaper

5/19/2026 at 9:04:23 PM

It's not the full story, but it's certainly a large part of it.

I'll chime in tangentially with another large part: the disproportionate share of both asset and liquid wealth held by people who are some combination of a) Baby Boomers, b) in the top percentiles of wealth/income, c) politically- or socially-connected. As you say, it's not all of them, but enough of them. At the confluence of the two groups is a desire not to invest in potentially risky ventures, or to spend on consumption, but instead to put as much money as possible into a narrow band of low-risk, often passive investments, and to pull every lever possible to protect those investments, even when they become outmoded in some regard and the income stream or economic activity that supports their high (growing) valuation dries up.

Supporting this paradigm (ostensibly so that seniors don't die in poverty, so that strategically-important businesses and ventures are backstopped, etc., but, crucially, to the detriment of all other concerns) means an erosion of a sort of "constructive inefficiency": "wasted" spending on ventures that might not work out, on employees who are not the best and most productive, on niche services and products, which altogether represent a massive share of potential economic activity that is much better at involving and supporting a diverse population with diverse needs and diverse skill sets that perhaps have not yet found the correct outlet to produce maximal value.

Your C-suite goons and my rich, highly networked seniors don't care about the potential of a paradigm shift to support and enable short-term losers, though. They just want to pile into the sure-thing of your "actually good businesses" (which, in many cases, aren't actually that good).

by underlipton

5/19/2026 at 10:01:00 PM

Easy to go after Disney for this, but did Nate have to sell to ESPN to begin with?

I've been burned too many times subscribing to services that go to shit because the owner wanted their payday. Let's stop (only) blaming the buyer.

by pupppet

5/19/2026 at 10:03:59 PM

He literally said he made the wrong choice by choosing ESPN, so he's in agreement with you.

by applfanboysbgon

5/19/2026 at 10:36:03 PM

Yes, but he's failing to see the big picture. Selling any small company to any big company leads to this risk. To hold water, his argument should be: "we shouldn't have sold the business at all," not "we shouldn't have sold to ESPN."

I personally don't love ESPN/Disney/ABC, but basically all major corporations that make acquisitions do this. Google does it all the time. It's very clearly a known risk when you sell a startup. I don't have much sympathy.

by panda888888

5/19/2026 at 10:42:19 PM

It wouldn't have been a business to begin with if he didn't sell it. At the time, it was just a blog driving a modest amount of ad revenue. Partnering with bigger outfits allowed him to hire staff and cover more ground, something that he could never do without outside investment. He has since returned to blogging, which to my understanding drives enough revenue for himself and exactly one assistant.

I replied to your comment, and now you've replied to two other threads I've commented in reiterating that Nate is a sore loser who deserves what he got and he should have expected this. To be honest, it sounds like you have some kind of personal grievance with him. His post doesn't come off like he wasn't expecting this outcome, or that it's devastating him. He mentions that he is significantly happier now having gone back to blogging than he was at Disney. It's just a blog post, about a big era of his life, which is now over with. He's human. He can feel disappointed that 15 years of his work was taken offline, and reminisce about the ways things went wrong, both on his and his employer's end.

by applfanboysbgon

5/21/2026 at 5:49:27 AM

I guess I read the tone of his blog post a little differently than you did. I basically interpreted it as boiling down to "disney sucks" and while he did admit to making some mistakes, IMO he didn't take nearly enough personal responsibility for the situation ending up with what we have today. I can empathize because it obviously is a disappointing result, but I interpreted the blog post as basically a complaint against his ex-employer (a "how could they have done this!" type of thing), not as a mature reflection that recognizes that he himself effectively caused this result. If he had said, "I shouldn't have been a sellout to ANY big corp," I'd feel differently.

by panda888888

5/19/2026 at 10:15:13 PM

The focus of the stories making the rounds about this are not about Nate having made some mistake, they're about big bad Disney deleting someone's work (which yes is also true).

by pupppet

5/19/2026 at 7:55:47 PM

Some of Disney’s most valuable properties—ESPN, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars—were acquired. FiveThirtyEight may be smaller, but it should be in Disney’s self-interest to set things right and earn a reputation for being a good home for acquisitions.

by divbzero

5/19/2026 at 8:17:57 PM

Berkshire Hathaway has this attitude, with the proviso that the corporate management at the acquired firm must be competent, and the firm be profitable and protected by a "moat."

It's amazing that they trot out Sees Candy every year for the shareholders' meeting when they own GEICO.

It seems that Disney isn't doing this quite right.

by chasil

5/19/2026 at 8:49:19 PM

For one thing See's Candy is fundamentally a value-added operation and GEICO is a positive cash flow financial structure which remains competitive by trying not to remove as much value from the customer as the next guy.

by fuzzfactor

5/19/2026 at 10:32:39 PM

See's Candy is also what Charlie Munger considered their shift from distressed companies to high quality companies; its sentimental on a company level because it represented a real shift in investment philosophy.

by crazypyro

5/19/2026 at 9:32:15 PM

Sees Candy made the wiki.

Services & retailing: Ben Bridge Jeweler, Business Wire, Dairy Queen, McLane Company, NetJets, Oriental Trading Company, Pampered Chef, See's Candies, Star Furniture, WPLG

Manufacturing: Benjamin Moore & Co., Clayton Homes, CTB International, Duracell, Fruit of the Loom, Johns Manville, Lubrizol, Precision Castparts Corp, Scott Fetzer Company, Garan Inc

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkshire_Hathaway

by chasil

5/19/2026 at 8:15:27 PM

> ESPN, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars

And all of those have declined in reputation since their acquisition or soon after.

by slg

5/19/2026 at 9:47:09 PM

That's not remotely true.

Disney bought ESPN in 1996, Marvel in 2009 (literally had 2 movies released here and one of them flopped) and Pixar in 2006.

For Pixar, they and Disney were joined at the hip even before acquisition. Besides distribution rights, Disney had full sequel rights to almost all of Pixar's catalogue at the time. Disney could have made a sequel to Finding Nemo, The Incredibles etc even without Pixar's blessing or involvement. There is quite literally no Pixar without Disney.

Marvel? Their most successful years were under Disney. ESPN did not become the media empire you know it as until well after Disney's acquisition either.

by famouswaffles

5/19/2026 at 10:30:24 PM

I specifically said reputation. Disney has a history of buying properties and squeezing every last dollar out of them until nothing is left but a husk of what they were at their peak. Disney certainly got their money’s worth out of those purchases. I’m not denying that. But the reputation of all of them has been on a steep decline even if there were temporary spikes after the acquisition.

I’ll grant you that “soon after” might have been a stretch for ESPN, but it’s obviously true for the others. Almost all of Pixar’s most enduring films had their start before Disney bought the company. The same is true with Marvel. Sure, Disney’s fanfare might have played before the Avengers films, but those movies were the brainchild of Kevin Fiege, who was already in charge before the Disney purchase. You can maybe claim Disney has a good eye for finding companies on an upward trajectory, but these are all examples of Disney management’s failure to be a long-term steward of their acquisitions.

by slg

5/20/2026 at 12:39:13 AM

>Disney has a history of buying properties and squeezing every last dollar out of them until nothing is left but a husk of what they were at their peak

Only if you don't know what you're talking about.

>But the reputation of all of them has been on a steep decline even if there were temporary spikes after the acquisition.

None of these were 'temporary spikes'. Marvel was on an unprecedented high for a decade. If that is a temporary spike then almost every company’s successful era would count as a temporary spike.

>Almost all of Pixar’s most enduring films had their start before Disney bought the company.

Did you not read what I said?

Pixar’s pre-acquisition slate was already deeply tied to Disney. Disney co-produced and distributed those films, and the relationship was so significant that Disney had rights to continue all but one of their properties even without Pixar’s involvement. That's pretty much unheard of.

Any success you can attribute to Pixar pre-acquisition, you can attribute to Disney as well. Moreover, it would be silly to claim Pixar has been mismanaged simply because arguably the most succesfull animation run in history did not go on forever. Pixar has been managed fine.

>Sure, Disney’s fanfare might have played before the Avengers films, but those movies were the brainchild of Kevin Fiege, who was already in charge before the Disney purchase.

Feige was in charge of Marvel Studios, not all of Marvel Entertainment, and his position was not necessarily secure under the old structure. He had well-known conflicts with Ike Perlmutter, who had significant authority over Marvel at the time.

It was Disney who re-structured Marvel Studios to be semi autonomous, answering only to Alan Horn and the Walt Disney Film Studios Division. Regardless, Kevin is still in charge of Marvel Studios and Disney has left the arrangement largely the same, so blaming the current situation on Disney specific mismanagement would be very strange.

by famouswaffles

5/19/2026 at 11:05:28 PM

Yeah, Disney, the company that recently tried to bankrupt several novelists by claiming that when they bought Star Wars, they didn't put themselves on the hook for respecting contracts that Lucas signed. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/sta...

Disney has never given a single f*ck about that reputation, but the chiefs who agree to these acquisitions never had to care about that.

by Eric_WVGG

5/19/2026 at 8:37:00 PM

They're running with their heads down, for at least as long as the current administration exists.

by browningstreet

5/19/2026 at 8:42:24 PM

> earn a reputation for being a good home for acquisitions.

It's way too late for that to be possible any more.

by ConceptJunkie

5/19/2026 at 8:14:43 PM

What a delightfully educational article on how the corporate world works

by cm2012

5/19/2026 at 8:41:30 PM

it was super interesting. My gut was like, jesus christ, if you don't live in New York City, seriously, absolutely nobody gives a single flying fuck about any of this stuff!

by doctorpangloss

5/20/2026 at 4:45:34 AM

I enjoyed FiveThirtyEight back in the day, but does anyone actually go back and look at the old posts? They were very much of the moment. I'd imagine the vast vast majority of the traffic to them is robots.

I can see why they wouldn't be a priority to keep up. For archival purposes, I'd think everything is still in the internet archive?

Nate seems to try to justify this a touch, saying he personally was looking for a specific article. Kind of a special case there…

by kenferry

5/20/2026 at 5:45:06 AM

> For archival purposes, I'd think everything is still in the internet archive?

I encourage anyone who thinks this is true to actually look for things in the internet archive and report back success. If you have the original exact URL you might be able to easily find something in the wayback machine, but if you have only a vague inclination that something existed and a general timeframe, it's a needle in a haystack. The wayback machine is, also extremely slow to retrieve data.

by Shank

5/19/2026 at 9:23:27 PM

RIP 538's burrito bracket from 2014

by jerlam

5/21/2026 at 2:54:57 AM

If you cared so much about it, why did you sell it?

by randyrand

5/20/2026 at 1:48:17 AM

what i miss most about 538: whether it’s elections or the play offs, nothing comes close to how clean and fun the data interaction felt. i would constantly refresh any time a game finished or when a started called a candidate. i wonder who the front end engineer was, and what they’re doing now. would love for them to be building more fun ways to be interacting with data.

by omot

5/19/2026 at 7:44:03 PM

A Pew study of a random sample of Internet links conducted in October 2023 found significant “link rot”: almost 40 percent of links that had been active 10 years earlier were broken. And that’s probably an underestimate: the study was based on the Common Crawl web archive (the same one that AI labs use to train their models), which is quite comprehensive but probably contains some bias toward more prominent sites.

"Random sample of Internet links" is going to include a lot of absolute garbage.

If we're talking about news sites, or commentary, or blogs, or magazines, or newspapers, or other publishers, the number of dead links will be far higher. Those are the types of sites that are likely to fail, be acquired, get migrated, or become paywalled.

I worked as a technology journalist for years starting in the late 90s. I did a lot of freelance work as well, and almost nothing survives online. There were media brands that were shut down, content migrated to another site, the CMS was migrated from Drupal to Wordpress to something else, there were two or three acquisitions, and so on. Last week, I checked some articles that I worked on between 3 and 10 years ago and they were either 404s or paywalled.

When I left one of the higher-profile pubs in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, I knew my articles wouldn't last even though they were migrated to a sister publication. I made PDF copies of every single one. I still have them in a folder somewhere, not sure what to do with them.

My personal blogs are still up, but even those will die at some point.

by ilamont

5/19/2026 at 8:04:24 PM

> "Random sample of Internet links" is going to include a lot of absolute garbage.

It's also likely to include a lot of non-content links, e.g. links to index and navigation pages, interstitials, search results, user profiles, image galleries, etc. These sorts of links don't reliably address specific content, and it's natural that they'll change or die over time. This doesn't necessarily mean that anything valuable has been lost.

by duskwuff

5/19/2026 at 8:00:09 PM

https://blog.archive.org/2026/04/23/introducing-vanishing-cu...

https://archive.org/details/vanishing-culture-2026

(when able, please consider donating to the Internet Archive; they are the durable, long term storage system of last resort)

> Yes, you can still access (for now) Disney-era FiveThirtyEight content via the invaluable Internet Archive, and pre-Disney-era content from The New York Times (which I partnered with from 2010 through 2013). And obviously, we’re trying to recreate some of the most popular parts of FiveThirtyEight at Silver Bulletin. The election models and polling averages are here, and new-and-improved versions of the sports models (PELE, ELWAY, COOPER) are gradually returning too.2 Galen Druke, Clare Malone and I have even been getting the old podcast crew back together for live shows.

With regards to:

> When I left one of the higher-profile pubs in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, I knew my articles wouldn't last even though they were migrated to a sister publication. I made PDF copies of every single one. I still have them in a folder somewhere, not sure what to do with them.

May I suggest:

https://help.archive.org/help/uploading-a-basic-guide/

You can upload them all as a single item, or as individual items per piece and asking IA Patron Services to create a collection for you.

> My personal blogs are still up, but even those will die at some point.

Drop links, and they will be queued for crawling, if not already archived. If you would like to self serve, https://web.archive.org/save

by toomuchtodo

5/19/2026 at 8:22:27 PM

Thank you!

by ilamont

5/19/2026 at 8:44:14 PM

This is quite sad.

by carlcortright

5/19/2026 at 8:48:20 PM

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48152553

by ChrisArchitect

5/19/2026 at 11:17:17 PM

Even if you believe Nate Silver's analysis was deeply flawed/inaccurate the layout and presentation of the data itself made it easy for others to understand why it was flawed or innacurate. Modern science is built on thousands and thousands of failed experiments and research that went the wrong path. That makes preservation of this site important, more important than whatever personal grudge you may hold against him.

by waterTanuki

5/19/2026 at 10:28:09 PM

I mean... you've spent how many articles talking shit about Disney and then complain they won't sell you back your baby that you sold to them.

Hard to get sympathy here.

by crazypyro

5/19/2026 at 10:31:33 PM

I agree, and am getting downvoted in other comments for this position. If you sell a small company to a giant one, there's a major risk that they will sunset your work. It's the risk Nate knowingly took on when he sold the company.

No surprises here, no sympathy from me, and his blog post reads like he's a sore loser.

(Disney sucks and isn't blameless, but this is very much a standard business practice.)

by panda888888

5/19/2026 at 7:53:47 PM

It’s what happened to Star Wars. Figures.

by SilverElfin

5/19/2026 at 8:09:14 PM

How so? To me it seems like the exact opposite of what's happened with Star Wars in the last 20 years.

538 was purchased and then left to wither and die where as Disney seems intent on squeezing every last penny from the Star Wars franchise by using the IP as much as possible

by superfrank

5/19/2026 at 8:20:45 PM

Disney removed a lot of the earlier IP from the official Star Wars storyline shortly after acquiring it. That IP was much better than the complete mess and politicization of Star Wars that happened in the sequels. Sure they are trying to squeeze money out of it - and maybe some of the TV shows are tolerable - but they killed the brand and its best content in the process.

by SilverElfin

5/19/2026 at 8:37:29 PM

Good point, Star Wars was famously not about politics. Very apolitical.

by wredcoll

5/19/2026 at 9:10:30 PM

The politics of the original trilogy Star Wars was essentially “dictators and fascists with big armies are bad”. It was naïve and simplistic; a simple storytelling device, nothing more. There was no conscious choice behind it. If it had been made 40 years earlier, the enemies would have been savage indigenous people, as was the style at the time. The politics of modern Star Wars are… specific. Pointed. Winking at the camera. I suspect they may not age well.

by teddyh

5/19/2026 at 9:35:27 PM

The Viet Cong parallels in the original Star Wars about as much "winking at the camera" as current Star Wars is to current politics.

by hobofan

5/19/2026 at 10:37:32 PM

What Viet Cong parallels? Whatever you mean, it can’t have been very visible to the audience, since clear Viet Cong sympathies would not have gone over well (at least not universally) in 1977-1983.

by teddyh

5/19/2026 at 11:27:38 PM

This 3 minute clip of a conversation between George Lucas and James Cameron might help.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=fv9Jq_mCJEo

by slg

5/19/2026 at 11:53:13 PM

“Not available in your country.”

But what George Lucas claims to have thought (now many years later), is essentially irrelevant. What matters is how audiences interpret the movies when watching them, both at the time and now. If, as I strongly suspect, essentially nobody saw clear Viet Cong sympathies in the original trilogy, then the modern Star Wars differs significantly.

And this is my point. The politics of the original trilogy was cookie-cutter, incidental, and unimportant, whereas much of the modern Star Wars has political creeds, obvious symbolism and grandstanding all over the place, front and center. You may (or may not) agree with the politics of the new Star Wars, but you can’t deny that they are different.

by teddyh

5/20/2026 at 12:57:47 AM

You said “There was no conscious choice behind it” and here is the creator telling you the choice was intentional from the start. Some people simply can’t admit they are wrong.

by slg

5/20/2026 at 3:31:05 PM

1. I can’t watch the video, as I said.

2. I actually don’t believe whatever George Lucas claims, many years later, to have had in mind at the time. Creators in general are known for not always being truthful in these matters, and mostly just going “yes, exactly, that is what I really meant” when fans come up with and present their complex theories many years later.

3. However, it does not matter what George Lucas thought or intended. What matters is how audiences interpreted it. Most people, both then and now, do not see any clear Viet Cong sympathies in the original trilogies. Ergo, the politics of the original trilogies was different, since most people do see the heavy-handed symbolism in today’s Star Wars.

But I guess some people simply can’t read what I write.

by teddyh

5/19/2026 at 8:34:26 PM

Content quality and content monetization are very different. The EU had exceptionally low monetization and brand recognition.

by mholm

5/20/2026 at 5:57:41 AM

They removed a lot of first party content too like the video games. But it almost doesn’t matter what was removed. The sequels and many of the shows were worse than all of it.

by SilverElfin

5/19/2026 at 10:02:34 PM

Polling, particularly in US elections, is hard. A lot of people, particularly tech people, got very excited about Nate Silver and 538 after the 2012 presidential elections but they shouldn't have. When you look at any polling or election predictions, the US has voluntary voting so it's not just a question of how people will vote but who will vote. So, if your predictions just guessed an outcome without explaining why (accurately) then it's just astrology, basically.

In polling circles, the voters tend to be segmented into high and low propensity voters. High propensity voters will always vote. Low propensity voters won't. But the differences are often so small the results can flip on unexpected turnout in just one segment of the voters.

As an example, the 2024 election turned on 3 big factors:

1. Millions of Biden voters in 2020 stayed home. Affordability was the biggest factor but there are were other huge factors too, most notably Palestine;

2. Trump retained the white vote while increasing his share of the Hispanic vote; and

3. Trump activated younger, low-propensity voters. You'll often osee this described as the "podcast sphere". We're talking the people who end up in alt-right pipeline on Youtube and in podcasts (eg Andrew Tate).

Most recent presidential elections come down the results in about 7-8 states. The other 42-43 are known before you go in with some rare exceptions. The most recent exception was Obama in 2008 who won Iowa, for example. Other big sweeps were Reagan in 1984 and Nixon in 1972.

So, with a modern election you can just flip a coin 7 times and you have a 1 in 128 chance of just being correct, 50 out of 50. This is why you need to show your work with any prediction modeling and polling. You need to show how you reached your prediction in terms of turnout as well as how major demographics will vote.

Every election cycle complicates this with external factors and per-state issues. Covid loomed large over 2020 but it also made voting easier than ever, with easy access to early voting and mail-in voting. This changes the high and low propensity voter math significantly. Also, the Arizona legislature went on a mission to punish Native Americans for flipping Arizona blue in 2020 by disenfranchising Native Americans in subsequent elections in many, many ways.

So what tends to happen is that results are close enough that it become s abit of a guess. No pollster wants to be an outlier AND wrong so there's a convergence to mean thing that happens where they all tend to make the same prediction because everybody being wrong is way better, optically, than you being wrong and everyone else being right.

Add to all this, population sampling used to be done on landlines decades ago. Now we just don't have an equivalent and if your sampling algorithm is off, your results are off. Garbage in, garbage out.

I guess my point is that Nate Silver got kinda lucky in 2012 and came back to Earth in 2016 so I've never been that impressed and honestly I jus tdon't care if 538 exists or not.

by jmyeet

5/19/2026 at 9:57:49 PM

Am I the only one who finds this whole blog post to be super unprofessional? I agree it's sad that the content is gone, but airing grievances about your former employer leaves a bad taste in my mouth (assuming you're not a whistleblower talking about illegal activity or something like that). I feel bad for Nate Silver, but business is business. I guess he had to learn that lesson the hard way.

by panda888888

5/19/2026 at 10:02:07 PM

> airing grievances about your former employer leaves a bad taste in my mouth

Absolutely not. Creating a culture where employees are expected to be silent about their (mis)treatment by wealthy owners is only favorable, to, well, wealthy owners. Business is business, so why is it unprofessional to point out they're bad at business?

by applfanboysbgon

5/19/2026 at 10:18:11 PM

I view Nate as basically acting like a sore loser here, which is why I find it unprofessional. I'm not arguing that we should clamp down on free speech or anything like that.

If a company wants to buy another company and sunset it, that's a normal business practice. I get that it's disappointing, but in no way is this "mistreatment." At least to me, this is a perfectly normal business situation that doesn't merit this level of complaining. It reads as an ex-employee being petty.

by panda888888

5/19/2026 at 10:21:41 PM

Funny, this story reads as ABC/Disney being petty to me. They were made a business offer to repurchase an IP that is worth nothing to them, and are instead choosing to blackhole any value it has and burn it to the ground because somebody with an ego has a personal grievance over Disney having been criticised for their management of the brand in the past. If that's what professional conduct entails in your eyes, I don't suppose there will be any agreement in our views.

by applfanboysbgon

5/19/2026 at 10:27:45 PM

I guess I feel like Nate should have anticipated this situation. By choosing to sell his company to a big conglomerate, this is the type of risk he opened himself up to. ABC/Disney certainly isn't blameless here, but this is the risk that any smaller company takes on when they get acquired. (The exact same thing happens to the startups that Google buys and then sunsets 12 months later.)

by panda888888

5/20/2026 at 2:00:18 AM

Big companies love to shut things down. Being so petty about something they don't actually want is less common and deserves loud mockery.

by Dylan16807

5/21/2026 at 5:54:56 AM

Eh, maybe. I feel like once you're a sellout, the situation is out of your hands. As a founder, you have to accept that, or you shouldn't sell the business in the first place. Or you could structure some very strict buyout terms, I suppose.

Companies pay obscene amounts of money all the time for things don't end up using. Google does it all the time. Was Disney acting a fool here? Absolutely. But is it within their rights to do so? Also yes. (I'm actually kinda surprised they didn't sunset it sooner, since I don't think it was making much money.)

by panda888888

5/19/2026 at 10:34:11 PM

I wouldn't say unprofessional, because this isn't a normal employer-employee relationship. Nate Silver is a famous professional, he made a business deal with a large media corporation, he made some money; later that large media corporation used the IP he sold them in arguably-bad ways, and he's upset. I don't blame him for being upset, certainly I don't think he owes Disney anything, but at the same time he's the one who agreed to sell his IP to a corporation and this is the kind of things corporations do with IP.

by JuniperMesos

5/21/2026 at 5:22:48 AM

You hit the nail on the head with your last sentence -- he agreed to sell to a big corp, and this is the kind of thing big corps do. I get that it's unfortunate, but this is the kind of thing you have to anticipate when you sell a business.

by panda888888

5/19/2026 at 8:47:36 PM

No wonder Disney won’t bother giving him his domain back.

by grebc

5/19/2026 at 8:54:10 PM

It feels a little disingenuous to call out your opponent's model failures when Silver's model on Live Election Night also completely bugged out showing Kamala as more favored as she lost state after state: https://web.archive.org/web/20241109030935/https://www.theda...

by sbxfree

5/19/2026 at 7:26:43 PM

Call me a skeptic, but it's certainly odd all the errors always lean to one side. Maybe this has to do with the leftward trend of the mainstream press.

> What happened in 2024 isn’t something I’d have scripted, though. Basically, their new election model was literally broken, continuing to show Joe Biden virtually tied with Trump even after his disastrous debate. (Evidently because Morris’s design for it had been overcomplicated. These models are hard to design, by the way.)

by dionian

5/19/2026 at 7:48:46 PM

> Maybe this has to do with the leftward trend of the mainstream press.

What mainstream press outlet has moved leftwards? I can't think of any, and I certainly am interested in knowing which those might be. Inversely, cbs, the ny times, and the washington post have all shifted rather noticeably rightward in the last 10 years.

by Octoth0rpe

5/19/2026 at 8:19:50 PM

According to AllSides, many outlets moved left, although some did move right: https://www.allsides.com/blog/AllSides-Media-Bias-Rating-Ove...

It and https://mediabiasfactcheck.com say NYTimes “leans left” and is “left-center” respectively.

What’s an example that you believe highlights NYTimes moving rightward?

by armchairhacker

5/19/2026 at 8:38:24 PM

> What’s an example that you believe highlights NYTimes moving rightward?

The treatment of Mamdani for one, or Hochul/Cuomo.

>say NYTimes “leans left” and is “left-center” respectively.

That can be true and at the same time it can be moving rightward.

by Octoth0rpe

5/19/2026 at 8:47:13 PM

I’ll give you that one: Madmani is treated unusually different by the news and social media, and his opponents were bizarrely overtly flawed.

by armchairhacker

5/19/2026 at 8:30:22 PM

you should scroll through AllSides' twitter before trusting them to be impartial.

by laweijfmvo

5/19/2026 at 8:38:07 PM

https://xcancel.com/AllSidesNow

Again, which one of these tweets highlights their bias? Most of them are event headlines from a “left”, a “center”, and “right” source.

by armchairhacker

5/19/2026 at 8:59:50 PM

That same result would also be achieved by the Overton window moving right.

by bryanlarsen

5/19/2026 at 8:33:56 PM

> What’s an example that you believe highlights NYTimes moving rightward?

Look at their coverage of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's response to a question about Taiwan versus Trump's response to a question about Taiwan. In the first case, their quote included all of the um's and other similar pauses in answering the question. In the second case, their quote of Trump cleaned up all of those artifacts. The end result is that it looks like AOC is flailing to come up with an answer while Trump has a clean, polished answer. But if you compare the actual audio clips of both answers, Trump's answer is the one that involves far more flailing to come up with a response.

There is a general pattern in the more subtle aspects of presentation and framing that generally excuse the behaviors of right-wing politicians compared to the same actions being done by a left-wing politician.

by jcranmer

5/19/2026 at 8:58:36 PM

I assume you mean this article for AOC quotes: https://archive.ph/gmvBy

And this for Trump quotes: https://archive.ph/staNQ

You’re right about the quotes.

But also consider this article that was published after Trump’s, not even labeled “editorial” or “opinion”: “Trump’s Taiwan Gambit is Already a Gift to China” (https://archive.ph/lwBWD)

by armchairhacker

5/19/2026 at 11:55:41 PM

This is a pretty comprehensive treatment: https://www.plutobooks.com/product/how-to-sell-a-genocide/

by AgentOrange1234

5/19/2026 at 8:39:35 PM

NYTimes constantly deletes parts of Trump's comments or outright rephrases them in an attempt to make him seem smarter, or at least, less insane. They rarely to never do that for other people.

by wredcoll

5/19/2026 at 9:19:42 PM

> They rarely to never do that for other people.

They do that to everyone. That's how all quotation in journalism is done.

by thaumasiotes

5/19/2026 at 8:04:04 PM

>cbs, the ny times, and the washington post have all shifted rather noticeably rightward

As the Overton window or activist left moves further left on issues like identity politics, crime and free speech (1619 Project era at NYT, staff revolts etc), steady coverage can appear "righter" by comparison without actually changing

by CGMthrowaway

5/19/2026 at 8:12:34 PM

Remember when Net Nuetrality was the priority of hackernews and slashdot and basically all people in tech. Now it's a "leftist policy". We live in crazy times.

Overton window has definitely shifted to the right. Beign a normal person who values science is now considered "leftist". Its nuts.

by rc_kas

5/19/2026 at 9:37:20 PM

There's also a bloc that's been working to try to retroactively redefine what "Net Neutrality" means.

Instead of the usual stuff like "consumers have rights" or "ISP monopolies are bad" or "utilities should just provide the product and not spy and manipulate", they want it to mean something closer to "no online community can moderate itself."

And that's the charitable version. The worse version involves rank hypocrisy and selective enforcement, where large social "networks" must be "neutral" to literal nazis, while somehow it's also OK to permaban for insulting Dear Leader.

by Terr_

5/19/2026 at 10:31:00 PM

The set of people who are "basically all people in tech" has changed a lot since then for a variety of reasons; it's not surprising that any given political issue from a decade ago might not have the same resonance today.

by JuniperMesos

5/19/2026 at 8:15:35 PM

Where is the steady coverage? Again, I see coverage moving rightward at every major publication (including the ny times)

by Octoth0rpe

5/19/2026 at 8:41:46 PM

Apparently it's "steady coverage" for CBS to be taken over by a culture warring op-ed writer who singlehandedly spikes investigative journalism if the Trump administration don't want to offer their comments on the story, and for WaPo op-eds writers to tweet that "we're now a conservative opinion section"...

by notahacker

5/19/2026 at 8:41:39 PM

Wait, so your argument is that people being against censorship or discrimination are now considered to be left wing? That's literally the overton window moving to the right, you're contradicting yourself!

by wredcoll

5/19/2026 at 7:54:57 PM

> leftward trend of the mainstream press

Oh yeah, venerable institutions like the Washington Post, New York Times, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, and the like? Or maybe you mean the TV news organizations owned by Sinclair Broadcasting, Nexstar, or Hearst? Or maybe cable news organizations like CNN or Fox News?

The narrative of the "liberal media" is so out of date it makes you look out of touch. The mainstream media is captured by billionaire interests and has been so for years now.

by jandrese

5/19/2026 at 7:43:19 PM

Why would a left-leaning press engineer errors predicting the victory of the left? Wouldn't this lull supporters of the Democrats into a false sense of security and enable Republican wins?

by tkzed49

5/20/2026 at 5:22:12 PM

I think it's more of a systemic issue than top-down manipulation. Like, as a hypothetical, they're disregarding some people as being extremist when in reality they have reasonable, representative views. This produces biased results, and people who agree with the results share them because it supports their world view. The shares and new revenue reinforce the companies decision to produce biased reports, and the effect is politicians read these popular reports thinking they're accurate and make policy decisions around them, when in reality they're just a political wish-list.

by guywithahat

5/19/2026 at 7:49:55 PM

Are you sure you aren’t experiencing selection bias? The article only mentions one modeling error (the one you quoted), so “all the errors” must be the ones you’ve noticed elsewhere.

by jdlshore

5/19/2026 at 7:44:06 PM

It seems calling a state purple is just using a synonym for red.

by LanceH

5/19/2026 at 8:10:29 PM

> Maybe this has to do with the leftward trend of the mainstream press.

What? Media in the USA has staggered to the right over the past ten years. The only reason it was called liberal before that was because one party used facts and data and the other preferred to rig the system against the common people. While Stephen Colbert made the joke "Reality has a well known liberal bias" it's joke only in that the conservative viewpoint today seems focused on imaginary problems and denying the existence of real ones.

by burnte

5/19/2026 at 8:52:33 PM

> Stephen Colbert made the joke "Reality has a well known liberal bias"

Video (queued up): https://youtu.be/IJ-a2KeyCAY?t=270

It's always pretty depressing to go back and watch this or old Colbert Report episodes and realize how parts are incredibly "evergreen", sometimes you don't even need to change out the names.

by joshstrange

5/19/2026 at 7:51:13 PM

its this really what we're left with, people sharing their skepticism? without any dint of rationale, just stories about how these obviously bad people did all this stuff that everyone knows.

I'm not going to defend Silver's predictions, but what was really refreshing about his work was some lovely diagrams, and real intent behind exposing his methodology. it was never 'trust me I'm the expert', but 'wow, this is hard and these are the problems and this is how I tried to deal with them'

by convolvatron

5/19/2026 at 8:14:48 PM

Maybe there were no errors and a certain techbro helped with the counting machines so right wing could win?

by rvba