PORTLAND, Maine — The financial meltdown and this year’s presidential election have at least one thing in common: forecasters got them way wrong.
Political forecaster, journalist and statistician Nate Silver, who on Saturday headlined the Maine Science Festival in Bangor, said miscalculations like those derive partly from the application of science to the rather unscientific process of politics and the 2016 primaries.
“You literally have candidates comparing the size of their anatomy on the debate stage,” Silver said Saturday, referring to an opening debate salvo from Republican primary candidate Donald Trump about what the size of his hands says about his manhood. “There’s never been anything like this in American politics and it means a lot of our assumptions are flawed.”
Bangor City Councilor Ben Sprague hosted an hourlong conversation with Silver at Hampden Academy on Saturday night.
Silver’s predictive powers have been dinged a bit this political season, though he’s noted predicting primary voting is more difficult than the general election — less information and more variables.
In Maine, for instance, he anticipated the win of Democrat Bernie Sanders, but missed on the victory of Republican Ted Cruz, forecasting top showings for either Trump or Ohio Gov. John Kasich. And a somewhat perplexing potpourri of elected officials demonstrates Maine’s difficulty to read.
“The state that can nominate Angus King and Susan Collins and Paul LePage and [Chellie] Pingree … all at the same time, that’s kind of wacky,” Silver said, referring to the independent U.S. senator, a Republican who makes headlines for bucking the party line, the state’s conservative populist governor and its back-to-the-lander congresswoman.
Silver’s statistical approach first to baseball and then to politics has changed how those topics are covered.
He said during an interview that his website FiveThirtyEight.com hopes to influence science and technology news next, with a similar approach.
“As journalism has struggled, a lot of budgets have been cut back and sometimes the stuff you read and hear will take a lot of studies at face value, kind of miracle-cure type stuff,” Silver said. “We try to push back on those and try to take a really sober look at a story.”
While rising to fame for his political predictions, Silver wrote in his 2012 book “The Signal and the Noise” that he sees “the dysfunctional state of the American political system” as the biggest reason for pessimism about the country.
It’s that arena of science, away from the political noise, with a university system he said is still “the envy of the world” and at Maine’s three-day science festival that Silver said he has a more positive view about the future of the country.
“Talking to students tonight makes me optimistic,” Silver said.