Do you wake multiple times during the night obsessing about the upcoming midterm elections and the Democrats’ chances of taking back the House or the Senate?  If the answer is “yes,” then here’s some updated data from statistician-extraordinaire Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight that might—at least temporarily—help you get through the night.

Hot off the presses on Tuesday, October 16, 2018, at 12:57pm, here’s Silver’s latest forecast about the probable breakdown of Democrats’ taking back the House.

According to Silver, there’s a 6 in 7 chance Democrats will win control, which translates for us non-data nerds as an 84.5% chance. Conversely, there’s a 1 in 7 chance, or a 15.5% chance, that Republicans will keep control of the House. Nate’s forecasting that Democrats have an 80% chance of gaining 19 to 62 seats and forecasts a pick up of 40+ seats.

Thank you, Nate, for today’s gift and for tonight’s (possible) restful slumber. And what about tomorrow and the day and night after and the days and nights after that? As in all things, there are no guarantees. However, Nate promises to continue to deliver his group’s most accurate forecasts up until election day.

There are still twenty-one days until the midterms, and all that we know for certain is that the world can turn upside-down in that amount of time. Anything is possible.

For today, I’m going to suspend my doubts, push aside the angst, and trust in Nate. What else have I got?

To read about Nate’s methodology, go to

How FiveThirtyEight’s House And Senate Models Work

The post The [Nate] Silver lining playbook for 2018 midterms appeared first on Occasional Planet.

It’s official.  Time magazine recently anointed Barack Obama as the 2012 Person of the Year.  With all due respect to the editors of Time—and to the president himself—I would have recommended someone else whose name didn’t even make it onto the short list. That would be Nate Silver, statistician extraordinaire of fivethirtyeight.com.

You see, what makes Nate stand out is the contrarian territory he’s staked out for himself in the dichotomous era in which we live.  It’s odd, is it not, that every Tom, Dick, and Harriet has at the touch of a keyboard access to a mother lode of information and data. Yet our public discourse and public-policy decisions seem to rely less and less on such facts and figures.  Nate, on the other hand, demonstrates how inhabiting a universe of facts yields sound, verifiable outcomes.

Remember election eve?  Nate tidily dispatched every Republican pollster, every snide Conservative pundit and Fox News lackey with his stats, charts, and spot-on predictions of the electoral outcome. He even dispatched the entire Romney clan who seemed to have retreated en mass into Bizarro-Land by election night.

Nate’s election predictions proved to be stellar, but that’s not the whole story.  Nate deserves his bespectacled face framed by the magazine’s red borders because his data-based methodology—and the accuracy of the results that flow from it—is a stark reminder of how our failing, dysfunctional political system could still fix itself if only we’d follow Nate’s roadmap.

Let’s look at some of the dysfunction we’re facing.  Many of our policy decisions have risen to crisis level because one of our two major parties no longer governs from facts but from ideology. As I write this (during the quickly diminishing hours of a lame-duck Congress), our representatives are mired in a self-inflicted crisis of budget and fiscal negotiations.  Coming in January, with a revised cast of congressional players, we should finally have a long overdue legislative debate on two other major crises—gun violence and climate change.

What If those debates were actually grounded in the world of facts?  Surely, as President Obama put it (and Nate would certainly agree), “facts matter.”  If facts held their rightful place in our governing process, wouldn’t legislation blowing out of the halls of Congress look radically different?

It’s not that our political culture lacks sources for informed advice.  There are more than seven thousand institutions of higher learning in this country, educating more than fifteen million students. Every year our universities churn out an average of more than nine hundred PhD’s in economics alone.  Yet rarely does the expertise of that deep brain trust find its way into the halls of Congress or mainstream media.  More often we hear the second-hand opining of politicians and journalists with little or no expertise in the matters they’re discussing.

Take as one glaring example the bargaining over tax cuts and which income levels will retain those cuts or which will see tax-rate increases.  How much of the support for retaining tax cuts for those below $250,000 or $400,000 or $1 million is based on factual data and the real-world effects on budgets, the economy, and individuals’ economic futures?  How much is stubborn ideological toadying? How can we even know the answer if the discussion resembles haggling in a back-alley bazaar rather than the sober consideration of facts and figures?

Nate’s way is the better way: Define the problem.  Find the data. Crunch the data.  Discuss and debate solutions based on hard data, then craft rational legislation. The more often I sample Nate’s illuminations on his website, the more I realize that Nate is a national treasure who time and again pulls back the curtain on our false wizards and, if we’re willing to pay attention, shows us a way to confront our false assumptions.

So here’s my invitation to Nate. Even though this year you didn’t get the public recognition you deserve, would you consider stepping more directly into public service?  There are two much-needed functions only you could fulfill.

The first would be in the Oval Office. If President Obama were to pull up a second chair behind his grand desk, would you be willing to settle yourself down in it from time to time, set up your laptop, and share the insights of your data one-on-one with him as he mulls over his policy prescriptions?   That way we could trust that the president would be getting just the facts and nothing but the facts.

The second would be in the Senate and the House of Representatives.  The American people would demand  the establishment of a permanent, honorary seat for you in both houses of Congress. As representatives and senators spout their unsubstantiated opinions, you would be there for us, sounding the alarm every time a piece of bullpucky gets rattled off.

Admittedly, these two functions are not nearly as sexy as being named Person of the Year, but I assure you, Nate, the American people would be, as someone once said, eternally grateful.

The post Nate Silver: 2012 (Data)person of the year appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Like many people, two of my primary interests are politics and sports.  They both lend themselves to statistical analysis; they have “seasons” (in both cases too long); and winners are sometimes the wealthy front-runners (George W. Bush or the New York Yankees); other times they are among those with the least resources (Dennis Kucinich or the 2008 Tampa Bay Rays).  It is no accident that Nate Silver, the publisher of what is considered to be the most reliable political forecaster (Fivethirtyeight.com) developed his skills handicapping baseball players through a method called baseball sabermetrics.

Thursday we will turn a statistical eye at the history of African-American players on the Cardinals.   For now, let us just say that yesterday, for the first time in 56 years, the Cardinals opened the season with no African-American players on its roster.

The current team is a very good one; reigning National League Central Division champions and odds-on favorite to repeat this year.  It’s a likable team; there are some great hustlers like Brendan Ryan, Skip Schumaker, and Ryan Ludwick.  Albert Pujols may be the finest player to ever don a Cardinal uniform; Matt Holiday is productive, Colby Rasmus is developing into a future star and Yadier Molina may be the game’s most exciting catcher.

The historian Ken Burns produced a wonderful series on PBS called “Baseball.”  He focuses on the evolution of the game, featuring its superstars (far too little attention paid to Stan Musial).  But as a historian, he weaves the history of baseball into the social and economic trends of this country’s legacy.  He has an “inning” (chapter) called “Shadow Ball” about the Negro Leagues that provided separate and unequal opportunities for African-Americans, primarily in the 1920s through the 1940s.  As America changed, so did baseball.  In September, 1945, five months after assuming office, President Harry S Truman began the process of integrating the army.  Only a month later, Brooklyn Dodger general manager Branch Rickey signed Jackie Robinson to a professional contract.  After a year in the minor leagues, Jackie Robinson was on the Dodger opening day roster in 1947 (I feel lucky to have been born the next day and to have always lived in an integrated baseball era).  Eleven weeks later Cleveland Indians general manager Bill Veeck signed Larry Doby who took the field for the team that July 5.  Baseball was integrated; the trend was inexorable.  The first African-American to play for the Cardinals was Tom Alston in 1952.  The last team to integrate was the Boston Red Sox in 1959.

As the country struggled with integration, so did baseball.  Most of the early great African-American players endured treatment in the south ranging from separate and unequal to outright harassment including death threats.  Spring training in Florida was not much better; finally in 1964 a group of African-Americans on the Cardinals convinced owner Gussie Busch to insist on housing the team under one roof in an integrated hotel in St. Petersburg.

The 1964 Cardinal team gelled into a winning team with a special bond between African- American, Hispanic and white players.  But with two weeks remaining in the season they were six and a half games behind the Philadelphia Phillies with a dozen games to play.  What ensued thereafter was remarkable; the Cardinals became a winning juggernaut and the Phillies “pholded.”  Their demise is generally attributed to manager Gene Mauch’s decision to repeatedly use pitchers Chris Short and Jim Bunning on only two days rest.  If you’ve been watching the U.S. Senate lately, you may have noticed that Bunning, now a U.S. Senator from Kentucky, may have suffered permanent damage from the debacle.  The Cardinals, under the cool guidance of manager Johnny Keane, kept winning and when the season was over; their record of 93-69 was one game better than the Phillies and Cincinnati Reds.

The Cardinals entered the World Series as decided underdogs to the vaunted New York Yankees.  As mentioned previously, the Cardinals won the series four games to three and thirty-one years later the seven-games were chronicled by historian David Halberstam in his book October 1964.  A review from Amazon.com states:

The 1964 World Series between the Yankees and Cardinals was coated in myth from the get-go. The Yankees represented the establishment: white, powerful, and seemingly invincible. The victorious Cards, on the other hand, were baseball’s rebellious future: angry and defiant, black, and challenging. Their seven-game barnburner, played out against a backdrop of an America emerging from the Kennedy assassination, escalating the war in Vietnam, and struggling with civil rights, marked a turning point–neither the nation, nor baseball, would ever be quite so innocent again.

On July 2, midway through the season, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that outlawed unequal application of voter registration requirements and racial segregation in schools, at the workplace and by facilities that served the public.  It prohibited discrimination in public facilities, in government, and in employment.

If you lived in St. Louis, there was a synergy of events as the country moved towards tearing down racial barriers and the Cardinals won the World Series with a truly integrated team.  It was a year when black and white St. Louisans joined the freedom riders, traveling south to face the angry voices in opposition to integration.  It was also a year in which the Cardinals played in a stadium at Grand and Dodier Avenues in north St. Louis.  No one could attend a game without walking through a sea of poverty and seeing faces that bore the stress of years of racial discrimination.

The country was in a period of racial transition; one that we would learn later would have many triumphs and moments of despair.  That continues today.  The 1964 Cardinals showed that baseball was right in the middle of the struggle.  If you were working and hoping for more racial equality and justice, it was a wonderful time to be a Cardinal fan, but the future of the team’s play on the field and unique composition of the roster were always unpredictable variables.  And so it is still today.

Link to Part II
Link to Part III

The post Baseball and Politics – Part I appeared first on Occasional Planet.