The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

by Nate Silver

Despite the election being many months away, commentary focused on the inevitability of Clinton’s nomination, ignoring the uncertainty intrinsic to such early polls. There seemed to be too much focus on Clinton’s gender and Obama’s race.24 There was an obsession with determining which candidate had “won the day” by making some clever quip at a press conference or getting some no-name senator to endorse them—things that 99 percent of voters did not care about. Political news, and especially the important news that really affects the campaign, proceeds at an irregular pace. But news coverage is produced every day. Most of it is filler, packaged in the form of stories that are designed to obscure its unimportance.* Not only does political coverage often lose the signal—it frequently accentuates the noise. If there are a number of polls in a state that show the Republican ahead, it won’t make news when another one says the same thing. But if a new poll comes out showing the Democrat with the lead, it will grab headlines—even though the poll is probably an outlier and won’t predict the outcome accurately. The bar set by the competition, in other words, was invitingly low.