Political polling guru says data on referendum is 'pretty definitive' unless there is a major crisis in England
The campaign for Scottish independence has "virtually no chance" of victory, according to Nate Silver, the polling expert who accurately called the outcomes of the 2008 and 2012 US presidential elections.
In an interview with The Scotsman, Silver, who correctly predicted the results of all 50 states in 2012, said the Scottish data was "pretty definitive". "There's virtually no chance that the 'yes' side will win," he said. "If you look at the polls, it's pretty definitive really where the no side is at 60-55% and the yes side is about 40 or so."
Speaking at the Edinburgh international book festival, he added: "There is a wide variety of polls and they all show the 'no' vote ahead, some by modest margins and some by overwhelming margins. The best you can do is take an average of those.
"If there was a major crisis in England – if the eurozone split apart and there were ramifications economically [for the UK] then maybe things would be reconsidered a little bit.
"For the most part it looks like it's a question of how much the 'no' side will win by, not what the outcome might be."
Silver also said his decision last month to take his popular data journalism blog FiveThirtyEight from the New York Times to the sports website ESPN was based on the latter's willingness to invest and develop it into a "full-fledged news site" – as well as anxieties about the New York Times's management decisions, financial outlook, and lack of "fresh young talent" in its newsroom.
He said: "ESPN is offering to make this a much bigger website so we can hire a lot more journalists and grow the brand and expand things out.
"Yes, they are a sports site but they are also affiliated with ABC News and happy to have me talk about whatever topics I am interested in, so there will be some sport coverage, and lots of politics and economics as well as health and education and I trust them to give me a lot of resources to execute things in the right way."
He said the New York Times is "in a business where they are not very good at monetising content, they are shrinking instead of growing and that creates a conflict when you are creating a long-term investment in your brand".
However, he was optimistic about the recent purchase of the Washington Post by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. "I think he will actually find ways to turn round the Washington Post back into a profitable enterprise. He's very good at understanding traffic and how to monetise that traffic… I'd much rather have the publication I am working on be growing instead and a more aggressive mentality can help with that. The Times, because it's shrinking, you don't have a lot of circulation of fresh young talent and ideas that are very helpful in a newsroom culture."
But he praised his former colleagues at the New York Times, saying: "My critiques of the Times are not about people in the newsroom. I think [executive editor] Jill Abramson runs an incredibly great news product but sometimes the management can be called into question a little bit more."
He added that he still goes "to the New York Times every day and, increasingly, the Guardian – which has better coverage of American politics."
He criticised traditional modes of political journalism, saying: "Data is so much more widely available now: the data that I use is mostly publicly available. It's often more reliable than insider information and gossip: because that's often what inside information is – gossip, that's given to you by someone who might have an incentive to spin you or is too close to the process.
"People who read politics news tend to be older, maybe 55 or 60. Our demographic was younger, very online-centric. They want the score, the bottom line: they don't care about the gossip as much. That's the approach we are trying to take to a lot of fields… to make FiveThirtyEight into a full-fledged news site."
