Silver Linings - What's Lining Nate Silver's Gut

Last week, pollster Nate Silver stirred discussion with his "gut" feeling that Trump will win the election.

I look at Nate's prediction very differently than I would have in past presidential elections.

I spent the first decade of my career building technology and viewing it as a way to solve business problems. As a freshly barred and practicing attorney in the late aughts and early 2010s when I founded Hire an Esquire, there was a general youthful optimism about the promise of technology. My tech enthusiastic circles believed it would be a way to solve not just lifestyle and business problems, but greater world and societal problems. I spent part of the 2010s in Bay Area where this ethos was shared as I raised money and otherwise built Hire an Esquire.

In the most recent chapter of my career, I’ve sold Hire an Esquire to the Allegis Group/ Major, Lindsey & Africa where I now work. I’ve moved back to Philadelphia where I went to law school and began my career as a lawyer. My social circle is less tech-centric and includes people in a wide range of professions.?

As the parent of a 5-month-old, I am now particularly attuned to the addict-like meltdowns of small children when an iPad is taken away. Those that I know in Silicon Valley are now spending absurd amounts of money on private schools and care infrastructures to keep their children away from the technology they built.?

And of course, now working at the world’s fourth-largest staffing company, I have been focused on how technology has changed society and what this means for staffing and enterprise software. The disturbing research backs up my anecdotal perceptions too well. I now believe that technology is like nuclear power, if used with care it can do great things, without regulation and care, it can cause disasters.

Through this lens, I was battling my 3rd bout of COVID in late October as Nate Silver made his proclamation. My boundaries around my phone went out the window as I had little energy to do anything but escape the misery through inhaling election information and reading all of the election-focused text chains of my various social circles. Amidst the fever dreams I came to 3 realizations:

1. People in my circles who are highly active online, especially on Twitter, tend to believe Trump will win.
2. Friends who spend less time on their phones and are more involved locally—canvassing in swing districts, for example—lean towards Kamala Harris winning.
3. News articles on the election often shared a familiar tone, with little authority beyond anecdotes and a reliance on the same limited polls.

Twitter still dominates news perception, especially for journalists and the tech-minded men in my network. According to MuckRack's 2024 State of Journalism report, 81% of journalists remain active on Twitter, with many citing it as their primary source for information. Since Twitter’s 2022 acquisition, researchers have noted changes that amplify right-leaning narratives and Trump's campaign, while reducing engagement for the official White House account as well as pro-Harris accounts, and other moderate to left leaning accounts.

With the decline of traditional beat reporting, journalists increasingly rely on social media rather than direct sources, deepening a self-referential loop. According to Pew Research, newsroom employment dropped by 26% from 2008 to 2020 . Beat reporting has dramatically declined over the past decades with fewer journalists embedded in communities, reducing firsthand perspectives. Instead, stories are often sourced from other media outlets or social platforms, creating a cycle where reporters cite each other’s work rather than gathering new insights.

This Twitter echo chamber creates a self-reinforcing cycle: journalists consume and amplify right-leaning media, shaping public perception in a way that may be very different from how the general public is thinking, feeling, and voting— although over time it is bound to shape the general public’s viewpoint.

Many voters still don’t live fully on their smartphones and feel the impact of in real life policies, like access to healthcare. And, as Spencer Neal of The American Conservative observed in his article "Haunted by the Red Wave, " social media enthusiasm for conservative candidates didn’t translate into sufficient votes to sweep the 2022 midterms as predicted. He warned that elections aren’t won by confidence on Twitter alone.

The Twitterverse may very well be wrong about the voting outcome of the current election. Still, an information landscape rooted in Twitter’s extremist, disinformation environment is a growing threat to democracy and truth in this and future elections.