The Silver Bulletin Year in Review
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Nate Silver founded FiveThirtyEight and repeatedly compares Silver Bulletin's metrics to it. Understanding FiveThirtyEight's history, methodology, and cultural impact provides essential context for appreciating the newsletter's evolution and Silver's career trajectory.
Hello readers,
Thank you so much for your continued support of this newsletter. I wish you happy holidays and an auspicious New Year. We made the big time: a couple of Fridays ago, Silver Bulletin was even featured in a New York Times crossword clue!
Two quick announcements:
It’s a good time to submit questions for SBSQ #28 in the comments to the previous edition. I’ve got some halfway-finished thoughts about tanking in the NBA, taxes in California and a recent media controversy or two that might make their way into the SBSQ depending on what questions people ask. But otherwise it’s open season.
We’re hiring a part-time editor! The original deadline passed and we have some promising candidates. But since I haven’t had a chance to review the applications in detail yet, I’ll go ahead and extend the deadline through next week (Jan. 7). I will give you a bonus point or two1 if you applied by the original deadline, however.
We have some big plans in store for 2026. Our generic ballot polling average will begin publishing soon, then our new NCAA basketball model, COOPER. Later in the year, of course, we’ll have the midterm forecast, and I’m really, really hoping to find time for some sort of World Cup model, too. (I’m honestly less certain about the timing of NBA stuff.)
But since this newsletter is headlined “year in review”, I’m going to take that mandate fairly literally and mostly look back on 2025, highlighting some of my favorite posts along with a couple that didn’t quite work. I’ll also give you some insight into our business metrics, as I always find it interesting when other writers do this.
Riding the election wave up and gently down
When you run a newsletter that’s (partly) about politics, it can be hard to disaggregate how your business is going from how your life is going from how it’s going in the broader world. Presidential election years are insanely stressful but also very good for business (and the more drama there is in politics, the better it is from that standpoint).
It can also make for an abrupt transition when the election is over, however. You can feel like you’re hurtling along an exponential curve as
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