Harry Enten is CNN’s chief data TV guy, and like his former boss at FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver, he has been afflicted with a terminal case of pundit brain. Nate Silver famously defeated America’s punditocracy across 2008 and 2012, only predicting one state wrong (Indiana in 2008) en route to nailing two presidential elections with his data-based approach. This made him the nerd darling of political media, and Harry Enten has followed in Silver’s footsteps all the way to betraying the sober data-based logic that got him there in the first place.
Enten was doing his TV show segment on CNN today, and he decided to get down and lick Trump’s boot while doing the classic thing all good statisticians definitely love to do: make broad, sweeping generalizations based off one week of Google search trends.
CNN data guru Harry Enten calls the Epstein story a “nothingburger” because Google searches have fallen off in the past week, says Trump’s approval rating is “pretty gosh-darn good” right now, and commends Trump for having “some of the best political instincts of any politician I‘ve seen.”
I like to half-joke that both Nate Silver and the Boston Red Sox each made a deal with the devil in the mid 2000s. They would realize their greatest dream—Silver destroying the hated punditocracy across two elections and the Red Sox becoming the first team ever to come back down from 3-0 while doing it against their chief rivals, the New York Yankees—but in return, each would have to become the thing they hate the most. You can’t tell me this conspiracy theory doesn’t have evidence, as the Red Sox grew into a massive big market spender up until it became time to pay Mookie Betts, and Silver turned into one of the most insufferable pundits in all of politics.
And now Harry Enten is doing something similar, but worse than Silver’s punditocracy in a lot of ways because of how pathetically cable news-brained his work has become. The man is captive to whatever news cycle his bosses at CNN impose on him, not wherever the data leads him. A month ago, he said, “My goodness gracious” when reacting to another definitely meaningful statistic every sober statistician would instantly trust, revealing how Google searches for “Epstein” are up 1,900 percent and “is currently the top term being searched alongside Donald Trump.” One month after that number compared to a totally meaningful baseline all good statisticians agree is good data science, Enten is shocked, shocked I tell you, to measure from absolute peaks and valleys and see big numbers appear alongside them.
This is horrible data analysis. Both figures. Of course Epstein searches are going to be up an infinite amount when measured from a time where no one was talking about him. And of course a month after that explosion of interest, the mania will subside. This is how news cycles work. What Harry Enten is doing with Google search trends is no different from some idiot crypto bro measuring from the very bottom of a coin he’d never buy at that price all the way to the tippy top where he’d never sell, and lamenting how he didn’t make the maximum amount of money possible.
In April, Enten called Trump “political poison” in a segment explaining how Independent voters are turning against Trump. A little less than a month ago, he said “the American people have turned against President Donald Trump on what was his best issue,” immigration. One week later he ran his numbers and said “The American people do not like what they are seeing.” A little over two weeks ago, Enten told Republicans to “wave adios” to their House majority because of Trump’s horrific polling with Independents. “It does not appear that there is a bottom to which Donald‘s support can‘t fall to” because Trump’s polling among Independents is “the worst on record” said a TV show host cosplaying as a data analyst. Three weeks ago, he exclaimed “I’ve never seen anything quite like it” on the rounding error of GOP support for Trump’s Epstein files release. Now all of a sudden one week of Google trends data invalidates a child sex trafficking scandal as story while Trump’s approval rating is “pretty gosh-darn good” just two weeks removed from costing the GOP their 2026 House majority even though it’s still at basically the same figure.
Cable news is our shallowest and least informative form of media, and its entire structure is incompatible with any kind of good data analysis. Really crunching numbers to a meaningful degree takes lots of time and lots of numbers, and cable news simply does not have the patience to wait for good data to come in. Cable news talking heads would much prefer Trump’s mode of thinking where every week the numbers fit whatever narrative he wants. Enten may still have a good data analyst trapped inside him somewhere, but like with Nate Silver, those days are long gone, and he is an entertainment product now.
