NYT’s Nate Silver Wins The Gold
Boston Globe
Nate Silver, the much-maligned prognosticator at the New York Times, was proved right last night, rendering all of his doubters wrong.
In fact, Silver who was chided for his supposed Democratic bias, called every state in the presidential contest correctly and erred only in two Senate races. In those races, in Montana and North Dakota, Silver forecast that Republicans would win. He was wrong. So much for liberal bias.
The leading Silver skeptic, Dylan Byers at Politico, conceded last night when he tweeted that “Nate Silver nailed it.” He was joined by Dean Chambers, the proprietor of www.unskewedpolls.com, a website that re-weighted polls in Romney’s direction. Chambers admitted ”Nate Silver was right and I was wrong.”
How did this nerdy-looking numbers-cruncher become such a star? And how was he able to predict, with such stunning specificity, that Barack Obama had a 90.9 percent chance of winning a second term?
The 2012 campaign proved the second consecutive election that Silver’s predictions proved to be dead-on. (In 2008, Silver successfully predicted every state save Obama’s surprise win in Indiana). Does this mean Silver is infallible and that elections are merely tedious exercises that confirm his conclusions?
Of course not. Silver’s methods, relying heavily on state polls, are hardly perfect. He is only as good as the data that he gets and can then feed into his model. Plus, his winning percentage really isn’t 99 out of 100. After all, it doesn’t take much skill to predict that Mitt Romney will win Utah or that Barack Obama will win Washington, D.C.
But Silver has forever changed horse-race reporting. It’s no longer just about pundits and gut feelings about who has “the big mo.” It has to involve empirically looking at data and drawing conclusions. Such an approach doesn’t deemphasize the importance of getting out and talking to voters and sources but it adds an important addition to the toolbox.
And get this: Sales of Silver’s new book have spiked 850 percent, landing him in the No. 2 spot on Amazon.
In fact, Silver may have had a better night than Barack Obama last night. Obama’s victory gives him only four more years in the White House, but Silver’s win gives him a lifetime as a relevant political journalist.
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