The Huffington Post | Salon | Forbes | Newsday | Slate | Time | The Washington Examiner | The New York Times
New York Times polling blogger Nate Silver appears to have called every state correctly Tuesday after being needled for weeks by political commentators who ridiculed his method for forecasting election results.
Salon’s Jacob Sugarman posts two vindicatory maps. (If you prefer, you can view Christoph Niemann’s M&M-based map.) Jeff Bercovici attempted to quantify Silver’s victory: “There’s a 90.9% chance that tonight is going to cap the best three weeks of Nate Silver’s life,” he wrote before returns started coming in Tuesday. Silver “got the race right because he analyzed the data properly and honestly, something his critics were unable, or worse, unwilling, to do,” Lane Filler writes in Newsday.
Silver’s accuracy reflects better on the science of polling, Daniel Engber argues in Slate. Silver’s fans, he writes, are “giving credit to the bearer of good news. In doing so, they’ve made the same mistake that Silver’s critics made last week: They’ve confused his projected odds with hard-and-fast predictions, and underestimated the accuracy of polling.”
Paul Bradshaw writes that Silver’s journalist critics are an “embarrassment to the profession.”
Journalists who professed to be political experts were shown to be well connected, well-informed perhaps, but – on the thing that ultimately decided the result: how people were planning to vote – not well educated. They were left reporting opinions, while Nate Silver and others reported research.
Similarly, in what won’t be the first story about how Obama won, Michael Scherer profiles his campaign’s data operation.
“We ran the election 66,000 times every night,” said a senior official, describing the computer simulations the campaign ran to figure out Obama’s odds of winning each swing state. “And every morning we got the spit-out — here are your chances of winning these states. And that is how we allocated resources.”
In contrast, Byron York writes that Romney’s data initiative, “Project Orca,” was a flop.
Orca, which was headquartered in a giant war room spread across the floor of the Boston Garden, turned out to be problematic at best. Early in the evening, one aide said that, as of 4 p.m., Orca still projected a Romney victory of somewhere between 290 and 300 electoral votes. Obviously that didn’t happen. Later, another aide said Orca had pretty much crashed in the heat of the action. “Somebody said Orca is lying on the beach with a harpoon in it,” said the aide.
Dylan Byers, who crusaded against Silver in various ways recently, tweeted a concession early Wednesday:
Nate Silver nailed it.
— Dylan Byers (@DylanByers) November 7, 2012
Silver didn’t gloat after the race was called exactly as he’d forecast (“we’re going to get some sleep and grab a beer,” he wrote), though he did link to his new book.
This is probably a good time to link to my book: amazon.com/The-Signal-Noi…
— Nate Silver (@fivethirtyeight) November 7, 2012
Silver talked about Obama’s win last night with Times blogs editor Megan Liberman. The subject of gambling came up and was quickly dismissed.
Related: 71 percent of politics visits to The New York Times last week “included a stop at FiveThirtyEight,” Marc Tracy writes in the New Republic. Don’t read that as saying Silver generated 20 percent of The Times’ traffic, reminds Peter Kafka. Numbers, people!
More Silver (and Silver-ish) stuff: Pundits’ 2012 predictions, visualized as darts on a target (Slate) | Silver was “not the only one who really nailed it” (The Atlantic) | A very good pundit scorecard (The Atlantic Wire) | Michael Barone: “please be assured that I will be on a diet of crow for some time” (The Washington Examiner) | The psychedelic poetry of a Silver parody Twitter account (The Washington Post) | Ezra Klein on Twitter: “The greatest trick Nate Silver ever pulled was becoming the face of aggregated polling“
Comments