Nate Silver has been plugging away at his blog, 538 , for years in relative obscurity.
The statistician and polling expert gained a devoted following in the 2008 election, but, in 2012, he became a political celebrity as his blog was picked up by the New York Times. Suddenly his predictions were being echoed on MSNBC and by countless political pundits, many of whom disagreed with his assessment that Obama was leading the race comfortably.
The blog aggregated the large number of state and national presidential polls using a formula to determine each candidate’s chances in a given state and in the popular vote. Silver, a former baseball statistician who developed the PECOTA system which can accurately predict a team’s win-loss record, posted updates about each candidate’s chance of victory as well as in-depth analysis of trends.
Throughout the 2012 presidential race, Nate Silver gained an increasing number of vocal critics, especially as his projects for Obama grew.
In the time after the Democratic National Convention and the first debate, Silver showed Obama with a close to 80 percent chance of victory. When Mitt Romney trounced Obama in that first debate and won the momentum of the race, Silver’s predictions continued to show Obama leading in the battleground states necessary to get him to 270 electoral votes.
Though many pundits called Nate Silver crazy for not buying the narrative that Romney had the momentum needed to carry him to victory, his numbers turned out to be the most accurate of all, Bloomberg Businessweek noted. While the Gallup poll showed Romney with as much as a 7-point lead in the week or so before Election day — though this advantage dropped to a single point in Gallup’s final poll — Nate Silver’s projection showed Obama gaining constantly in the final weeks.
For Nate Silver, a former professional online poker player who only got into politics to follow the progress of a bill banning online poker play, the accuracy of his predictions have brought a new level of fame. This year he appeared on The Daily Show , and, after the election, sales of his book jumped 500 percent, CNN reported .
Many are seeing Nate Silver’s emergence as the beginning of the end for television pundits, whose predictions he noted are no more accurate than a coin flip. Talking heads like Karl Rove and Dick Morris had predicted a Mitt Romney victory, going on nothing more than gut instinct or party allegiance. Silver’s unbiased, numbers-based predictions instead carried the day.