Did you’ve a hint that President Obama was going to win the re-election last night? If you followed Nate Silver, the statistical geek and the New York Times political blogger, you did.
Silver’s model has correctly predicted 50 out of 50 states, this year. A last-minute result for Florida, also went in Obama’s favor according to Silver’s prediction on Monday night. No wonder one of the more popular tweets suggested that he was actually from the future, working from old newspapers.
This nerdy analyst outdid even his 2008 prediction. In that year, his mathematical model correctly called 49 out of 50 states, missing only Indiana (which went to Obama by 0.1 %.)
“Nate Silver, right,” said Bill Burton, who moved from the White House to serve as the Senior Strategist with Priorities USA Action.
Now, if you don't follow Silver, you're probably wondering who this guy is and why everyone is talking about him. So here’s a little background on this renowned personality.
Introduction to Nate Silver
Nate Silver is a statistician and a writer who maintains a blog, FiveThirtyEight, currently licensed by The New York Times. Started in 2008, the blog was initially hosted on Daily Kos and written under a pseudonym ("Poblano") until Silver revealed himself and became a full time blogger. Silver got his start as a statistician and blogger in the world of baseball, where he came up with a proprietary model — PECOTA — that used past data to predict baseball players' future performances. Silver ended up winning over much of baseball media.
Why is Nate Silver popular?
Coming back to the results of Presidential elections, where most political pundits offered less-riskier and predictions about the race between Obama and Romney, Silver gave Obama a certain 91 percent chance of winning on Election Day, and correctly forecasted every state outcome as well. Silver not only picked Obama on November 6 — he was known to be calling the president the favorite for the entire election cycle.
Silver’s poll-based analysis site FiveThirtyEight.com which was bought by the New York Times two years ago, takes a statistical, nonpartisan approach to the election. His model doesn’t cherry-pick polls, but analyzes them based on how accurately each polling organization in each state has performed in the past.
Factors like economic data, such as the jobs report numbers and stock market rises and falls, which have affected elections in the past are taken into consideration. Until recently, this part of Silver’s model was regarded as a controversial thing and drew complaints from the Obama campaign.
By 2016 don’t be surprised to see if the future breeds of statistical analysts are all Nate Silver clones. Every media organization will now want its own state poll-based algorithm, given how much traffic Silver has driven to the New York Times‘website. You’ll start seeing more about that kind of model, and less news about individual polls, which are almost always misleading unless you aggregate them.
And if you want to see just how accurate Silver’s model was, check this image out:
