He had this locked tight. I can't get over how accurate he was. Major Kudos.

Why would you trust statistical analysis of dozens of professionally executed polls over political pundits? UR DUM

Has he missed a single state yet? This guy was by far the most accurate pollster I've seen.

You would think so, but the Republican war on science marches on...

Honestly, I am sort of surprised that no republicans, and specifically the libertarian minded ones, have posted on this thread.

Ha.. what do you expect them to say? Seems he's only 44 for 44 right now.. those crazy 'ol skewed polls... and now skewed, biased ballots. It never stops with these dirty Chicago politics.

Nate Silver is on point and pretty much the best in the business.

After this election I don't know how you can argue otherwise. He's killing it.

He wins again

Silver even got Florida right; all the way down to the fact that the State would be a toss up that Obama was going to win it by a few thousand votes.

Silver got the demographics of the electorate right; he predicted really, really high turnout for African Americans, Hispanics and Women.

He seems to be on target with total popular votes that Obama would win and he may have only missed on the total number of electoral votes, which he had at 313. Obama seems to be sitting at 331.

O.K., we can concede that he is the best in the business.

Heck, I didn't know anything about him until the last couple of days threads about him (never even heard of the guy previously), but he got his numbers right. Although if he got the electoral votes wrong, he had to miss something somewhere didn't he?

I just looked at his blog again. He went 50 for 50. Absolutely amazing.

(11-07-2012 03:02 AM)DaSaintFan Wrote:  Heck, I didn't know anything about him until the last couple of days threads about him (never even heard of the guy previously), but he got his numbers right. Although if he got the electoral votes wrong, he had to miss something somewhere didn't he?

His electoral votes were based on a statistical belief that Obama would not win every single state where he was a slight favorite. Turns out Obama won every state where he was a favorite (even a slight favorite).

Where are those who were trashing his model and algorithm now? At least have the decency to come up here and admit that, like those old and ignorant baseball scouts who turned their nose at sabermetrics, you simply had no idea what you were talking about when it comes to statistical analysis and tried to belittle that which you don't understand.

(11-07-2012 09:33 AM)Machiavelli Wrote:  I just looked at his blog again. He went 50 for 50. Absolutely amazing.

Wonder how many regressives are still refusing to believe the polls aren't skewed.

A couple of points:

- Nate is not a pollster per se. He doesn't do polling. He developed a program to parse current and historical polling data to predict an outcome.
- Detractors will never give him credit because they will say they weren't detracting from him, but from the polling data he was using. Because if the polls are wrong, Nate looks wrong.

What they need to come to grips with is that these supposedly skewed dem polls were not. Face it, no one wants to call themselves a Republican any more thanks to W.

(11-07-2012 10:01 AM)HuskieFan84 Wrote:  

(11-07-2012 09:33 AM)Machiavelli Wrote:  I just looked at his blog again. He went 50 for 50. Absolutely amazing.

Wonder how many regressives are still refusing to believe the polls aren't skewed.

I know it's amazing. In the weeks leading up to the election every time someone on here posted a poll with Obama in the lead it was shot down as "liberal biased" and "skewed", yet the polls posting a Romney win weren't biased at all.

(11-07-2012 10:13 AM)Bucster Wrote:  

(11-07-2012 10:01 AM)HuskieFan84 Wrote:  

(11-07-2012 09:33 AM)Machiavelli Wrote:  I just looked at his blog again. He went 50 for 50. Absolutely amazing.

Wonder how many regressives are still refusing to believe the polls aren't skewed.

I know it's amazing. In the weeks leading up to the election every time someone on here posted a poll with Obama in the lead it was shot down as "liberal biased" and "skewed", yet the polls posting a Romney win weren't biased at all.

Exactly. You have to come around to reality at some point when nearly EVERY damned poll taken samples more democrats. That just doesn't happen by accident.

EXCELLENT point RedWingTom. Alot of these Independents are guy's like GTS. They don't want to call themselves R. In some places you have a D+9 advantage. The GOP can not survive today as we know them with that kind of inherent advantage to D's. They will adjust though and come back stronger.

(11-07-2012 10:13 AM)Redwingtom Wrote:  What they need to come to grips with is that these supposedly skewed dem polls were not. Face it, no one wants to call themselves a Republican any more thanks to W.

This is not entirely true. It looks like a D+6 advantage in the election. Obama got his vote out which was the key.

The polls routinely showed D + 7 or greater. CNN had one last week that was D + 11. That is not the electorate that turned out. So the underlying point the polls were showing more D's than turnout is actually true.

My point was that didn't make sense to me given the state of the economy. These same polls also showed Romney winning independents big and greater republican enthusiasm. Those internals didn't jive with a D + 7 or greater advantage in my opinion. I thought the likely voter screens were being far too generous to Dems. Clearly they weren't.

Silver didn't impress me in 2008 cause it wasn't exactly difficult to predict the 2008 election. He wasn't distinctively better in 2010. His model was spot on this cycle so I give him all the credit for that. But like I said his model is only as good as the data that goes into it. He was fortunate that the data was good.

Kudos to him.