It was not. I kept wondering why Rmoney was so confident.

when i started reading Silver in May or June of '08. I thought "this guy is fucking amazing." I was always was chomping at the bit for his new senate rankings and updates on the state of the race. After he picked 49 of 50 states correctly (in 2008, only getting Indiana wrong) and every senate race I knew he was going to be a phenom. Not long after that fivethirtyeight was picked up by the Times and the rest is history. I hope Nate predicts many Democratic Administrations for years to come!

and happy ever since...

plethora of RW polls giving Mitt a significant lead in the battleground states and the media hype made it clear what was going on. They were trying to in up Republican excitement for a bullshit candidate. Up to that point, Mitt was consistently behind, and I suspect they knew he was losing.

the outcome was obvious although it depended on the ground game being operated by well organized, intelligent people.

I would go to a random park in a low-income, presumably low-information area and talk to adults, young and old. Most everyone not only said they would vote for Obama but could tell you precisely why. "Obama got handed a bad deal. Things were already in bad shape when Obama took over, and Republicans are trying to shift the blame." People who said that were making a moral judgment about the honesty and irresponsibility of the entire Republican establishment -- and in my opinion, they were right.

Another one, which I heard from young people in particular, was that Obama had ended the war in Iraq and promised to end the war in Afghanistan. These young people could tell me about friends of theirs in the armed forces. Obama's re-election was life or death to them. They voted for Obama.

Those who did not support Obama were upset by the economy. Joblessness was the problem. But then if you pointed out that the Republicans had ruined the economy by failing to regulate wrongdoing, they became silent, pensive.

Then there are those (and they are growing in number) who supported neither Romney nor Obama because they want fundamental changes such as an end to wars of greed and the Federal Reserve system and hegemony of the banks. (I repeat that they are growing in number.) I suspect, however, that, once in the polling booth, many of them voted for Obama. Because hope reigns eternal . . . And we all still hope that Obama will strive toward the fundamental changes that we need. He is the only candidate, the only politician who has the name recognition, who cares and who can achieve real change.

In my experience, voters were, for the most part, much better informed or at least much more willing to state the bases for their choices than in 2004 or 2008. Maybe it was just the way I approached the voters, maybe I was different this time, but I found people to be more articulate about their reasons for supporting Obama this year than they were about him or other candidates in the past.

I kept asking hubby how the hell one debate of lies could change the fact that WilLIARd was the sleaziest of the scumbag ReTHUG candidates in living memory. All of M$Greedia including more than a few liberals bought form rather than LYING content in fifteen minutes.

And we vote! and Nate Silver counts us! The corporate news and pundits are just here to scare us and sell us shit! Well, we're not afraid and we're not buying! But we ARE voting! The next two years will be a turnaround in America, topped off by people power in the 2014 elections electing good Dems to a super majority. We will not go down the dark road of facism. At least I hope not! I'm getting up there and want to leave my country better than it was.

money from ads and ratings.

makes it happen. I think the PR flacks and their sugar daddies were justifiable in believing that enough money spent on mass marketing will convince people to buy any old shit, and they were confident that enough money could sell Mitt Shit to suckers even though the numbers said otherwise.

after all he perdicted the Electoral College count! <doffs tin foil cap to Nate "the Anomynous" Silver>

n/t

Thanks for the link!

to milk more money from the rich then they started believing their own lie.

Nate is the best.

I didn't believe someone could make a book about statistics interesting.

I was wrong.

This is a very good article. Nate Silver is now internationally famous... For what? for being a nerdy smart person.

That's cool. That's awesome. I wish more nerdy guys and gals would achieve this.

and I didn't jump on the Nate bandwagon in the beginning ....butI should have

Check out this paragraph:

----
There was more than a touch of homophobia to the criticism (Silver is gay), not to mention an aversion to scientific rationalism that has come to characterise certain segments of the conservative right. (Gawker compared the attack to "something like a jock slapping a math book out of a kid's hands and saying, 'NICE NUMBERS, FAG.'"
------

There were multiple sites that did what he did -- go beyond the latest poll of the national popular vote and instead make Electoral College predictions based on state-by-state analysis of the state polls. I myself was following electoral-vote.com, chiefly because I happened to have gotten into that habit and couldn't take the time to follow Silver and all the other sites as well. AFAIK, every single one of those poll aggregation sites predicted an Obama victory.

This wasn't Nate Silver versus the world. The real division was into these two camps:

1) People with an agenda, such as MSM calling the race close so as to hype viewer/reader interest, and Dick Morris predicting a Romney landslide so as to inspire the troops.

2) Objective, number-driven analysts who wanted to get it right.

I read an interview with Sam Wang of the Princeton Election Consortium, which also did poll aggregation and which also got it right. He expressed respect for Silver but stated a disagreement with him on some minor statistical issue that went over my head. I strongly doubt that the people focusing on Silver -- whether to praise or disparage him -- could give any coherent reason for believing that Silver's statistical approach was better or worse than Wang's.

It seems that "Nate Silver" is partly the name of a real person and partly a shorthand way of referring to all the number-crunchers.

where Sam and PEC are still associated with the school....

So M$M focuses on M$M....

And not given the Princeton guys (and others, as you point out) the same celebrity treatment.

However, Nate had a heckuva platform to speak from in fivethirtyeight, is fluent in Nongeek, creates cool, accessible charts, and has a very engaging prose style. On one level, he's a columnist as much as a numbers guy.

And hence more easy to present (market?) as a star.

Let's see how they spin their shit next time. I expect no changes. Indeed they will try to destroy him. The sad truth is that Princeton and others also got it right using real numbers and not the opinions and talking points of hacks.

yes, that is what was going on.

Hello US, you may be making a pay check from corporate america, but you are also giving away your democracy by giving them so much power and freedom.

It backfired this time - go Nate!