Nate the Great and 538

Nate Silver, the quant jock who created the website:  www.fivethirtyeight.com  (538) has proved his detractors wrong once again and accurately predicted the outcome of the presidential election (Obama). Despite the conservatives claiming the presidential election was too close to call and trying to spin Romney as the front-runner (especially after the first debate), the race had never been that close, according to Silver. Obama always had a strong chance of winning:  ranging from a low of 63% on Oct. 9th to a high of 91% the day before the election. In terms of electoral votes, Silver predicted (on election day) Obama would obtain 313 electoral votes while Romney would obtain 225. The actual outcome was 303 electoral votes for Obama and 206 for Romney, with Florida too close to call. And yet numerous news stations, talk shows, radio programs, and newspapers predicted the 2012 presidential election too close to call.  Why is that?

Most political writers and analysts are not mathematicians or trained in the ways of quantitative analysis and up until 2008 politics was never a field that most mathematicians were interested in (enough to apply quantitative theory). People seemed to be satisfied with polls that had margins of error ranging from 3-8 points, except Nate Silver, a statistician who believed the public was entitled to accurate information and so he took the polling data from both parties, analyzed the margins of error, and used his math skills to create a quantitative model to make accurate election predictions.

Talk show hosts and party supporters may have the gift of gab or pen and use subjective markers and their own personal biases to persuade the public to their opinion or to believe in what they want to happen but they don’t typically have a bunch of math geeks analyzing the data to support their claims.  All too often, the trailing party in their desire to win at any cost wants to portray a winning momentum when in fact, there is no momentum, the momentum has slowed, or even stopped. Instead of asking “why,” they attack those (i.e. Silver and 538) who point out the inaccuracies of polling data thus threatening their positions of power and persuasion.

Silver is not a partisan hack, despite what the conservatives would have everyone believe.  He’s young (35), gay, Jewish (which are all beside the point) and registered as non-partisan although he admitted supporting Obama in 2008. What he professes is a faith in mathematic principles and rational thought. So although his detractors paint him as a Obama supporting Democrat, his projections are based on mathematical analysis of both Republican and Democratic polls.  Polls have margins of error and Silver’s analysis of their historical margins of error are used to predict a race’s outcome resulting in very accurate predictions.

The bottom line is Silver accurately predicted the election outcomes in 2008 and again in 2012.  He isn’t a one-hit wonder and although the Conservatives would have you believe otherwise, the proof is in the outcome. It’s hard to argue with accurate results. So instead of attacking Silver and the validity of 538, the conservatives may want to ask themselves:  What is it about the Republican Party’s platform that most Americans cannot support?