The Nate Silver Election: The pollsters and the pundits got it right, and Dick Morris is still looking for a Romney landslide
The Nate Silver Election | American Journalism Review
Call it the Nate Silver election.
The New York Times’ acclaimed and assailed FiveThirtyEight blogger, who analyzes polls with his way-cool special algorithm, has been telling us for some time that President Barack Obama was going to win a second term.
This brought him all sorts of opprobrium from conservatives livid that he could be so blithely be predicting certain victory for the beleaguered incumbent when polls showed Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney were virtually tied in the popular vote.
But the critics were totally missing the point. Elections in this country are decided by the meshuganah electoral college. And those swing state polls were making it clear, although by the narrowest of margins, that Obama was going to once again be the One.
Silver, and much of the mainstream media, got it right. The polls were tight, but the analysis suggested correctly that Obama was going to win again. The much-maligned narrative wasn’t “skewed” — it was on target.
The obsessive focus on polls this time around was no doubt over the top. But given the tightness of the election, the intense passions surrounding it and insatiable thirst of so many to know who was going to win, I’m not sure it was a major war crime.