Blogger finds baseball stats proves Obama will win
Daily Kos favorite Poblano, the moniker for blogger Nate Silver, spent a lot of time getting right what powerful polling organizations missed with the Democratic nomination process. You could say he hit a home run.
Science News took a look at how Silver managed to blog his way to political stardom among the followers of hugely-trafficked Daily Kos. An interest in baseball and skill with statistics allowed Silver to come through with predictions that more established pollsters missed:
On May 6, his methods were put to the test. The latest polls said Clinton had drawn close to Obama in North Carolina. But Silver’s model didn’t buy it. In South Carolina and Virginia, Obama had done much better than the polls predicted. When the model matched each district in North Carolina with a similar one in South Carolina or Virginia, it calculated that Obama would clean up with a 17-point win.
Pollsters jeered. On Slate.com, Mickey Kaus said the prediction was made “by a blogger using a sophisticated model that ignores … what’s been happening in the campaign. Like Rev. Wright. I predict this person is wrong!”
But when the results were in, Obama won by 14 points. Silver beat every established pollster.
The real question for Silver and the pollsters concerns the November election. His model sees a narrow win for Obama, perhaps by three points, once the votes are counted. Find more of his work at FiveThirtyEight.com.
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