Finding Fame With a Prescient Call for Obama: Nate Silver

[DeepModem Mom]

NYT: Finding Fame With a Prescient Call for Obama
By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD
Published: November 9, 2008


(Beth Rooney/NYT)
Nate Silver, founder of FiveThirtyEight.com, at his home office in Chicago.

At 9:46 p.m., blogging on his site FiveThirtyEight.com, Nate Silver called the presidential election for Barack Obama. The television networks followed suit about an hour and 15 minutes later after most polls in Western states closed. Of course, Mr. Silver had a head start: he had forecast that Senator Obama would beat Senator John McCain back in March.

In an election season of unlikely outcomes, Mr. Silver, 30, is perhaps the most unlikely media star to emerge. A baseball statistician who began analyzing political polls only last year, he introduced his site, FiveThirtyEight.com, in March, where he used his own formula to predict federal and state results and run Election Day possibilities based on a host of factors.

Other sites combine polls, notably RealClearPolitics and Pollster, but FiveThirtyEight, which drew almost five million page views on Election Day, has become one of the breakout online stars of the year. Mr. Silver recognized that people wanted to play politics like they played fantasy baseball, and pick apart poll numbers for themselves instead of waiting for an evening news anchor to interpret polls for them....

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Mr. Silver has also become an in-demand analyst, appearing on MSNBC, CNN, “The Colbert Report” and Fox News. “From a marketing standpoint, I’d rather hedge a little bit more,” he said, “but we’re the ones who are bold enough and are stupid enough to say what the polls translate to.”...

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Mr. Silver has believed in numbers the way authors believe in words, as capable of expression and provocation, since he was young. He “was a numbers fanatic,” said his father, Brian Silver, a political science professor at Michigan State University....

He graduated from the University of Chicago in 2000, and was working for (and bored by) the accounting firm KPMG when he began messing around with baseball statistics. He tried to predict players’ performance based on their similarity to players from the past, like Bill James, a pioneer in baseball statistics, had done. But unlike Mr. James, Mr. Silver adjusted for body type, including factors like height and weight, discovering, for example, that taller pitchers age better. He built a predictive system called Pecota around that, and sold it to Baseball Prospectus, a statistical organization, in 2002, staying on as a writer and consultant for the company....

Late last year, Mr. Silver, an Obama supporter, became frustrated with how primary poll results were being reported, and how sloppy polls and rigorous polls were given the same attention....Mr. Silver posted his speculations on the liberal Web site DailyKos.com, and earned attention when he projected Senator Obama would win 833 Super Tuesday delegates, which was within about a dozen of the actual vote estimates.

He began feeding a database with every poll available, from the University of Akron to Zogby International, state demographics and election results from 1952 forward. He weighted all the polls on historical accuracy, and adjusted them for whether they tended to favor Democrats or Republicans and other factors, then built a model that simulated elections....

Between his live TV appearances on election night, Mr. Silver updated his model and determined around 8 p.m., after New Hampshire went to Senator Obama, that Senator McCain had no way of winning. By the end of the night, Mr. Silver had predicted the popular vote within one percentage point, predicted 49 of 50 states’ results correctly, and predicted all of the resolved Senate races correctly....

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/business/media/10silver.html?pagewanted=all

[Tarheel_Dem]

1. I love Nate, and I'm so glad he's one of ours. Recommended....nt

[quidam56]

2. ME TOO !

President Obama and Vice President Biden will probably go down in history as the best team in our life time. Keep us up to date Nate,

END MOUNTAIN TOP REMOVAL ! http://www.wisecountyissues.com