Talk about getting it right! 50 out of 50 is Nate's amazing election score
So which political pundit made it to the top of the tree for getting the result absolutely right?
Blogger Silver got it just right
Little doubt about that. Adweek has handed the prize to New York Times blogger and poll guru Nate Silver, who correctly predicted 50 out of 50 states in his electoral map yesterday evening.
"Nobody in the media had a better night," said the mag .
Yesterday morning, at 10:10 a.m., Silver forecast that Obama had a 91 percent chance of winning and would score 313 electoral votes to Republican candidate Mitt Romney’s 225.
As of 1:10 a.m. this morning, CNN projected 303 electoral votes for Obama and 206 for Romney, based on unofficial returns.
Said Adweek, " Silver took the wind out of the windbags and let the data (accurately) tell the story."
Bloomberg concurred, saying, "Nate Silver was right. The Gallup Poll was wrong."
Gallup’s daily national tracking poll put Romney ahead by five points until it was suspended for Hurricane Sandy. A final national survey released on Nov. 5 gave the Republican a one-point advantage.
“These polls are designed only to measure what is happening at the time of that poll in terms of the national popular vote” and are not “designed to be predictive,” Gallup editor-in-chief Frank Newport said. Silly me , I always thought they were predictive !
With the count in Florida still to be finished, Obama was leading Romney nationwide by two percentage points, 50 percent to 48 percent.
The Republican-leaning Rasmussen Reports, an automated poll, also had Romney winning the popular vote by one point, said Bloomberg. It missed on six of its nine swing-state polls.
“Nationally, we projected a toss-up and that’s what happened. We projected Ohio would be a tie, and it was very close,” president Scott Rasmussen said. “I believe that what happened is that the polls were right.”
The Pew Research Center and ABC News/Washington Post put Obama up by three points, while the NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey had him ahead by one point.
Silver, said Bloomberg, infuriated conservatives with his model, which uses a number of measurements and calculations, including attention to state polls.
“Unless America abandons the Electoral College, the national polls just aren’t meaningful, although we all love the horse race,” said Rogan Kersh, provost at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
Silver had Obama losing North Carolina, which the president won four years ago, and winning the other eight swing states. Silver also predicted Romney’s win in Indiana, the only other state that Obama won in 2008 and lost in 2012.