Report by Rory Cellan Jones
Despite numerous political pundits saying that the Presidential Race was neck-and-neck, Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight statistician has correctly predicted that Obama would win – in fact, he never considered Obama’s chances of victory to be less than 61.1 percent.
In a sense, Nate Silver also won, thanks to his understanding of the American electorate derived from years of analysis of demographic shifts and voting trends.
After the first debate, it seemed as if the President’s prospects has lessened but for those Democrats who regularly visited Silver’s FiveThirtyEight blog hosted at the New York Times knew that Obama re-election wasn’t under any threat whatsoever.
As for those Americans who were too busy making their own judgments based on polling data accumulated by reputed polling organizations such as Gallup, Silver’s number did not make any sense. Of course, Silver did not have any experience running a poll and with so many national polls indicating that Obama was struggling and trailing Romney, it seemed ridiculous that the President should win the election easily.
There were critics namely Dylan Byers who were skeptical of the approach taken by poll aggregating that took hundreds of national and state polls to arrive at figures that would predict who would take the Electorate College.
In fact, Byers went on to voice his opinion in an article stating that Silver (and his predictions) were highly overrated, a consensus if you will which was shared by political pundits, colleagues and reporters, before the election.
However, with Nate Silver getting the winner of each of the 50 states absolutely right in his predictions, it can be safely surmised that he knew exactly what he was talking about.