Baseball stats guru Nate Silver sees election landslide for Barack Obama

[cali]

BY ANDY MARTINO
DAILY NEWS SPORTS WRITER

Baseball prognosticator Nate Silver (below) has turned his prescient eye to politics - and sees a big victory for Barack Obama on Tuesday.



The Tampa Bay Rays and Barack Obama have made 2008 the year of the surprise contender, though one man predicted both successes before nearly anyone else - and he sees a general election landslide for Obama over John McCain on Tuesday.

In February, baseball analyst Nate Silver predicted that the long-pathetic Rays would win 88 games in 2008. Three months later, a blogger calling himself "Poblano" ignored that Hillary Clinton's campaign against Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination seemed to be gaining momentum, and wrote that Obama would win the upcoming North Carolina primary in a landslide and lose Indiana by a small margin.

And in both cases, the forecasts proved true. The Rays became American League champions, North Carolina and Indiana effectively sealed Obama's victory - and Poblano turned out to be none other than Silver.

Silver, 30, holds an economics degree from the University of Chicago. His innovations for the popular think tank Baseball Prospectus include a sophisticated formula called PECOTA (Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm), which predicts future performance for baseball players and teams more reliably than many traditional metrics.

Now, on his Web site fivethirtyeight.com (named for the number of electoral college votes at stake in the presidential election) and as a frequent commentator on MSNBC, he is establishing a reputation for political prognostication. On Tuesday, his credibility will be tested, as his complex formula predicts a larger victory for Obama than nearly anyone else.

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http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/baseball/2008/11/01/2008-11-01_baseball_stats_guru_nate_silver_sees_ele.html?page=0

[democrattotheend]

1. Poblano and Silver are the same person?

I was wondering why we hadn't heard much from Poblano lately...guess that makes sense.

[Muttocracy]

4. I guess America didn't have room for 2 really smart statistical predictors :)

[texpatriot2004]

2. k & r nm

[BrklynLiberal]

3. That picture of Nate Silver is the most awake-looking I have ever seen him.

On TV he always looks like he just woke up, or he has a terrible hangover.

[immoderate]

5. Or both!

--IMM :)

[Omnibus]

10. From the hours he posts on his site...

...I don't think Nate gets much sleep.

[stillcool]

6. this part is very cool..

"If Obama is going to do some sort of health care plan, what are the chances it would pass through Congress?" he says.

maybe he can target congress critters that need persuasion, so we can orchestrate our efforts..or something.

[Gregorian]

7. This kid is truly impressive.

I've been searching for just this. I'm very happy to see my hunch being "confirmed". I admit to being bipolar about the outcome. But when foul play is involved, it's hard to secure a prediction. Whatever that means.

[BlooInBloo]

8. In the interests of accuracy, he currently sees a 22.19% chance of Obama landslide.

[Blondiegrrl]

9. That was a good article. I particularly enjoyed John Zogby's comments.

"It seems like he's injecting a lot of geekery into the system," says veteran pollster John Zogby. "I don't know that that's a good thing."

Meow! Hiss!

[DeepModem Mom]

11. K&R

[Brooklyns_Finest]

12. Hope he is right

Nate is a liberal, but he also is a business man and a professional. If he succesfully predicts the election outcome, he will change the face of electoral analysis and will be in line to make a lot of money. His livelyhood and reputation is dependant on the correct outcome.

[pdxmike]

13. 538 is a go to place for me

What I love about the site is the analytical rigor that Nate et al employ. For the past few months, I've seen screwy polls that have tilted one way or the other. I always relied on this site to help me keep things in perspective. What a great resource!!

[BluegrassDem]

14. So what is his prediction???

I'm confused on 538. I see the stats on the left column, but is that his actual election day prediction, or just where the race stands that hour of the day? I'm curious to know what is actually popular and EV vote is for Tuesday.

[BlooInBloo]

15. What you see there are the summary stats of the last set of 1 brazillion simulation runs...

Think of all of that as the latest estimate of the probabilities of each event taking place, updated to reflect the most current information.

[Florida33156]

16. Those are his election day predictions...

...based on current polling and other assumptions. He runs a bunch of simulation models which use the polls and other factors to predict state winners. He then comes up with percentages based on the number of times each candidate wins each state based on 10,000 simulation runs, and comes up with averages nationwide, etc.