After nailing 2012 elections, number crunchers suggest pollsters are asking the wrong question
President Obama wasn’t the only winner in November’s election: Math also triumphed. At the forefront of the algorithmic charge was numbers nerd Nate Silver, who correctly predicted the presidential winner in all 50 states on his New York Times blog FiveThirtyEight.
Silver incorporated several factors into his calculations, including whether a candidate was an incumbent and how much money a candidate received in campaign contributions. But a hefty portion of Silver’s predictive secret sauce was the careful aggregation and weighting of results from multiple polls. To the chagrin of many, he was dead-on, and election night was touted as a win for Silver as much as it was for the president. (As one fan tweeted: “Tonight, Nate Silver is the Chuck Norris of the Web. Or Chuck Norris is the Nate Silver of fighting.”)