Scooping the political pollsters
Who will win the election in November? A technique from baseball stats may predict the answer.
Nate Silver was bored. He’d graduated from the University of Chicago in economics and gone on to a typical consulting job, but it didn’t interest him much. Not as much as baseball, that’s for sure.
The job came with one nice perk, though: access to a cool, geeky statistics software package. It was just the thing for analyzing baseball data. Before long, Silver could use it to predict how good a baseball player’s season would be — and he could do it better than anyone else.
Silver’s method catapulted him into a new career as a hotshot baseball analyst. But his tendency to noodle around with side interests didn’t stop. He tackled a new game, politics. The result? Once again, he bettered all the old-timers.
He’d been tracking politics for a while, and questions kept popping up for him. Did Clinton really appeal more strongly to poorer voters? Did Obama have an advantage in caucus states as the pundits said, and if so, by how much? And most importantly, who was going to win? Numbers, Silver figured, could help find the answers.