Today’s election may be a contest between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, but for hordes of pundits and political news junkies it is also, at least in part, a referendum on the statistician Nate Silver.
Ever since he correctly called all 35 Senate races and 49 out of the 50 states in the presidential race of 2008, Silver, who began his career analyzing baseball, has become the urim and thummim of American statistics. (In 2010, The New York Times acquired his blog, FiveThirtyEight). As November 6 neared, Silver’s defenders and detractors have doubled down on their emotional investments: the former spread a Facebook meme that urged fellow fans to keep calm and trust Nate Silver, while the latter accused the statistician of everything from unmerited celebrity to partisan hackery.
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