Obama Campaign Shared '08 Polling With Silver (FRAUD!)

As the Democratic primary began to rivet public attention at the end of 2007, political junkies began to develop an obsession with a blogger under the name "poblano" on the liberal DailyKos who was analyzing and merging polling data with unusual sophistication. The anonymous analyst dropped the occasional hint — he wasn't involved in politics, but did work with numbers — and the next summer came out as Nate Silver, a baseball statistician whose work had taken a similarly probability-focused approach to the sport as he did to politics.

Silver is walking back his 82% Zero win lock.

And the walkback continues. RT @fivethirtyeight: We have Obama as ~80% likely to win EC if pop. vote is a tie. 98% if O+1. 30% if R+1

To Twitter the twit:

https://mobile.twitter.com/fivethirtyeight

Written agreement with Obama in ‘08 lands him the NYT gig.

Fraud!

It's too late for him to walk back anything. He's on record as Zero having an 80% chance of re-election and winning 300+ electoral votes. Either his statistical methods are shown accurate or they aren't.

I'm surprised he has kept this a secret, not sure why. In 2008 he was just a blogger. I give Axlerod a lot of credit for finding him and hiring him. Having a good statistician on your staff has to be critical to running and winning POTUS.

He should have informed readers though. That's not cool, especially after he went to work for the NY Times.

It's interesting to see Michael Barone come out for Romney so strongly. My suspicion is that he has become irritated by Silver's smug assurance that he knows the outcome of the race. Despite a month of polls breaking Romney's way, Nate has remained steadfast. (Or, his "model" has.)

So another election night showdown looms: battle of the uber-pundits. Who's got the real knowledge, who's got the goods? The grizzled vet of a hundred campaigns who literally wrote the book on American politics, or 'the kid' with his fancy math and computer models?

There can be only one!

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.