THE POLL DANCE: Nate Silver on Predicting Elections
Nate Silver turned a love of baseball into a breakout career in forecasting player performance, inventing his own statistical system for gaming the game. Then he turned his methodical eye on politics, shocking the media-polling industrial complex by correctly calling 49 of 50 states in the 2008 presidential election. He’s now the house polling analyst for the New York Times, bringing a rigorous and gnomic level of intensity to his Five Thirty Eight blog. And his well-timed new book The Signal and the Noise comes out this week, attempting to unspool the science and art of trying and/or failing to predict the future of most anything. We talked with Silver about how the 2012 race looks so far, how it might all turn out, and how this could be the year when all the predictions (including his own) go very, very wrong.
A thing I did for the election blog. That Nate Silver is a smart dude.
