For the last few news cycles, Nate Silver (and by extension all election forecasters) faced intense but misguided scrutiny by pundits (especially conservative ones). His critics run the gamut from partisan charlatans to scared pundits clinging steadfastly to the relevance of their raconteur. It's fun to laugh at the innumerate, wishy washy arguments these people make. Yet a rational strain of the debate gets muffled by our collective cachinnation: the argument that Silver's model isn't perfect. I'll examine this strain of the debate and argue that we need to systematically compare and combine the results of the numerous election forecasting models that have cropped up in the last decade, and will crop up in the years to come.
This is a manifesto for better election prediction by comparing and contrasting prediction models. That's right. We need to aggregate the aggregators or, if you prefer, meta-analyze the meta-analyses.
(Read the rest of the manifesto for meta-meta-analysis of election prediction models at Malark-O-Meter.)