Nate Silver took a lot of crap from conservative pundits this election season, mainly because he wasn't telling the story they wanted to tell ("Mitt-mentum!"). Now that it's election day, and now that the final predictions are in, I thought it would be fun to compare and contrast Silver's final FiveThirtyEight predictions for Election Night 2012 with those of the new darling of wingnutosphere, Dean Chambers and UnskewedPolls.com. Let's see who ACTUALLY gets it right in the end ...
FiveThirtyEight : Silver's predictions are, of course, over at the FiveThirtyEight blog. As of this morning, the "NowCast" and "Nov. 6 Forecast" have converged and show identical numbers (for obvious reasons).
As of this morning, Silver's prediction is 313 EVs for Obama and 225 for Romney, with a popular vote spread of 50.8% vs. 48.3%.
Of the crucial swing states, Silver gives Obama the vote in Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin. he's pretty light on Florida, though, sticking the probability at just over 50%.
UnskewedPolls.com: Dean Chambers has tried to give his Unskewed Polls approach some legitimacy by publishing his predictions on the faux-journalism site Examiner.com.
Chambers predicts "Mitt Romney being elected the next president of the United States with 50.67 percent of the popular vote and 275 electoral votes to President Obama's 48.88 percent and 263 electoral votes."
Of the crucial swing states, Chambers gives Romney the vote in Colorado, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, and Virginia.
Actually, even "unskewed," Chambers agrees with most of Silver's state-by-state predictions (albeit arguing for different margins of victory). It really comes down to their Popular Vote predictions, which mirror one another; and the results in 4 states, Colorado, Florida, Ohio, and Virginia, that create the very different EV predictions.
So who's right? Silver is obviously the odds-on favorite, considering his 2008 performance; and if Chambers turns out to be correct, it will leave a lot of people scratching their heads and giving his methods a new look. Either way, we'll know tonight ...
UPDATE [11/7/2012]: You know what? It's the day after and I don't even feel like mocking Dean Chambers today. I'm just going to put this link here and be done with it.
Triumph of the Nerds: Nate Silver Wins in 50 States