The New York Times’ Nate Silver is being hailed has a prognosticating hero following President Barack Obama’s re-election Tuesday. Silver’s political forecasts, based on complicated calculations and poll compilations put through a statistical wringer, consistently showed Obama winning Tuesday’s election by a comfortable Electoral College margin over Mitt Romney. His projections gave Obama anywhere from 290 electoral votes to 332, depending on the day’s computation, with his Election Day forecast settling on 313 electoral votes for Obama to 225 for Romney. The electoral count currently is 303-206 Obama, with Florida yet to be called. Assuming Obama wins Florida (he leads by 0.6 percent), then the final electoral vote count will be 332-206.
Silver (pictured right) also projected a popular vote win for Obama of 50.8 percent to 48.3 percent. Obama currently leads in the popular vote 50.4 percent to 48.1 percent.
(At least two other prognosticators who focused on numbers and statistical models earned praise Tuesday, and if Florida goes to Obama, they will have been even more precise than Silver: Josh Putnam, a professor of political science at Davidson College, forecast 332 electoral votes for Obama to 206 for Romney, as did Simon Jackman, a political science professor at Stanford.)
Silver’s work has been a necessary read since the 2008 election. His readers rallied to his defense and now are claiming vindication for him after several conservative pundits and Republican operatives attacked him in the weeks before Tuesday’s vote as a hack whose models were biased and inaccurate and based on phony polling. Conservatives’ views on climate change and evolution have long painted them as averse to science, but their attacks on Silver painted them as averse to math, too.
Conservatives saw Tuesday’s elections through data and electoral outcomes that were more imagined than real. The Washington Examiner’s Michael Barone confidently predicted Romney would win 315 electoral votes to Obama’s 223. Fox News’ Dick Morris saw a 325-213 Romney victory.
The Washington Post’s George Will, reinforcing his standing as one of America’s least accurate pundits (see this 2011 survey of pundits’ accuracy), predicted Romney would win Minnesota, and thus the presidency, because Minnesotans were voting on a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, and the amendment would drive turnout for Romney. Someone forgot to remind Will that this isn’t 2004, when proposed amendments banning same-sex marriage in 11 states turned out the evangelical vote for George W. Bush. Minnesota voters defeated the proposed amendment, and Minnesota went for Obama, as everyone but Will thought it would.
Then there’s Karl Rove, whose American Crossroads super PAC raised $300 million this election cycle. Rove said Romney would win Ohio, Iowa, Virginia, Colorado, Florida and 285 electoral votes to Obama’s 253.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Probably wrong. And wrong.