Republicans say Nate Silver is a biased liberal, and reading his blog this election cycle makes it seem that way to me even.<p>But I would like to know - is there a Republican analog to Nate Silver? Someone who predicts 90% of the races at the end, does the meta-math, and has a computer model?<p>If there is no Republican analog, can you possibly say Nate Silver is liberal or biased? Does using a computer model and math, and blogging about your results make you a Democrat?
Nate Silver came from the fantastic world of the statistical analysis of baseball, specifically Baseball Prospectus. You can check out his body of work here (some articles require a subscription):<p><a href="http://www.baseballprospectus.com/author/nate_silver/" rel="nofollow">http://www.baseballprospectus.com/author/nate_silver/</a><p>His big contribution was a model used to predict player statistics. When he first started writing about politics, I assumed the name was a coincidence.
The book is pretty good, sort of like a cross between Moneyball and Freakonomics. It's less political than you'd think it'd be, and as an attempt to preach the gospel of Bayesianism, should be congenial to most HN readers.
<3 Nate's blog. Only two election sites I bother with nowadays are Nate's [1] and Andrew Tannenbaum's [2], both data-oriented.<p>[1]: <a href="http://fivethirtyeight.com" rel="nofollow">http://fivethirtyeight.com</a><p>[2]: <a href="http://electoral-vote.com" rel="nofollow">http://electoral-vote.com</a>
he's good because he's careful, he does the maths right, and he's doing meta-analysis, so he has more data than the people he's being compared to.<p>but he's popular mainly because he can communicate so well. doing the maths right is not that hard.