CELINA, Ohio — As Mitt Romney's campaign works to exude confidence in the home stretch, one wonky, liberal, self-made New York Times election forecaster has emerged as a particularly tricky obstacle.
Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight blog runs dozens of polls through a model that weights and averages them, and then spits out a daily forecast determining the likely outcome of the race. Silver has consistently identified Mitt Romney as a serious underdog, and his projection did not swing as dramatically as did the conventional wisdom after the first presidential debate in Denver: his latest projection gives the Republican just a 26.4 percent chance of winning.The model's stubborn insistence on a likely Obama victory has earned Silver the wrath of conservatives, who accuse him of shoddy methodology at best, and sinister Obama-boosting at worst.
pot kettle syndrome all over again, the audacity of the right to accuse anyone of sinister actions.
For his part, Silver told BuzzFeed he's "a bit dismayed that the FiveThirtyEight forecast has become a story rather than what the polls say. It seems unhealthy, on a number of levels.
"He said the Romney adviser could be right that the state polls will tighten — along with his forecast — but that the more likely positive outcome for Romney is that the state polls are just systemically biased, and will be proven wrong on election day.
with the enormous amount of misleading information and like a boxer who's lost every round his trainer says"we got him where we want him".
