Election Wrap-up II: All Hail the Great Nate Silver

One of the prominent themes of the final weeks of the campaign was the exponential increase in visibility of New York Times writer and FiveThirtyEight Blog editor Nate Silver. As pundit after pundit crowed about the imminence of a Romney victory (Andrew Sullivan has a good round-up), they were increasingly forced to push back against Silver's prediction of a fairly hefty Obama victory. They did this in various ways and for various reasons.

When Jonah Goldberg called Silver's model a "numbers racket," or when former GOP Congressman Joe Scarborough referred to Silver as an "ideologue" and a "joke," one could safely assume that this was just right-leaning pundits keeping the hope alive and trying to stave off negative press on their guy. Then there are the non-partisan pundits like Politico's Dylan Byers, who wrote the following:

So should Mitt Romney win on Nov. 6, it's difficult to see how people can continue to put faith in the predictions of someone who has never given that candidate anything higher than a 41 percent chance of winning (way back on June 2) and — one week from the election — gives him a one-in-four chance, even as the polls have him almost neck-and-neck with the incumbent.

My assumption with them has always been that the moment people thought the horse race was ending, they'd lose a big chunk of their election season readers and ad revenue almost overnight. The knew the gig was up in a week or two anyway, so why not call it a toss-up and take the cash?

Silver's response to these critics was pretty much consistent: he'd note the fact that his 2008 model had correctly predicted the outcome of 49 out of 50 states (Indiana was the lone exception), mention that a Romney win was a very real possibility due to systemic poll bias, and finally suggest that this question was empirical  and that his prescience or wrongheadedness would be as plain as day on the morning of November 7. Oh, and sometimes bet sums of money against his detractors on the accuracy of his model, putting his money where his mouth was in a way the punditocracy didn't like AT ALL.

At any rate, the final iteration of Silver's model was released to the public at 10:10 A.M. EDT on the morning of November 6, a few hours after the election day polls opened on the east coast. Almost exactly 13 hours later, the networks called the race for President Obama. So how'd he do?

• Silver's model predicted a final popular vote percentage for the President of 50.8%. Per the Examiner's extrapolation of the results once all the votes are in and certified (which could take weeks, as Florida was only called today, and there were still more than 3 million uncounted ballots in California as of yesterday), Obama will win with a total of 50.79% of votes cast. Thus, it appears that Silver's prediction missed the actual vote by about 0.01%. Put another way, Silver correctly predicted the total number of votes Obama would get, out of more than 133,000,000 cast, within 15,000. Not bad.
• Silver's model didn't offer a final electoral college prediction in whole states, instead finding the average of the simulations, which rounded out to 313 electoral votes, as the model landed in between 303 (without Florida) and 332, the number Obama ended up with. It is worth noting, however, that the single highest probability outcome, according to the simulations, was the 332 EV outcome. 
• Silver correctly predicted the outcome of all 50 states, besting his 2008 record of 49 out of 50. 
• As far as the Senate is concerned, he correctly projected the outcome of 32 out of 33 Senate races, missing only the surprise victory of Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota.

At the end of the day, Silver's model did an exceptional job of predicting the election accurately, while other, less rigorous estimates proved wildly inaccurate. His feat is being called a "real-life-revenge of the nerds," he himself is referred to as the destroyer of punditry, and a hilarious twitter meme using the hashtag #DrunkNateSilver has erupted in his honor. All that's left to do is to see how he fares come 2016.