While many conservatives look to former Clinton political consultant Dick Morris to understand the polls and political surveys on the elections, or even a site like UnSkewedPolls.com, those on the left look to New York Times blogger Nate Silver. Silver had a background in analyzing and writing about baseball that Wikipedia describes as, “Silver first gained public recognition for developing PECOTA, a system for forecasting the performance and career development of Major League Baseball players, which he sold to and then managed for Baseball Prospectus from 2003 to 2009."
Silver currently writes about the polls and politics at a web site called FiveThirtyEight.com that is affiliated with the New York Times. His currect projections of the presidential race look quite favorable to the incumbent, President Obama, both nationally and especially in the swing states. Routinely he assigns percentage odds of a candidate (usually his beloved Obama) winning a state far higher and disproportionate any reasonable odds of that candidate winning a state as indicated by the polls.
His blog site has an article yesterday arguing that Mitt Romney's momentum in the polls has stopped. This is wishful thinking of a liberal given that the polls continue to improve for Mitt Romney. He still has Obama winning in Virginia and Colorado even though the most recent and credible polls in those states show Romney winning them. He gives Obama a 73.4 percent chance of winning Ohio, which is downright absurd, as Rasmussen has the candidate tied in Ohio, which really means the undecided voters tip the state of Ohio to Romney if the election were held today. So much for that fantasy-land 73.4 percent chance of Obama winning Ohio.
Apparently, Nate Silver has his own way of “skewing” the polls. He appears to look at the polls available and decide which ones to put more “weighting” on in compiling his own average, as opposed to the Real Clear Politics average, and then uses the average he calculates to determine that percentages a candidate has of winning that state. He labels some polling firms as favoring Republicans, even if they over sample Democrats in their surveys, apparently because he doesn't agree with their results. In the end the polls are gerrymandering into averages that seem to suit his agenda to make the liberal Democrats candidates apparently strong than they are.
He claims to have been highly accurate in predicting the 2008 election results, and perhaps he was. But it's highly unlikely his current methods and projections will have the level of accuracy unless he changes then quite a lot between now and election day. The race has shifted profoundly in favor of Mitt Romney while Nate Sillver is still projecting an Obama win. Unless he changes that, the credibility he earned in 2008 will be greatly diminished after this years election.
Note: This article has been edited to remove a paragraph that the author believes was inappropriate and has apologized for, and therefore has removed it.
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