Nate Silver Vindicated: Prediction Matches Reality

Elections have consequences. I strongly suggest that there should be consequences for pundits like Newt Gingrich, Michael Barone, Karl Rove and Dick Morris who all made outlandish predictions based on "secret" data that Mitt Romney would win the presidential election, with some of these fantasy-based commentators suggesting the Republican would win a landslide.

The media should refuse to take anything these people (and other partisan hacks who eschew a reality-based view of the world in lieu of an attempt to choose their own "facts") say in the future about politics without acknowledging how wrong they had previously been in their analysis of the 2012 election.

Nate Silver, on the other hand, should probably be awarded a special McArthur "genius grant" fellowship for the accuracy of his predictions and for what he has done to promote the importance of mathematics and quantitative thinking to millions of Americans.

This tweet, demonstrating the unerring accuracy of Silver's predictions of the 2012 presidential election results compared to the actual results, is pretty stunning.

For the Nate-haters, here’s the 538 prediction and actual results side by side twitter.com/cosentino/stat…
— Michael Cosentino (@cosentino) November 7, 2012