Poynter rounds up reax:
New York Times polling blogger Nate Silver appears to have called every state correctly Tuesday after being needled for weeks by political commentators who ridiculed his method for forecasting election results.
Salon’s Jacob Sugarman posts two vindicatory maps. (If you prefer, you can view Christoph Niemann’s M&M-based map.) Jeff Bercovici attempted to quantify Silver’s victory: “There’s a 90.9% chance that tonight is going to cap the best three weeks of Nate Silver’s life,” he wrote before returns started coming in Tuesday. Silver “got the race right because he analyzed the data properly and honestly, something his critics were unable, or worse, unwilling, to do,” Lane Filler writes in Newsday.
Silver’s accuracy reflects better on the science of polling, Daniel Engber argues in Slate. Silver’s fans, he writes, are “giving credit to the bearer of good news. In doing so, they’ve made the same mistake that Silver’s critics made last week: They’ve confused his projected odds with hard-and-fast predictions, and underestimated the accuracy of polling.”
Dean “Unskewed” Chambers really should apologize now for his personal attacks against Nate. But don’t hold your breath.
