FiveThirtyEight.com

[lsanderson]

This Math Whiz Called It for Obama Months Ago
By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD
Published: November 9, 2008

At 9:46 p.m., blogging on his site FiveThirtyEight.com, Nate Silver called the presidential election for Barack Obama. The television networks followed suit about an hour and 15 minutes later after most polls in Western states closed.

Of course, Mr. Silver had a head start: he had forecast that Senator Obama would beat Senator John McCain back in March. Link

Comments

[gerisullivan.livejournal.com]

Sweet.

I especially liked how FiveThirtyEight went on the road, and their state-by-state reports, too. Nate Silver and the rest of his team deserve the fame and excellent reputation that accompanied their work.

[shsilver.livejournal.com]

To be fair, by 10:00, it was clear to anyone who could add that Obama would win, however the networks, having screwed up royally in 2000, have set their policy that they can't call any specific state until polls close in that state and, in order to come to the definite conclusion that Obama would win, you needed the 55 California electoral votes.

[lollardfish.livejournal.com]

I loved 538 this year. I'm a big fan of Silver's work with baseball statistics and was pretty sure that he'd do fun things, if semi-controversial, with political statistics.

OTOH, not calling the race until California came in (which was the proper thing to do), gave us a "national moment." Every network called it for Obama, people around the country and around the world screamed in excitement, people honked their horns. Friends of mine in denser urban areas (living in Manhattan, for example), describe a palpable roar of joy that extended up from the streets.

I'm glad we all got the "news" at 11:00 Eastern Time.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

Despite the enjoyable thrill of following the (estimated) returns as they come in, and the obvious limitation of Freedom of Speech, I'm leaning towards favoring a ban on the Media dissemination of such information (and maybe speculation) until after the moment when the last of the Polls close. (Fair Disclosure: I wanted the largest possible groundswell of the popular vote for Obama, to support the Mandate concept, and suspect that his majority would have been larger if fewer people on the West Coast had not bothered to vote because his election seemed to be certain by mid-afternoon here.)

[sethb.livejournal.com]

On the other hand, if his election had been called a couple of hours earlier, Proposition Hate might have failed.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

Ohh, I _like_ "proposition hate" (as a way of describing it). But yeah, you might be right (*sigh*), though I've seen no break-down of voting trends according to time of day.