Hans-Sachs-Straße - Emirates.com

to the coming election. Polling
firms dramatically increased their
output and pundits, desperate for
a ‘story’ to tell, used any change
in the numbers to enhance their
overblown points.
On November 1, 2007 – roughly a
year before the election – a blogger
using the pseudonym ‘Poblano’ started
posting detailed breakdowns of
the polls on DailyKos, a liberal site.
The items discussed the failings
of individual polls, the dangers of
jumping to conclusions based on
limited or faulty information and
assumptions, and offered a more
informed take on statistics. Poblano
slowly gained a following, launching
the site FiveThirtyEight in March,
2008 with the tagline ‘Politics Done
Right.’ The URL, FiveThirtyEight.
com, is a reference to the number
of electoral votes in the country.
(To win the presidency, a candidate
must secure at least 270 electoral
Some argued that
politics was about
momentum, instinct
and feel. Silver
argued that is was a
numbers game, albeit
a very important one
77
Open skies / march 2013
BiGGesT Loser / Karl Rove’s
infamous election night
appearance on Fox was a turning
point for many pundits
votes. Each state gets two votes for
its senators and another one vote for
each representative in the House,
determined by the state’s population.
(Yes, this is a rather ridiculous
process.) As the visibility of the site
grew, so did the interest in the real
identity of the blogger.
Poblano, of course, was none
other than PECOTA’s Nate Silver.
He was still working for Baseball
Prospectus, but he had also turned
his attention to making sense of the
reams and reams of polling information.
He revealed himself during the
summer and continued parsing the
tight battle between the Democratic
candidate, Illinois Senator Barack
Obama, and the Republican one,
Arizona Senator John McCain. Each
day, Silver’s algorithm updated the
state of the race. The formula took
the polls and other factors into account,
to determine the probability
of a candidate winning their state,