Silver sells out, moves to the Big Apple (isn't this the Decker career path?)

FiveThirtyEight Joins East Coast Media Elite

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How to Suck at Democracy -- the PhD seminar

Today, just moments ago, the infamous Lizard People ballot came up for the Canvassing Board's review!

This ballot was initially counted as a Franken vote. The Coleman campaign challenged the ballot, claiming "Lizard People" was an identifying mark. The Board voted to uphold the challenge, arguing that they couldn't be certain that "Lizard People" wasn't a real person's name.

And in a separate post...

If Coleman wins 127 challenges and Franken wins 122, that would mean a net of 5 votes for Coleman. If the Franken campaign's estimate was correct that it was winning the re-count by 4 votes assuming that all challenges would be rejected, that would produce a Coleman win by a grand total of ... one vote!

Zogby-like shenanigans in the news

NS: Thank you, have a good day.
JZ: Go fuck yourself.
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that's a lot of scratch

Nate Silver Signs With Penguin In Two Book Deal Worth About $700,000 [Update]

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Bill Pecota gets his name in the New York Times (sort of)

News item: There is a Facebook page named "There’s a 97.3 Percent Chance That Nate Silver Is Totally My Boyfriend."

In an election season of unlikely outcomes, Mr. Silver, 30, is perhaps the most unlikely media star to emerge.

beginner's luck

Nate Silver blew it (and NBC calls it)

We always had a good feeling about Indiana when we saw it in our travels. This was a state where Obama had the ground game all to himself. With us predicting a slight win for McCain in the state, but no ground game taken into effect, and with a late minute canvassing push from FiveThirtyEight in Gary, Indiana looks like it'll go Obama.

UPDATE:

We're All Doomed

A McCain's win chance drops below 2%...

Obama Marches Toward Victory

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Silver cracks the plutocrosphere

Not sure whether y'all can get at this for free, but...

Crain’s 40 Under 40 for 2008 features a diverse lineup of up-and-comers, from chefs to statisticians to CEOs, in industries ranging from coffee to casinos, corrections to commercial real estate.

No. 30: Nate Silver: Managing partner, Baseball Prospectus; creator, FiveThirtyEight.com

Last winter, a young baseball prognosticator trumped the preseason magazines with a dead-on forecast: The perennial doormat Tampa Bay Rays would contend for a division title.

On May 6, a little-known political blogger bested national polls in predicting the victory margins in the Democratic primaries in North Carolina and Indiana, which all but sealed Barack Obama's victory over Hillary Clinton.

Both improbable calls belonged to Nate Silver, a 2000 University of Chicago economics grad who looks right at home in his hipster-thick Wicker Park neighborhood. His blending of algorithm-based predictive models and keen subjective insights has made him a trusted soothsayer for baseball geeks and political junkies alike...

From the troglodyte homunculus who said Kerry was going to win, or, OUTLIER

Pollster John Zogby: "Is McCain making a move? The three-day average holds steady, but McCain outpolled Obama today, 48% to 47%. He is beginning to cut into Obama's lead among independents, is now leading among blue collar voters, has strengthened his lead among investors and among men, and is walloping Obama among NASCAR voters. Joe the Plumber may get his license after all. "Obama's lead among women declined, and it looks like it is occurring because McCain is solidifying the support of conservative women, which is something we saw last time McCain picked up in the polls. If McCain has a good day tomorrow, we will eliminate Obama's good day three days ago, and we could really see some tightening in this rolling average. But for now, hold on."

Nate gives this a smackdown: Trick or Treat

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I sure hope the Big Ten is better at polling than football...

AM Polls Show Surprisingly Large Leads for Obama

New polling this morning from the Big Ten polling consortium and Quinnipiac University present a view of what the world might look like if Barack Obama wins in a landslide. The Big Ten polls have Obama ahead by double digits in ten Midwestern states: he leads by 10 in Indiana, 11 in Pennsylvania, 12 in Ohio, 13 in Wisconsin and Iowa, 19 in Minnesota, 22 in Michigan, and 29 in Illinois....

With that said, the trendlines in these polls are interesting. Quinnipiac has had a slight (1-2 point) Democratic lean this election cycle, but only in the last month or so have they started to produce some of these "shock and awe" numbers for Obama. And when the first round of Big Ten polling was conducted in mid-September, it had not been particularly favorable to Obama.
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there is probably an interesting story behind that (cont'd)

9:57 PM [Sean] By the way, a special shout out for an absolutely horrible experience on the campus of Belmont University. I'm not sure I've ever been to a less welcoming place. We hated this campus and the staff here so much that we left to watch the debate at a pizza joint. I don't like to regret things, but it would be hard to overstate how terrible a day this has been, and how crappy every interaction we had in Tennessee was. It was a terrible decision to leave Indiana and come down here. That had to be said for the record.

Mr. Burns is really making the rounds...

Tonight
In what might be the second worst kept secret of all time, I will be on the Colbert Report tonight. We will also, of course, be liveblogging the debate.

-- Nate Silver at 5:22 PM 51 Comments...

He was also in the studio last night with Olbermann. He does a weird thing with his eyes--distracted by the lights, like a moth. He has Obama at nearly a 90% win chance right now, which means his fall will be a spectacular crispy, crackly fireball, preceded by so much sleaze that the Swift Boaters will look like a bunch of Girl Scouts in comparison.
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