For the past eight weeks we’ve been juxtaposing snapshots of the presidential campaign with Nate Silver’s daily predictions from his FiveThirtyEight blog for our Campaign Calculus series. We wanted to give you a sense of the arc of this election, show you the events, gaffes, and moments that made the difference and drove the campaign toward—we know now—the re-election of Barack Obama.
In our final video we’ve strung together the whole series of Campaign Calculus, from the conventions to Election Day, for your viewing pleasure. Take a moment to remember the highlights of the 2012 campaign.
The man behind the numbers, Nate Silver, received a wave of criticism in the days leading up to the election. Silver was suddenly deemed overrated by a number of pundits. Dean Chambers of the Examiner went so far as to say:
Nate Silver is a man of very small stature, a thin and effeminate man with a soft-sounding voice…Nate Silver, like most liberal and leftist celebrities and favorites, might be of average intelligence but is surely not the genius he’s made out to be. His political analyses are average at best and his projections, at least this year, are extremely biased in favor of the Democrats.
NBC has not yet declared a winner in Florida yet, though Romney has conceded it. But if they do declare the state’s electoral voted for Obama, Nate Silver will have correctly predicted fifty out of fifty states in the 2012 presidential election. So much for the critics.
If you see Nate Silver, give him a high-five from The Last Word staff.
Evan Puschak