Nate Silver has a good track record of political predictions.
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When Nate Silver predicts a victory for either political party, he is inevitably criticized by the other. Yet observers on both sides of the political divide have come to laud Silver as a guru statistician and to see his work as both reliable and groundbreaking.
“In 2008, Nate Silver correctly predicted the results of all 35 Senate races and the presidential results in 49 out of 50 states,” said Democratic political scientist Samuel L. Popkin in 2012. “Since then, his website, fivethirtyeight.com (now central to The New York Times’s political coverage), has become an essential source of rigorous, objective analysis of voter surveys to predict the Electoral College outcome of presidential campaigns.”
Silver now says there is a 60% chance that Republicans will win a Senate majority. There is also a 30% chance that Republicans will win an especially crushing victory.
The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee pushed back against Silver’s prediction in a memo released this morning. Notably, however, the memo begins by praising Silver as a great statistician.
