2012: Kudos to Nate Silver

No wrap-up of the 2012 presidential campaign would be complete without a tribute to Nate Silver of FiveThirtySeven.com. All year, the statistician had been sifting through polling data, applying it to his own statistical model and calmly explaining, to the disgust of Fox News, why President Obama would re-election. 

Silver's confidence was unmatched. Well before Election Day, Silver was forecasting that Obama was an odds-on favorite, even in the wake of the president's poor performance in his initial debate with Mitt Romney. And even as the race seemingly tightened toward Election Day, Silver was forecasting that Obama stood a 90 percent chance of being re-elected. His forecast  correctly called Obama's win in each of 50 states. In the 2008 presidential election, he correctly called 49 states, missing only Indiana, which had not gone Republican since 1964.

Fox and the Republicans howled about his forecasts. Even political pundits on the left said he had gone too far out on a limb with his 2012 forecasts. He rejected the idea that he was biased in favor of Obama and the Democrats. Indeed, in the 2010 mid-term elections, all three Senate seats that Silver misdiagnosed were won by Democrats, not Republicans as he had forecast.

Silver says his "most important distinguishing characteristic" is that he is open-minded. That quality, he adds, is probably encouraged by the fact that he is gay. That open-mindedness makes him skeptical even of parts of the gay culture, he told OUT magazine in its December 18 profile of him.

OUT tells of Silver noticing a series of memorials in Chicago's Boystown to various gay Americans such as Keith Haring. "I was like, Why isn’t he just an American artist? I don’t want to be Nate Silver, gay statistician, any more than I want to be known as a white, half-Jewish statistician who lives in New York," he told the magazine.

Silver says he considers himself "kind of sexually gay but ethnically straight." Until recently he had a boyfriend; they separated but remain close.

So here's to Nate Silver: the nation's premier analyst of election data, a superb statistician and sabermetrician, and a writer and author. Oh, and by the way, he happens to be gay.

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