How a hardball freak turned his calculator on politics—and beat the nation’s biggest pollsters at their own game

by nate penn

Last fall, when an Internet commentator calling himself “Poblano” began posting highly sophisticated primary-election predictions—first at DailyKos.com, then at his own site, FiveThirtyEight.com—you had to wonder: Why the pseudonym? Because the dude just kept getting things right. By the time his balls-out, stunningly accurate predictions for the North Carolina and Indiana Democratic primaries (based on an algorithm incorporating sixteen variables) hit the Web in early May, he’d become the most compelling anonymous Beltway observer since the Primary Colors guy.

“Poblano,” it turns out, is Nate Silver, creator of PECOTA, the revolutionary statistical tool for evaluating…baseball players. The 30-year-old wanted to keep his name out of the pollster mix until he was sure he had something legit to add, which he most certainly does. Chat with him for half an hour and he’ll explain how Obama is “the Billy Beane of politics” because “his campaign is clearly very data-driven. If you look at the cities he visited, you’ll find a lot of times he’d purposely straddle two congressional districts, to swing votes in both.” He’ll explain that certain beloved articles of faith in both baseball and politics ought to be reevaluated: For the former, it’s the value of stats like batting average and RBIs; for the latter, it’s “the whole notion of red states and blue states, which is conditioned solely on the last two elections.” Fans of his work include Obama-campaign operatives: After Silver suggested that the senator go to Alaska in the lead-up to the general election, they booked the flights. And in case you’re curious, his simulations currently have Barack winning the election more than 60 percent of the time, though “it’s not going to be a blowout victory.”

Come November, Silver will be crunching both 2009 PECOTA numbers and 2008 election returns. He won’t sleep much. “Alaska is a swing state this year,” he sighs, “and you can conjure scenarios where you wait for the results to be moosed in from Nome.