Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Polls or prophecies?

My latest column at the American Spectator:
Analogies from sports are often employed to describe the competitive clash of politics and I've used a baseball metaphor myself to describe the current presidential campaign.
However, my eyebrows were raised when I learned that Internet poll guru Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight (538 = total number of Electoral College votes) comes to political punditry from a background of baseball statistics. . . .
The results on Nov. 4 may very well match Silver's projections (currently 295 EVs for Obama, 243 for McCain), but this is merely the extrapolation of current numbers over an imaginary 90-day event-free path to Election Day, which cannot be assumed.
Read the whole thing. (That means you, Dave Weigel.)

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