Nate Silver is a statistics geek.
As his Wikipedia entry notes, he gained minor notoriety with baseball, co-authoring several books and articles on baseball statistics, coming up with his own types of statistics, like PECOTA (Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm), a statistical system that projects the future performance of hitters and pitchers.
In March of this year, he turned his considerable statistical skills to politics, and a blog entitled fivethirtyeight.com. At this site, he predicts the outcome of the election, based on current polls. However, he has weighted the polls, based on their performances during the primaries. He then runs computer simulations based on those polls.
The site is a little geeky, and Silver clearly falls within the Obama camp, but he is anal about his statistical analysis. It is a site to bookmark for the next few weeks.
Here, for example, is his state-by-state projection map:
Not too shabby.
And his latest 10,000 trial computer simulation of the outcome:
All told, it looks really good, yes?
But don't get complacent. This is all rope-a-dope by the GOP. McCain tipped his hand when he said today:
My friends, we’ve got them just where we want them. …
Well, yes, that's true. If you want "them" in a landslide….