Nate Silver nails it

Election night held virtually no surprises for those of us following Nate Silver's 538 blog at the New York Times. The poll aggregator and analyst had for a long time tracked the probability of a decisive Obama victory among swing states and an equally decisive result for Democrats to retain control of the Senate.

So the Romney supporters who profess to be sincerely stunned by the 11:15 announcement calling the race for Obama, or Eugene Robinson's surprise at the extent of the Obama swing state sweep on Morning Joe, just means they weren't paying attention.

There was simply no reason not to believe that Silver's models were doing anything other than following sophisticated statistical techniques for weighing and analyzing poll data to predict the result. There was no reason not to accept the evidence he provided that state polls on the whole were going to be more accurate than national polls, or in any event, given the Electoral College, more significant.

So Silver had put the probability of an Obama victory at 87% before the first debate, then tracked the plunge after that debate down into the 60s, only to end up yesterday with a 90% probability of an Obama victory and a conservative estimate of 303 electoral votes. More venturesome poll analysts who predicted 332 votes are more likely to be right once problem child Florida gets around to the unbelievably complicated process of counting their votes and those 29 electoral votes go into the Obama column.

Anyway, a big thanks to Silver for providing evidence on a daily basis that this country was not going off the rails and falling for the deceptions of two of the most dishonest politicians ever to head a national ticket.