Five Thirty Eight kicks ass

The big winner of this election cycle: Nate Silver. His website, fivethirtyeight.com, kicked the crap out of the mainstream media and every polling firm, consistently predicting the primaries and presidential election with uncanny accuracy.

Just take a look at the final election results compared to what he predicted:

"Right now, Barack Obama has 63.7 million popular votes to John McCain's 56.3 million, whereas third party candidates have roughly a collective 1.6 million. That works out to 52.4 percent of the vote for Obama and 46.3 percent for McCain ... conspicuously close to our pre-election estimates of 52.3 percent for Obama and 46.2 percent for McCain."

So Nate Silver missed the popular vote prediction by 1/10 of a percentage point. Truly amazing work, Mr. Silver.