At 9:46 p.m., blogging on his site FiveThirtyEight.com, Nate Silver called the presidential election for Barack Obama. The television networks followed suit about an hour and 15 minutes later after most polls in Western states closed. Of course, Silver had a head start: he had forecast that Senator Obama would beat Senator John McCain back in March. In an election season of unlikely outcomes, Silver, 30, is perhaps the most unlikely media star to emerge. A baseball statistician who began analysing political polls only last year, he introduced his site, FiveThirtyEight.com, in March, where he used his own formula to predict federal and state results and run Election Day possibilities based on a host of factors. Other sites combine polls, notably RealClearPolitics and Pollster, but FiveThirtyEight, which drew almost five million page views on Election Day, has become one of the breakout online stars of the year. Silver recognised that people wanted to play politics like they played fantasy baseball, and pick apart poll numbers for themselves instead of waiting for an evening news anchor to interpret polls for them.FiveThirtyEight is “among the very first things I look at when I get up in the morning,” said Allan McCutcheon of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. “He helped make sense of some of the things that didn’t seem sensible.”Silver has also become an in-demand analyst, appearing on MSNBC, CNN, The Colbert Report and Fox News. “From a marketing standpoint, I’d rather hedge a little bit more,” he said, “but we’re the ones who are bold enough and are stupid enough to say what the polls translate to.”He spent election night in a small studio inside the Newseum in Washington, as an on-air analyst for Dan Rather Reports on HDNet. During the campaign, Silver had learned a thing or two about TV polish: he smoothed his hair, ironed his jacket, applied Visine drops and dabbed on concealer before a “hit,” as he had learned to call it. This was his second television booking of the day, and a producer from The Tonight Show had called earlier. A makeup artist brushed on powder and a producer yelled into a cellphone as Silver sat sideways at his computer, squinting at Excel spreadsheets.Silver has believed in numbers the way authors believe in words, as capable of expression and provocation, since he was young. He “was a numbers fanatic,” said his father, Brian Silver, a political science professor at Michigan State University.
