ABSTRACT
Over the previous four years, Nate Silver’s election forecast model has correctly predicted the Electoral College winner in 99/100 states and the outcome of 100/105 Senate elections. Silver was not the only election forecaster to succeed. Sam Wang, Drew Linzer, and Simon Jackman all developed election forecast models that predicted essentially the same outcome in the 2012 presidential election. In spite of this consensus among election forecasters, many in commercial print and broadcast media portrayed the election as a tossup. Some pundits even participated in a vocal backlash to the forecasts. Peggy Noonan, former communications director for Ronald Reagan and columnist for The Wall Street Journal , reacted to Silver’s forecast by arguing that “nobody knows anything” about who would win; David Brooks of The New York Times proclaimed that election forecasters lived in “silly land;” and Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post tweeted that polling averages were “junk” (as cited in Bartlett, 2012, para. 7). Joe Scarborough, former U.S. House Representative and host of Morning Joe on MSNBC , argued that the race was a tossup and anybody suggesting otherwise, Nate Silver included by name, “should be kept away from typewriters, computers, laptops, and microphones for the next ten days because they’re jokes” (Scarborough & Ridley, 2012).
