Tag Archives: FiveThirtyEight

The Hill reports: Democrats have about a 75 percent chance of retaking the House of Representatives in the midterm elections, according to the data crunchers at FiveThirtyEight. The website launched their new House forecast on Thursday, predicting an 80 percent chance that Democrats gain between 14 and 58 seats. The party needs to flip 23 seats to retake the House …

I don’t think moving to an unsold seat is necessarily rude. Source.

(Via – Nate Silver)

Over at FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver updates his forecasts today to predict that the GOP will pick up 49 seats in the House. That’s far fewer than the 100+ being claimed by some Republican flacks, but still enough for the GOP to take the majority by six seats. Silver hedges his bets: As I have warned repeatedly in the past, we …

Nate Silver’s latest forecast gives the Democrats only a 35% chance of holding their majority in the House. Republicans are assigned a 65 percent chance of taking over the House by our forecasting model, up slightly from 62 percent last week. They are projected to control 224 House seats in the new Congress, up a single seat from 223 last …

More at FiveThirtyEight.

Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight makes its debut as part of the New York Times today, where he gives us the above predictions for this year’s Senate races. It looks like Silver is predicting that the Democrats will lose about seven seats, yet retain a slim majority.

Nate Silver: Something to bear in mind is that it’s only been fairly recently that gay rights groups — and other liberals and libertarians — shifted toward a strategy of explicitly calling for full equity in marriage rights, rather than finding civil unions to be an acceptable compromise. While there is not necessarily zero risk of backlash resulting from things …

Nate notes this about his graph: The big spike you see in 2008 is California recognizing gay marriage through the courts, and then un-recognizing it through the passage of Proposition 8. Right now, it’s possible to marry your same-sex partner in Buenos Aires, in Mexico City, in Ames, Iowa, and in Pretoria, South Africa, but not in San Francisco. With …

The New York Times has taken over hosting of FiveThirtyEight, the popular elections prognostication site run by statistics guru Nate Silver. Mr. Silver, a statistical wizard, became a media star during the last presidential election season for his political projections based on dissections of polling data. He retains all rights to FiveThirtyEight and will continue to run it himself, but …

This here website thingy made the Advocate’s Top Political Blogs list. From Joe.My.God to The Daily Beast, Advocate.com spotlights a few of the best blogs that cover politics, inside and way outside the Beltway. Joe.My.God: The name sounds salacious, but the content is anything but. Not to say Joe Jervis’s six-year-old blog is boring — it just gets to the …

You’ll have to embiggen this graph from FiveThirtyEight to make sense of it. Jeff Lax and Justin Phillips put together a dataset using national opinion polls from 1994 through 2009 and analyzed several different opinion questions on gay rights. Here I’m going to talk about their estimates of state-by-state trends in support for gay marriage. In the past fifteen years, …

With all the often wildly-conflicting polls, the one site I kept drifting back to was stats geek Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight. History will be very kind to Silver’s predictive prowess. His final call of 349 electoral votes for Obama is dead-on for the current results, although Obama’s total may increase slightly as the couple of still deadlocked states are finally decided.

Could this explain the great disparity between polls? Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight: The polls in the Cingular-y orange color include cellphones in their samples; the polls in gray do not. The cellphone polls have Obama ahead by an average of 9.4 points; the landline-only polls, 5.1 points. I did a radio hit the other afternoon with Mark DeCamillo of California’s …

Probabilities by FiveThirtyEight.com, a site that you should be following (if you aren’t already). The author is 30 year-old stats whiz Nate Silver.