Five Thirty Eight

I would just like to take a little time out of my night to praise the insane genius of Nate Silver.  Silver is a political blogger with the New York Times.  He uses his blog entitled Five Thirty Eight (after the amount of electoral votes in U.S. elections) in order to showcase his predictions for the elections.  By gathering information from all of the major political polls across the U.S. such as Gallup and PEW and weighting them based on their bias, Silver carves out accurate predictions about which candidate is most likely to be the victor. 
Throughout the fall I followed Nate Silver's blog and found that following his no nonsense, unbiased and objective predictions for President, gave me comfort on election day.  I knew, based on Nate Silver's predictions, that the probability of Obama winning was around 90% whereas Mitt Romney's probability was much lower at 9%.  I cast my vote based on who I thought would do a better job leading the country, not swayed by Nate Silver's statistics.
When the election was over and almost all of the votes had been counted (as of right now they are still counting) I was not at all surprised that Obama won and laughed at every person on Facebook that was surprised when Romney lost.  Nate Silver is a mathematical, logarithmic genius who pegged this election perfectly and who took the surprise out of the results of the election. 

If everyone followed his blog the argument has been made that no one would vote.  If everyone followed his blog, his blog would fail as his job would be immensely harder.  People would look to him to predict the election and then decide not to vote because they would say their vote doesn't matter.  It is good that Nate Silver has skeptics and that most people don't follow his Five Thirty Eight because that makes his job easier, people still vote when they think their candidate has a chance. 

In this election cycle Silver pegged every state's electoral vote correctly and only missed one senate race which was decided by a few thousand votes.  He is awesome and his blog is highly recommended for anyone who doesn't want to be surprised on election day.