November 06, 2008
the web rules
How good was 538? This good. The only state their model got wrong was Indiana, where they expected a narrow Obama loss. He won the state by a hair. Nate Silver owned this election on the polling front: one young guy with a background in baseball stats beat out the mainstream media in a couple of months. And he beat out the old web: I mean if you consider the total joke of Drudge's recent coverage and compare it with Silver's, you realize that the web is a brutal competitive medium where only the best survive - and they are only as good as their last few posts.If you want to know why newspapers are dying: that's why. They're just not as good as the web at its best. This election proved that beyond any doubt. For the record, I think the WSJ and the WaPo and the NYT and the Anchorage Daily News rocked in this election. Most of the rest of the old media: not so much.
from Andrew Sullivan.
Posted by Morgan Meis at 03:57 PM | Permalink
Comments
Of course they rocked the coverage. Those papers have always been some of the best in the world. I don't know much about the ADN, but I would bet that having the advantage of more reporters than any other media outlet (not fact, but I'm guessing I'm right here) and a long-standing coverage of the Alaskan legislature would give a slight advantage. Then again, he's not giving props to the Illinois, Delaware or Arizona papers.
Here's the lesson, like Joe Perry said, "Good musicians borrow, great musicians steal."
Posted by: Gerald Witt | Nov 6, 2008 11:03:27 PM
- It is much easier to predict landslides than it is to predict a close election.
- It seems like the polls generically did really well, but a more useful measure of 538's fancy methodology is to compare it to the much simpler averaging techniques used by sites like realclearpolitics. Thing is, they all nailed it. These various poll aggregators all had about the same average prediction, which is to say this election at least showed no great value addition coming from these baseball statistics and monte carlo techniques. Then again, only a close election would really allow for meaningful differentiation.
Posted by: D | Nov 7, 2008 4:25:27 AM
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