Who will win the election in November? A technique from baseball stats may predict the answer.
Nate Silver was bored. He’d graduated from the University of Chicago in economics and gone on to a typical consulting job, but it didn’t interest him much. Not as much as baseball, that’s for sure.
The job came with one nice perk, though: access to a cool, geeky statistics software package. It was just the thing for analyzing baseball data. Before long, Silver could use it to predict how good a baseball player’s season would be — and he could do it better than anyone else.
Silver’s method catapulted him into a new career as a hotshot baseball analyst. But his tendency to noodle around with side interests didn’t stop. He tackled a new game, politics. The result? Once again, he bettered all the old-timers.