Political Prognostication and the Revenge of the Nerds

On Monday, when we discussed how many electoral votes would go to President Obama, Florida was up in the air. But the prediction of Professor Sam Wang, who founded Princeton University's Election Consortium, was dead on. The President won exactly 303 Electoral College votes and Florida is still undecided -- and Wang is not alone. Before the election, Nate Silver's "538" blog was bringing more visitors to the New York Times' website than any of the paper's more famous traditional pundits. He also called the election just right. Mark Blumenthal is founding editor of Polling.com and senior polling editor for the Huffington Post, which has it's own scientific modeler, Simon Jackman.