Among the top election quants, Nate Silver reigns supreme

FiveThirtyEight blogger and statistician Nate Silver.

(Credit: CBSNews.com)

While there's already been whole swimming pools of ink devoted to the Election Day prediction performance of polling aggregators like FiveThirtyEight blogger Nate Silver, CNET is ready to hand out one more round of kudos to the king of the quants.

By now, anyone following the presidential election knows that Silver successfully predicted the winner in the race between President Barack Obama and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in all 50 states. That performance was one for the ages, earning him worldwide admiration and validating a polling aggregation model that had drawn mockery and ire from many pundits.

This CNET chart shows that, among polling aggregators, FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver was more accurate than anyone on Election Day.

(Credit: Data by Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

But Silver wasn't the only one to do exceptionally well in the predic... [Read more]