This geek has an almost supernatural ability with statistical analysis and prediction logic. In 2008, Nate Silver garnered attention when he correctly predicted the landslide victory for President Obama on his FiveThirtyEight blog. He also correctly predicted the popular vote split that occurred in that election. His dead-on predictions caught people’s attention so this time around he was under a lot of scrutiny. He came through again correctly predicting the outcome in all 50 states for the 2012 election. His popular vote forecast, 50.8 vs 48.3 was also spot on.

Nate uses a proprietary model of averaging historically reliable polls and weighting them properly.

Nate told Fast Company:

“When human judgment and big data intersect there are some funny things that happen. On the one hand, we get access to more and more information that ought to help us make better decisions. On the other hand, the more information you have, the more selective you can be in which information you pick out to tell the narrative that might not be the true or accurate, or the one that helps your business, but the one that makes you feel good or that your friends agree with.

We see this in polls. After the conventions we’ve gone from having three polls a day to like 20. When you have 20, people get a lot angrier about things, because out of 20 polls you can find the three best Obama polls, or the three best Romney polls in any given day, and construct a narrative from that. But you’re really just kind of looking at the outlier when you should be looking at what the consensus of the information says.”