Baseball stats guru Nate Silver sees election landslide for Barack Obama [View All]

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BY ANDY MARTINO
DAILY NEWS SPORTS WRITER

Baseball prognosticator Nate Silver (below) has turned his prescient eye to politics - and sees a big victory for Barack Obama on Tuesday.



The Tampa Bay Rays and Barack Obama have made 2008 the year of the surprise contender, though one man predicted both successes before nearly anyone else - and he sees a general election landslide for Obama over John McCain on Tuesday.

In February, baseball analyst Nate Silver predicted that the long-pathetic Rays would win 88 games in 2008. Three months later, a blogger calling himself "Poblano" ignored that Hillary Clinton's campaign against Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination seemed to be gaining momentum, and wrote that Obama would win the upcoming North Carolina primary in a landslide and lose Indiana by a small margin.

And in both cases, the forecasts proved true. The Rays became American League champions, North Carolina and Indiana effectively sealed Obama's victory - and Poblano turned out to be none other than Silver.

Silver, 30, holds an economics degree from the University of Chicago. His innovations for the popular think tank Baseball Prospectus include a sophisticated formula called PECOTA (Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm), which predicts future performance for baseball players and teams more reliably than many traditional metrics.

Now, on his Web site fivethirtyeight.com (named for the number of electoral college votes at stake in the presidential election) and as a frequent commentator on MSNBC, he is establishing a reputation for political prognostication. On Tuesday, his credibility will be tested, as his complex formula predicts a larger victory for Obama than nearly anyone else.

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