The Decision Tree  Decision-making from all perspectives  Why
Did Obama Win?  The campaign doesn't matter much, even though it
feels like it does  2008 was the year of Obama, and 2010 was the
year of the Tea Party. 2012 was the year of Nate Silver.  We had
good models of the election before, but 2012 was the year
everyone had to have an opinion on Silver and the other quants,
and on the statistical methods they use to predict the election.
Silver and his cohort were loudly opposed by the pundits - the
smart voices in the Op-Ed pages who used common sense and
political savvy to make pronouncements. The nerds won because
they asked one question: "Is there evidence for that?" They used
evidence and reason to make principled predictions.  And now
that the election is over, we know that the stats nerds won.
Silver predicted all races correctly, and Wang, Linzer, and
others were essentially just as accurate.   Now that math has
succeeded, can we accept the rest of what political science says
about elections?  The