This chart, despite its headline, is good news for Hillary Clinton.
True, she is a controversial character. About 48 percent of those polled look on her favorably and 45 percent unfavorably. But she has a better favorability rating than any of the plausible Republican candidates, especially Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz and Chris Christie.
She also is a superstar. Almost as many people recognize her name as recognize the name of the sitting President of the United States. No Republican candidate is anywhere near as well known as she is.
One of the big winners in the 2012 national election is Nate Silver, a statistician-blogger who predicted President Obama’s election victory. He called every state correctly and predicted the margin of the popular vote correctly, while better-known pundits, especially on the Republican side, were embarrassingly wrong. He was subject to personal abuse as well as accusations of left-wing bias from readers who forgot that he predicted the Republican comeback in Congress correctly in 2010.
He was lucky as well as right. Based on the odds that Silver himself quoted, it wouldn’t have been surprising or discrediting if one of the swing states had gone otherwise than as he predicted. But he certainly deserves his success and acclaim, for basing his conclusions on fact and logic rather than intuition and wishful thinking.
I’m not surprised that Silver got his start as an analyst of baseball statistics. I think that on the average daily newspaper, sports writers and their readers have a more sophisticated understanding of statistics than political and business writers do.
Click on Nate Silver wikifor his biography, including his background as a baseball statistician and how during one period of his life he supported himself playing on-line poker. If you read it, you’ll better appreciate the following comments by Bob Lefsetz on The Big Picture web log on the lessons of Nate Silver’s career success.
Phil Ebersole's Blog 