Five Thirty Eight

Nate Silver, a political analyst for the New York Times, publishes the Five Thirty Eight blog wherein he uses a complex statistical model to assign the total electoral vote between the two Presidential candidates, without tossups.  (His “Now-cast” forecasting model presently splits the votes Obama 301 and Romney 237, with all tossups assigned.)  We are not using this forecast in our opinion map average because it is an informational input to the New York Times Political Desk that publishes the official Times opinion map, which is included in our average.  However, it is interesting to see the methodology he uses to reach his conclusions:  http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/methodology/#postComment