Nate Silver Visits ‘The Daily Show’

Posted on Nov 8, 2012

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Jon Stewart interviewed everybody’s favorite election forecasting wizard Nate Silver on “The Daily Show” Wednesday night, a day after Silver’s algorithm model proved to be successful once more in picking the winner of the presidential election.

After jokingly admonishing the FiveThirtyEight blogger for incorrectly forecasting the North Dakota Senate race (Silver predicted Republican Rick Berg to win; in actuality, Democrat Heidi Heitkamp pulled out an election stunner), Stewart tried—albeit unsuccessfully—to get Silver to gloat about his election success.

And why not? Silver correctly predicted the results of 49 states in the presidential election (and he could go an astounding 50 for 50 if Florida ever gets its act together and picks a winner), thereby proving that his success in 2008 was no fluke.

“You are so reasonable. Don’t you want to stand up and say ‘I am Nate Silver, bow down to me,’ ” Stewart said. “I am Nate Silver, lord and god of the algorithm!”

Silver responded, “I ... all right,” shrugging his shoulders.

—Posted by Tracy Bloom.

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