Perhaps more important is the reputation he already built through predictions on the primaries. From a recent New York Magazine article here: http://nymag.com/

Perhaps more important is the reputation he already built through predictions on the primaries. From a recent New York Magazine article here: http://nymag.com/news/features/51170/ http://nymag.com/news/features/51170/ on the Clinton/Obama primaries... "Reading the polls, most pundits predicted she’d win Indiana by five points and noted she’d narrowed the gap with Obama in North Carolina to just eight. Silver, who was writing anonymously as “Poblano” and receiving about 800 visits a day, disagreed with this consensus. He’d broken the numbers down demographically and come up with a much less encouraging outcome for Clinton: a two-point squeaker in Indiana, and a seventeen-point drubbing in North Carolina. On the night of the primaries, Clinton took Indiana by one and lost North Carolina by fifteen. The national pundits were doubly shocked: one, because the results were so divergent from the polls, and two, because some guy named after a chili pepper had predicted the outcome better than anyone else." It will be great to see how his model stacks up against reality on election night.