Nate Silver made an interesting point a while back when he compared the political data revolution to the Sabremetrics revolution in baseball. In baseball, the

Nate Silver made an interesting point a while back when he compared the political data revolution to the Sabremetrics revolution in baseball. In baseball, the journalists and pundits were way ahead of the professional operators in moving from gut calls to data-crunching, while in politics, it's the opposite - what Silver and other public number-based forecasters do is commonplace inside the campaigns.