You're right, it's not mathematically justifiable at all. The focus was on quick and dirty results over mathematical sophistication. Note that I described the a

You're right, it's not mathematically justifiable at all. The focus was on quick and dirty results over mathematical sophistication. Note that I described the adjustment for the number of polls as "a fudge"! > Silver isn't just trying to call the election the Monday before the election, he's trying to build a model that predicts the outcome as early as possible. That's true, but all the praise he's now getting is for correctly predicting the outcomes in every state - a prediction that he made less than 24 hours before the election took place (in fact, he changed his prediction for Florida from REP to DEM after I'd made my predictions, using up-to-the-minute polling data).