The Silver Standard

Nate Silver, guru of the FiveThirtyEight political blog and a statistician with an enviable track record, announces his basic, underlying beliefs:

I see American political history as being highly stochastic (if not random, then at least hard to predict over the long term). If a party has a terrific year, as Democrats did in 2008 or Republicans did in 2010, I don’t interpret that as saying much about what the political landscape is likely to look like in future seasons.

Incumbency is still an advantage on average. However, it’s much less of an advantage than it used to be.

If deep blue Massachusetts elects a Republican governor, as it well may, nearly anything is possible.