The Nate Silver truthers: Is the Times' polling guru biased?

Some conservatives insist that the country's most famous forecaster is in the tank for Obama. His defenders's retort: It's math, stupid

Nate Silver attends the 16th annual Webby Awards in New York City on May 21
(Image credit: Paul Zimmerman/Getty Images)

Nate Silver rose to prominence as a political forecaster in the 2008 election, accurately predicting the electoral results of 49 out of 50 states. Since then, his blog on The New York Times has become a go-to destination for political insiders who want the lowdown on where the presidential election is heading. Silver's numerical model, developed long before the election began, is based on polls from a variety of sources, including those that lean left and right. The polls are averaged out and adjusted according to each firm's historical track record of corresponding with election results. When a new poll is released, it gets fed into Silver's computer program, which then spits out a prediction. That formula has led Silver to report that Obama has nearly a 75 percent chance of winning what is widely perceived to be a tight race, leading conservatives to speculate that Silver is skewing the numbers.

The Nate Silver truthers, as they've come to be known, just received some fresh ammunition for their conspiracy theories from a mainstream publication, as Dylan Byers at Politico claims that Silver could turn out to be a "one-term celebrity":

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