Sabermetrics cracks the electoral college

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Nate Silver, a Bill James acolyte, usually works for the website baseballprospectus.com and so typically invests his energy trying to answer questions such as: Will Tampa Bay or Philadelphia win the World Series? Or is Manny Ramirez a better free agent signing than Mark Teixeira?

But this election season, Silver’s political website, fivethirtyeight.com, has become a must-read for its sophisticated number-crunching of presidential polls and what it means in the voting booth -- all thanks to the application of his baseball sabermetrics background to politics. (538, by the way, refers to the number of electoral votes in this presidential election.)

New York magazine just ran a glowing feature on Silver and how he’s been ahead of the curve this year in most of his predictions about presidential primaries. As of today, fivethirtyeight.com predicts that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama will get 345 electoral votes to Republican candidate John McCain’s 193 on election day -- it takes 270 to win the White House. (Silver makes no mention of where Manny and Teixeira will play next season.)

-- Barry Stavro