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Nate Silver sets his eyes on the US Midterms
Americans are set to vote in the mid-terms tomorrow, in an election that will determine American politics for the next two years. Nate Silver and his organisation use data to predict the likely outcome.
FiveThirtyEight is one of the most listened-to podcasts in America. Specialising in election forecasting, founder Nate Silver calculated the results of the popular vote in 2008 within one percentage point. He followed this up in 2012 by identifying the winner in all 50 states. Managing editor Michael Cohen believes that FiveThirtyEights’s data-driven model is the key to its forecasting success. “The question of who's going to win the House is really a question that's best answered with data that's just empirically true.” For Silver, the podcast is a useful corrective to the media's exaggerations. "You know a big part of what FiveThirtyEight does…is debunking media narratives that are overblown.” Silver believes the 2018 mid-terms will be very tight. "America is as divided as ever."
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