The real number to be watching today is Nate Silver’s Amazon book ranking.
— Rex Sorgatz (@fimoculous) November 6, 2012
FiveThirtyEight blogger and author Nate Silver gave Mitt Romney an eight percent chance of winning the election yesterday. Since making his accurate predictions about the election, The Signal and the Noise has shot up from No. 15 at Amazon to No. 2 among all books.
He wrote: “I hope you’ll excuse the cliché, but it’s appropriate here: in poker, making an inside straight requires you to catch one of 4 cards out of 48 remaining in the deck, the chances of which are about 8 percent. Those are now about Mr. Romney’s chances of winning the Electoral College, according to the FiveThirtyEight forecast. As any poker player knows, those 8 percent chances do come up once in a while.”
In recent weeks, Silver has defended his statistical methods against all sorts of attacks, and his book has spent 50 days in the Amazon Top 100 of all books. Writer Rex Sorgatz made an interesting point yesterday. Silver is staking his reputation as a blogger and an author on this election, and Sorgatz thinks “the real number to be watching today is Nate Silver’s Amazon book ranking.”
When we started this post yesterday, Silver is currently ranked #2 in Books on Amazon. We discussed these numbers on the Morning Media Menu. Press play below to listen…
Editor’s Note: This post was updated as the story evolved.
