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The great war between people who write about politics for a living is not between liberals and conservatives, but between humanities majors and math nerds, and their battleground is currently the validity of Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight election prediction model.The English majors have been writing that the presidential race is a total tossup-down-to-the-wire-nail-biter, and the math nerds, most prominently Silver, have been writing that actually, the race has been pretty stable and President Obama has a solid chance of winning. A 72.9 percent chance, in Silver's estimation. The week before Election Day, the English majors launched a major offensive against the math nerds, who pose a threat to fierce urgency of their headlines. "Nate Silver: One-term celebrity?" Politico's Dylan Byers asked Monday, chronicling the complaints of David Brooks, Joe Scarborough, and others whose livelihoods depend on people caring about their subjective feelings about elections saying they think Silver's overrated. On Tuesday, nerds rallied to the defense of their own.

For a long time, most discussion of who will win the election has been dominated by pundits, who depend "heavily on qualitative impressions and hazy narratives," Dartmouth professor Brendan Nyhan writes at Columbia Journalism Review, "But as the audience for quantitative analysis of politics has grown" -- analysis like Silver's -- "the establishment analysts have become increasingly defensive about their status." You see that in articles like the one by Politico's Byers, who suggests that if Romney wins the election, Silver's career is toast. That seems to show a lack of understanding of the difference between analyzing the probability something will happen and predicting that for sure that thing will happen. A 25 percent chance of something happening is still a pretty solid chance. And Silver's model is actually one of the more conservative, Nyhan demonstrates in some handy charts, seen at left, comparing FiveThirtyEight to other models. "Whatever objection pundits or conservatives may have is with the state of the publicly available evidence or the way in which forecasters and betters translate that evidence into probabilities, not with Silver or his methods," Nyhan says.