Nate Silver Mocks Accusation He's Too 'Effeminate' to Analyze Polls

Nate Silver has finally found a polling model that shows Mitt Romney winning — not that he thinks it has any credibility.



In a tweet on Friday, Silver called out the founder of a conspiratorial website called "Unskewed Polls," Dean Chambers, who wrote an op-ed attacking Silver as "a man of very small stature" and "a thin and effeminate man with a soft-sounding voice."



Apparently only truly manly men can analyze polling data. Chambers's website recasts all mainstream polls with Republican-leaning survey samples so they are truly "unskewed" — or shall we say "fair and balanced?" He's gotten a lot of attention in conservative blogs and on the bearer of that tagline, Fox News.



Silver is a self-described geek who writes for the New York Times and is the founder of FiveThirtyEight. One of our favorite pieces of Nate Silver data analysis was his conclusion that gay friendlier states have lower divorce rates.

But he's known for having correctly predicted the popular vote in 2008 within one percentage point, correctly predicted the outcome in every state except Indiana plus accurately forecast all of the Senate races. Silver is also the author of the book, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't. He finds Chambers pretty amusing.



"This is pretty awesome," Silver wrote on Twitter. "Per http://unskwedpolls.com, I am 'a thin and effeminate man' & therefore not to be trusted."



Silver summarized the attack this way: "Unskewedpolls argument: Nate Silver seems kinda gay + ??? = Romney landslide!"