Scarborough says he may have been too tough on Nate Silver. | POLITICO Screen grab My (semi) apology to Nate Silver

Nate Silver dropped by Morning Joe today to talk about his best-selling book “The Signal and the Noise,” as well as the 2012 election. We had a good talk.

If you are blessed enough to be able to avoid political chatter on Twitter, you may not know that Silver became a sort of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi for liberals seeking peace and serenity during the turbulent 2012 presidential campaign. Just as the Beatles had the Maharishi to guide them through the tough times after the death of their manager Brian Epstein, progressives had Silver’s New York Times blog to comfort them after the first presidential debate. My liberal friends spent countless hours manically refreshing the “538” blog every three minutes or so throughout most of October seeking reassurance that President Obama would win. Water usage on the Upper West Side took a dip during that time when progressives realized that bathing regularly would keep them away from the site. Nate Silver provided cool assurance in the middle of a crazed political hothouse, and he did so by offering readers detailed numerical formats with 27 decimal points kept Democrats sane.


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Even during Mitt Romney’s post-debate surge, Silver put the president’s chances of winning at around 75%. During this same time, Gallup and Rasmussen released a flurry of polls that pointed to Mr. Obama’s doom.

During a Morning Joe discussion, I mocked both liberals and conservatives for cherry-picking polls to prove their candidate was all but assured victory. Channeling former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan who once said that a week was like a lifetime in politics, I predicted the campaign would have many more twists and turns.

I had been through enough political campaigns to know that predicting the outcome of any election with numerical certainty was tricky business — especially in a presidential campaign that had been in flux since that first debate. More to the point, predicting an outcome to the nearest thousandth of a decimal point several weeks out seemed like a fools’ errand (and still does.) After my critique, liberals pounced on my claim from the left as conservatives bristled from the right when I mocked their conspiracy theories about “biased” media polls.

But in the end, Nate Silver’s early predictions were right for several reasons.

The Obama-Romney race proved to be the least fluid in a generation. As Mr. Silver noted this morning, public opinion surveys remained consistent from June through Election Day. More importantly for Nate, the state polls that he depended on the most did what Rasmussen and Gallup did not — they got the election right. That meant that Nate Silver got the election right.

That was no small feat. Even though he could not have predicted the static nature of the race, he does deserve great credit for confidently basing his model on the right state polls. This is especially true considering that a fierce debate over polling continued throughout election day.

Since the president’s reelection, liberals have been cluttering my Twitter feed with demands that I apologize to Nate for dismissing his 74.8374629% prediction in October that Barack Obama would win. I have ignored those requests because as is usually the case for ideologues on Twitter, their rage is unfocused and based in ignorance. These critics conveniently forget that I consistently predicted an Obama win throughout the year and even said on Election Day that the president’s stubborn lead in swing state polls would doom Romney.

I won’t apologize to Mr. Silver for predicting an outcome that I had also been predicting for a year. But I do need to tell Nate I’m sorry for leaning in too hard and lumping him with pollsters whose methodology is as rigorous as the Simpsons’ strip mall physician, Dr. Nick. For those sins (and a multitude of others that I’m sure I don’t even know about), I am sorry.

Politics is a messy sport. And just as ball players who drink beer and eat fried chicken in dugouts across America can screw up the smartest sabermatrician’s forecast, Nate Silver’s formula is sure to let his fervent admirers down from time to time. But judging from what I saw of him this morning, Nate is a grounded guy who admits as much in his book. I was too tough on him and there’s a 84.398264% chance I will be less dismissive of his good work in the future.

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