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Nate Silver on 'Morning Joe': Why pollsters got it wrong

New York Times statistician Nate Silver stopped by MSNBC's “Morning Joe" on Tuesday to discuss how he got it right this election when so many others didn’t.

Host Joe Scarborough — who during the campaign questioned Silver for calling the race decisively for President Barack Obama — kicked off the sit-down by addressing their infamous bet.

“We didn't bet because we love humanity too much to bet, but I think we gave money and we made a contribution, in Nate’s name, to AmeriCares,” Scarborough said.

After Scarborough joked that “the first thing I want to do — before your apology to me — is let’s sell books,” Silver discussed why so many polls were wrong this year and incorrectly called it as a much closer race for Mitt Romney. Silver said most of the major network polls — NBC/Wall Street Journal, ABC/Washington Post, CBS/New York Times — are “pretty good," while the polls that faltered made too many assumptions about the population.

“I think that high-quality polling really differentiates itself now because if you take an automated poll, you miss people who have cellphones, which is about a third of the population now,” Silver said. “And they're mostly younger urban demographic, mostly Democrats, so you will undersample Democrats, to use that buzzword, if you don't call people who have cellphones. And lo and behold, those polls had a Republican bias this year. Not because the pollsters are evil partisan, but because, hey, if you miss a big chunk of the population that's Democratic-leaning, you're going to have problems.”

The best pollsters, Silver said, “let the sample tell you what it is by themselves.” The ones who didn’t “put their finger on the scale” and didn’t make assumptions about the voting public were most successful.

“Just going with what the data said instead of making assumptions is usually the best practice whenever you're doing any kind of scientific survey and that worked again this year,” Silver said.

As for Romney, Silver called the Republican a "B-, C+ candidate" with an “adequate" campaign that just couldn’t cut it against the powerful advantage held by an incumbent president.

“I think Neil Newhouse, the pollster there, I think those guys are pretty smart guys with a frankly, B-, C+ candidate, ran a pretty close campaign,” Silver said.

But it’s already time to look past this cycle, Silver said.

“I’m a pro-horserace guy. I’m more interested in diagnosing 2016 now than Benghazi, for example, because that’s where my bread is buttered,” Silver said. “But if you’re going to do horserace, then do it the right way because it can be more data driven.”

Back in late October, Scarborough had blasted Silver’s statistical process.

“And anybody that thinks that this race is anything but a tossup right now is such an ideologue, they should be kept away from typewriters, computers, laptops and microphones for the next 10 days, because they're jokes,” Scarborough said on “Morning Joe.”

As the interview wrapped on Tuesday, Scarborough, who noted earlier in the show he had predicted an Obama win, invited Silver to come back after the pair joked about sports.