CAN we put the Great Forecasting Debate to rest at last? The 2012 presidential election went exactly as predicted by the leading quantitative analysts. Nate Silver of the New York Times’s FiveThirtyEight blog, Sam Wang of the Princeton Election Consortium and Drew Linzer of Votamatic all got at least 49 states right. They differed only on Florida, which all three listed as a dead heat, and which indeed turned out to be the closest race. (If it goes to Barack Obama, as seems likely, then Mr Silver and Mr Linzer will have run the table, while Mr Wang will have a single blemish on his record). Mr Silver, who has taken the brunt of the backlash over statistical methods in this campaign, has now been vindicated as the finest soothsayer this side of Nostradamus, and is enjoying a nice sales bump for his new book on the art of prediction. Just as the criticism piled on Mr Silver in recent months was grossly misplaced, so will the praise be for his sterling showing on election night. The fact of the matter is that predicting the 2012 presidential election was hardly rocket science. By the time the voting began, the state and national polls had largely come into alignment, and Mr Obama led the RealClearPolitics polling average in every state he eventually won except Florida. Mr Silver established his reputation in the 2008 presidential primaries, when his forecasts proved impressively accurate despite highly volatile polling and voting. Since then, elections have offered far fewer surprises. As a result, there have been few opportunities to test whether the complexity of his model really adds much value compared with a simpler approach like Mr Wang’s. But the strong performance of the publicly available polls does offer two lessons for future forecasters. The first is that pollsters’ much-criticised methodology for predicting voter turnout is working just fine. The best argument that the polls overstated Mr Obama’s support, advanced by Dan McLaughlin and Ted Frank and implemented in the “Unskewed Polls” compiled by Dean Chambers, was that they predicted a big advantage in Democratic turnout that was unlikely to materialise. In fact, exit polls show that the makeup of the electorate was almost precisely as the polls foresaw: there were a lot more Democrats than Republicans, but the independent vote went heavily for Mr Romney. This supports the interpretation offered by Josh Marshall, that a lot of voters calling themselves “independents” were really disgruntled former Republicans. (Mr Marshall speculates this group is comprised of tea-partiers who thought the GOP had gone soft; I think it’s more likely they’re moderate business-first Republicans alienated by the party’s newly strident tone). Regardless, although these voters have cast aside their party identification, they remain conservative, and preferred Mitt Romney to Mr Obama by a large margin. The conclusion is that re-weighting polls by party identification as well as demographics is a very bad idea. People can and do change their party affiliation, and if pollsters try to control for that by imposing a different turnout model on their sample, they wind up erasing the very signal—a change in the electorate’s preference—that they are trying to detect. A second take-away is that despite Mr Silver’s reputation as an evangelist for the accuracy of polls, he probably didn’t trust them enough. The main reason why his forecast had a lower likelihood of Mr Obama being re-elected than Mr Wang’s did was that Mr Silver assigned a higher probability than Mr Wang did to the risk that the polls were simply wrong, underestimating support for Mr Romney across the board. Only once every last vote has been counted will we be able to determine exactly how close the polls were to the final tallies. But their record this year in predicting the winner in each state means there’s a good chance that forecasts four years from now will have more confidence in the polls’ reliability than Mr Silver’s did this year. That would enable forecasters to assign a high probability of victory even to a candidate with a fairly narrow lead.

Finally, the outcome should leave much of the media eating crow just as much as the Republicans are. As I wrote two days ago, the vast majority of journalists said that the race was “coming down to the wire”, “deadlocked”, “too close to call” or a “toss-up” when it was anything but. Donning my hat as the editor of Game theory, The Economist’s sports blog, I think that most political journalism now is where sportswriting was a decade ago. Starting in the 1980s, outsiders armed with calculators such as Bill James began writing that many long-held beliefs about how to win baseball games could not withstand quantitative scrutiny. In the 1990s and early 2000s, early adapters (most prominently Billy Beane, featured in the film “Moneyball”) began implementing the strategies recommended by the analysts, and were rewarded with success on the field. Only after pretty much every team in the game had hired a staff of in-house number-crunchers did the media stop confining modern statistics to isolated “nerd’s view” sections—like the New York Times’s “Keeping Score” column, to which I am a longtime contributor—and allowing figures to leach into the bulk of their coverage. For the baseball fans among you, the writers’ vote on the Most Valuable Player of the American League this year will be a good indication of how far this process has come. If Mike Trout, the statisticians’ favourite, is chosen, we can probably declare victory; if Miguel Cabrera, the traditionalists’ preference, is selected instead, we still have a long way to go.

In politics, the stakes are much higher, because the media influence the outcome as well as reporting on it. But the process of replacing fact-free punditry with empirical analysis in the press has barely begun. Mr Silver is perfectly accustomed to getting raked across the coals for daring to inject a dose of objectivity into a discussion—he was part of the original vanguard of quantitative baseball analysts (and frequently quoted in “Keeping Score”) long before he moved on to politics. In the sports world, his methods are no longer controversial, and are broadly accepted at least by most young fans. In politics, however, he remains a lightning rod.

I think it is inevitable that media coverage of politics will eventually follow the path taken by sportswriting, and that traditional pundits will be left out in the cold—just as there are ever-fewer members of the old guard, like the recently retired Joe Morgan, in baseball broadcast booths. After all, the campaigns have already been using advanced statistics for years. But it’s up to individual news outlets to determine the speed of progress. I hope to see many more references to weighted poll averages, quantitative win probabilities and betting-market odds in the pages of The Economist in the years to come.

Correction: An earlier version of this post mis-stated Josh Marshall’s theory regarding the motivations of former Republicans who now identify as independents but still voted for Mr Romney.