Nate Silver FiveThirtyEight Called the Election Right Weeks Ago

On his NYT blog Fivethirtyeight, Nate Silver made his final predictions for the 2012 Presidential Elections, and while reports around the globe are calling it one of the closest elections in history, Silver isn't biting. 

Silver, whose fame as America's most accurate pollster grew this past week with a feature on him in France's daily Le Monde, concludes that Barack Obama has a 90.9% chance to win the election. Silver gives the President 313 electoral votes, and and 50.8% of the popular vote.

The Fivethirtyeight results take on particular significance considering the fact that Silver's projections were almost perfectly right in 2008. On election day in 2008, Silver gave Obama 349 electoral votes to Senator McCain's 189; Silver also predicted that Obama would win the popular vote by a difference of 6.1%.

In that year, Obama slightly outperformed Silver's prediction, picking up a total of 365 votes and winning the popular vote by a margin of 7.2% (Fivethirtyeight gave Indiana to McCain when in fact Obama won it). That Silver slightly underestimated Obama's lead in 2008 counters the Democratic tilt sometimes attributed to the blogger.

Today on Policymic, Jesse Merkel predicted that Governor Romney would win with 325 electoral points, but if Nate Silver's poll analysis is to be given any weight — and history shows that it should — Merkel and Romney are headed for a big disappointment.