BLUE ASH, Ohio -- Tens of thousands of Republicans were jammed into a Friday night rally in the Cincinnati suburb of West Chester, and Ron Sokol leaned over the crowd-control barricade to talk about what he's witnessed during his door-to-door canvassing expeditions.
"Between now and 2008, I see a world of difference," Sokol said, explaining how much more enthusiasm there is for GOP nominee Mitt Romney -- and how much less for Barack Obama. Sokol also mentioned that Republican get-out-the-vote operations here in Butler County have been bolstered by an influx of volunteers from around the country. "I see people from Tennessee, Texas, Indiana -- everywhere."
Eyewitness accounts like Sokol's are routinely dismissed by analysts as mere anecdotes and, even though it is proverbial that the plural of "anecdote" is data, such tales don't count for much among the gurus, soothsayers, and other savants who arrogate to themselves the mantle of political expertise. But why bring up Nate Silver at this late stage of the campaign?
The statistical wizard of the New York Times has gone so far out on a limb with his prediction of an Obama victory that Silver might as well pull a Joe Namath and guarantee it. Late Saturday, he peered into his vaunted "Forecasting Model" and raised the likelihood of the president's election to 85.1 percent, the one-tenth of a percentage point being the gimmick by which Silver provides his guesstimate with the illusion of scientific precision. Whatever his qualifications as a political analyst, Silver may be the most successful public-relations man since Eddie Bernays. His self-created aura of infallibility has made Silver a vital bulwark of the Obama campaign, which fed him their internal polling data (and signed him to a confidentiality agreement) in 2008 when he was openly advocating the Democrat's candidacy on his own blog.
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