How Pundits' Predictions Stacked Up

The official results from Florida aren't in yet but it looks like Nate Silver—whose blog accounted for a fifth of the New York Times' web traffic Monday—correctly called 50 out of 50 states after getting 49 right in 2008. "You know who won the election tonight? Nate Silver," said Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, a sentiment echoed even by Bret Baier at Fox News, the Huffington Post reports.

But while Silver triumphed, there were plenty who got it wrong, notes Politico, which lists more than a dozen pundits who predicted a Romney win with varying degrees of confidence. Among them are assorted Fox pundits, Sarah Palin, and Peggy Noonan at the Wall Street Journal, who wrote "I think it’s Romney ... While everyone is looking at the polls and the storm, Romney’s slipping into the presidency." Rush Limbaugh was also way off. "All of my thinking says Romney big," he said Monday. "My thoughts, my intellectual analysis of this—factoring everything I see plus the polling data—it’s not even close. Three hundred-plus electoral votes for Romney." (More Nate Silver stories.)