I Got A Feeling

This is the last remotely political post you'll see on these pages for some time. Tribe hoops season starts Friday, and the Futile Superfans need a few days to get our costumes ready. You guys will not believe the codpiece Teejay found at Goodwill.

In the final weeks of the election, a bizarre battle between the punditocracy and the forces of math and science came to a head, with the unassuming Nate Silver becoming a lightning rod for a chattering class that both disdained and feared his nebbishy magic. Silver, to put it mildly, had a good night (though he wasn't the best of the nerdocracy). Lots of others didn't, headlined most prominently by Dick Morris, a man so bad at his job it strains the mind to wonder what kind of pictures he has of Fox News executives with underage barn animals.

Here's a list of predictions curated by Adam Pasick of New York Magazine. Note, for the record, that the worst of the bunch was the addled Jim Cramer, who saw Obama getting 440 electoral votes. But note further over the next several years that none of these people will see their livelihood impacted in the least by being very right (Sam Wang of the Princeton Election Consortium was even better than Silver, nailing 332 electoral votes) or wildly, insanely wrong (George Will, playing out the string in an increasingly absurd fashion, calling for Romney to win 325 electors).

We're all, regardless of beliefs, poorly served when the ostensible intelligentsia ignores facts in service of political positioning. It's our hope that this election result (and the rebuke to wishful thinking it provided) signals a change in how our political process is covered. Our hope, but not our prediction. The math - in this case ratings and pageviews - don't lie.