How the White House will be won

Want to know how this year’s race for the White House will end? Then head over to the New York Times’s FiveThirtyEight page, where expert psephologist Nate Silver has just released his model’s forecast. What makes Silver’s analysis stand out from the rest is that it doesn’t just take into account the polls, but also economic indicators (including job growth, inflation and GDP forecasts) that help predict the outcome. And it doesn’t just forecast the national result, but also the result in each of the states — taking into account all sorts of state-specific factors such as previous vote shares and demographics. But perhaps the main strength of the model is that it knows its own weakness. It recognises the uncertainty in predicting the result — especially almost five months from Election Day — and hence includes margins of error for the state-by-state forecasts, and also presents its predictions as the probabilities of Obama or Romney winning.