Stats guru Nate Silver is getting flack from all sides, and on Friday he even drew the ire of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
The editor-in-chief of FiveThirtyEight, whose polls were close to holy for Democrats during the 2012 election, isn’t right all the time, Reid said in an interview with the Washington Post.
“He gave me a 16 percent chance of being reelected, he gave Heidi Heitkamp an 8 percent chance of being reelected, he gave Jon Tester a [34] percent chance of being reelected,” the Nevada Democrat said. “So all polls are about like Nate Silver’s predictions: good sometimes, bad most of the time.”
Reid’s comments follow a critical memo from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee similarly calling into question Silver’s past work after the stats whiz gave Republicans about a 60 percent chance of winning control of the Senate in November.
Silver responded to his critics on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart Thursday night.
Update: Silver defended himself on Friday afternoon:
@fshakir @DSzymborski: We’d be happy to publish @SenatorReid‘s senate forecasts at @FiveThirtyEight. Can he file by Monday?
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) March 28, 2014