Everybody wants to know what will happen in November before November actually comes. To satisfy this demand, there is a cottage industry of statistical modeling that will predict — with eye-poppingly high degrees of (promised) accuracy — just what will happen. Nate Silver of the popular FiveThirtyEight blog, now at the New York Times‘s website, does this, and every election cycle you can usually find a handful of new models in the scholarly journal P.S. — Political Science and Politics.  Earlier today, I blogged on the APSA conference, where political scientists unveiled new predictive models.

I used to be a big fan of these models.  I still think they can be helpful when used in a limited fashion, and I also think that Silver and the political scientists who put these APSA models together produce lots of good and interesting work.  Still, I’ve come to believe that these predictive models need to be approached with caution.