The past year has seen the rise of data-driven journalism websites that were intended to replace the type of horse race coverage that typically dominates political news. But in an ironic twist, election forecast models have become the horse race coverage of 2014.

Nate Silver was a web pioneer of the concept of employing rigorous modeling based around aggregating polling data to predict the probabilities of election outcomes. In 2012, as many political reporters speculated about how various gaffes and news events would affect the outcome of the race — or exaggerated the importance of fluctuations in national polls — Silver, then at the New York Times, calmly and repeatedly reminded everybody that President Obama was the odds on favorite because of state-level polling data.