In today’s Morning Examiner, I linked to FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver for his analysis of the early voting trends, based on whose partisans have come out to vote or cast their absentee ballots so far. I did this because it seems like everyone has their own spin on early voting. Silver has a good record of looking at numbers dispassionately and distilling them, whereas most partisans do not. (Remember the high-flying expectations of a Kerry victory? The talk on the Right in 2008 about how the polls were all just wrong?)

Since his post, which suggested that Republicans are getting the upper hand, Silver has come in for a mild drubbing by some lefty bloggers — some of whose thinking I have to admit I agreed with at first blush. For example, why is Silver focusing on party registration instead of past early voting trends? Wouldn’t the latter be a better comparison?