Nate Silver and the nerdlingtons at FiveThirtyEight are liveblogging the Virginia election results (which are hidden and secret) and have called it, meaning it is officially over, by law: “7:45 EDT [Nate]: OK, the 538 decision desk is calling this one for R. Creigh Deeds. Almost half the vote is in, and although we’re a little bit light on turnout from areas like Richmond, neither Moran nor McAuliffe is doing anywhere near as well as they’d need to to make up for Deeds’ large advantage. It’s really a battle for second place at this point.” MORE, Silver, MUSH MUSH! MORE »

In the months leading up to the presidential election, the single most important time of the day, every day, was late in the afternoon, when Nate Silver’s “Today’s Polls, dd/mm” from FiveThirtyEight would appear in America’s Google Readers. Nothing excited liberals more than seeing a new SurveyUSA poll showing Obama +7 in Virginia, for example, precisely because Silver told us all that SurveyUSA was a good pollster. But you know who else was good, and got less credit, was Mark Blumenthal over there at Pollster.com. Poor underappreciated Mark Blumenthal! He used fancy regressions on his poll averages too, you know!? Well we haven’t looked at either of these sites since November 5, but this random Andrew Sullivan post tells us that Silver and Blumenthal are still doing poll analysis — and they’re reaching shockingly different conclusions. MORE »

Hey people cheer up! Your Nate Silver, that mathbot you all loved so much until the election was over, has persisted with his math and numbers to this very day. Most of the time he just worries about that whole boring sordid Franken/Coleman mess in Wasilla. But maybe because Depression reporting is such a “hot trend,” he has written about what the chances are we will actually enter one of these depression thingums in the near future. MORE »

OK NOW IT’S TIME TO START HATING NATE SILVER: Remember how Nate Silver was working on a two-book deal? Well GOOD GOD: “New intelligence says Mr. Silver’s advance is in the neighborhood of $700,000, give or take a few grand. Now Mr. Silver just has to choose which imprint he likes best, a process that is unlikely to be resolved before next week.” Nate Silver is the only person in American history to realize the American Dream. [NY Observer]

Oh Nate Silver, how we long for your embrace! Spin us a tale of numbers and regressions, just like in the old days? Like that time you Internet-fought the Real Clear Politics guy when he wasn’t accurately weighing reputable polls… yes… just yes. Whoa what’s this, you’re writing a book. Two books! WANT. NOW. Please include sexy nude numbers pix. The numbers 5 and 8, 69ing. We don’t read for the words. [NY Observer]

After 2004, two groups were blamed for making John Kerry’s loss extra sad for the liberals: those secret retards from off-the-grid caves that Karl Rove forced to vote at the last minute, and pollsters. All of the pollsters failed spectacularly on Election Day in 2004, especially with exit polls. Everyone knew that John Kerry was too much of a cocksmoker to possibly win anything, and yet these pollsters committed the CARDINAL SIN of getting Democrats’ hopes up about a national victory of any kind. But this year they tried again. Who will be first against the wall? MORE »

Hmm… our secret money robot models are indicating high counterparty risk in this potential transaction? Oh what the hell, we’ll throw a cool $2 trillion at this McCain victory fund and get one of them there credit dee-fault swaps from, uh, McDonald’s. [FiveThirtyEight]

Thank you to Wonkette tipster “MB” for directing us to this chart from today’s most lurid math-porn site, FiveThirtyEight, of recent polls about California Proposition 8, the famous referendum which will decide whether the gays can keep getting married in their home state. For a while, it looked like the gays had this thing all locked up, but now it’s a toss-up after Jesus made angry robocalls about “the gay AIDS” infecting everyone’s children. And he left his mark on this chart: it’s a JESUS FISH. Whoa. Consider. [FiveThirtyEight]

Here are more of your fancy “math numbers” showing that Obama is not only still ahead in mostly every state in the world, but his leads are still growing. Wait… Obama? Who is the REAL Barack Obama? A space cockroach? A used crack pipe? We do not know yet because John McCain has not told us, so these polls don’t count, bwah. [FiveThirtyEight]

Here’s a chart from FiveThirtyEight, the damnable, smartypants, know-it-all site that… oh hell, we read the motherfucker compulsively. This chart shows the net favorability scores of the four candidates based on some recent polls, and as you can see, people are rapidly realizing that Sarah Palin is a rather unsavory character — her numbers last week were about 10-15 points higher. So much for the happy times, Sarah; it is the happy times we will miss. So is it too late for Walnuts to shake this gal and throw Mitt “Willard” Romney in there? One can only dream… MORE »