Nate Silver – The Biggest Winner from the 2012 Election

Of course we all know Barack Obama won the re election Tuesday night, but one of the biggest winners of the night was not a politician at all. He's an amazing statistican and analyst.

In 2008, Nate Silver correctly predicted voting results for 49 out of 50 states. This year he did even better. Yeah, he correctly picked how each of the 50 states voted in the 2012 Presidential Election.

Silver gained notoriety for crunching numbers for Major League Baseball, similar to the character Jonah Hill portrayed in the movie Money Ball. When he nearly perfectly predicted the 2008 Presidential Election along with correctly choosing all 35 US Senate races, he became a phenomenon and was even named to the 2009 TIME 100.

Silver now works as a political statistician for The New York Times and runs the FiveThirtyEight blog. He added author to his list of accolades with the release of 'The Signal and The Noise' in September of this year. Since last nights succesfful predictions, sales have skyrocketed 850% on Amazon.com and has now become the second best selling book on the site. During the election as NYTimes.com was being flooded with visitors going to Neil's blog, he took the time to tweet this:

Yeaop, I think a little shameless self promotion is a great idea. I imagine he will be signing a new deal soon if he hasn't already.

[Via Politico and CNN Money]