If you haven’t heard of Nate Silver then you are in for a ride. Nate is very, very famous in two distinct areas, baseball and politics, for his ability to predict things.
For baseball he developed, PECOTA, a system for predicting future performance of baseball players, and sold it to Baseball Prospectus in 2003.
From there he moved into politics and went on a run, correctly predicting the winner in 49 out of 50 states for the 2008 presidential election, and all 35 of the Senate races.
That made him some enemies, specifically all those existing pollsters who were proved wrong time and time again.
They still don’t like him, but he is the reigning king of political predictions and now a blogger for the New York Times. Where he maintains a running forecast for the 2012 presidential election.
This screenshot shows the forecasted winner in November:
This shows the predicted winner as things stand right now:
And, the percentages:
Keep an eye on his blog to see how these numbers change over the Summer.