Pundits Vs. Nate Silver, Data Vs. "Gut":

Nate Silver has a computer model. Each day he plugs the data from the various national and swing state polls into that model, numbers are crunched, simulations are run, and he posts the results on his New York Times blog indicating who is more likely to win the presidential election: Barack Obama or Mitt Romney. (As of this posting, Silver's analysis has Obama winning in 74.6 percent of scenarios.) And for this, Silver is coming under attack from pundits who insist that their gut feeling tells them the race is a true toss-up.

"Anybody that thinks that this race is anything but a tossup right now is such an ideologue, they should be kept away from typewriters, computers, laptops and microphones for the next 10 days, because they're jokes," complained Joe Scarborough on the October 29 Morning Joe. [...]

It makes sense that pundits like Scarborough and Brooks would have it out for a numbers guy like Silver. Their oeuvre is the intangible. They analyze based on gut feelings and nonspecifics. Their great trick is to transform the utterly unquantifiable into something approaching concrete certainty.

Nate Silver joined Colbert in the following segment and he didn't get him to call Scarborough out by name, but he didn't have any kind words for pundits during the interview and quite frankly, I don't blame him. He was a lot kinder than I would have been with Scarborough given how rotten, nasty, personal, and wrong Scarborough was to him on Morning Joe.

You can watch Silver's interview with Colbert below the fold.