Many commentators on the blogs I usually read (centrist, maybe skewing left, self-defining as "smart" rather than overtly "partisan") are immensely pleased with the Nate Silver's accomplishment in calling the election results based on his number-crunching of the polls, rather than the "expert sense" of various right-tending commentators: this Language Log post contains probably the clearest summary of both the history, the pleased feeling, and a cute meme about Silver.

Look, I checked out Five Thirty Eight, Silver's NYT blog pretty much every day in the runup to the election. But that was that I pretty much liked what he was saying. It predicted a result I tended to favor.

Silver clearly has something, and it makes sense that we respect him for analyzing things correctly. It's just that we who liked the prediction he was making shouldn't congratulate ourselves too much for having the sense to see what a great analyst he was. If he'd been accurately predicting the same Romney victory that people like the normally sensible George Will were, how much honor would he have gotten from the left side of the commentariat? Would they have just accepted his results, or would they have devoted a huge amount of effort to poke holes in them?

Right now we'd see him front and center on Drudge, and he'd be getting interview requests from Fox News. The right would be congratulating itself on how devoted to honest statistics they were.

I like to think that the rationality-trending part of the left would still have respected him for his analysis, and that people wouldn't have made delusional predictions of an significant Obama victory in the same way that Barone, Will, Noonan, and others did.

But you don't cheer your team by yelling "The statistics show that our opponents will probably win!"