Well, not everyone can be right. Here’s POLITICO’s rundown of the top pundits who got it wrong and predicted a Mitt Romney win. Oops: 
 
 Newt Gingrich: 
 
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 reset Pundit predictions: They blew it Play Slideshow Top 2012 takeaways 
 
 “I believe the minimum result will be 53-47 Romney, over 300 electoral votes.” – Oct. 25, on Fox News. 
 
 Karl Rove: 
 
 Romney 285, Obama 253. “If crowds at his recent stops in these states [NV, WI and PA] are any indication of his supporters’ enthusiasm, Mr. Romney will likely be able to claim victory in these states as well.” — Nov. 5, on his website. 
 
 Fox News contributor Dick Morris: 
 
 Romney 325, Obama 213. “It will be the biggest surprise in recent American political history. It will rekindle the whole question as to why the media played this race as a nailbiter where in fact I think Romney’s going to win by quite a bit.” — Nov. 4, on Fox News. 
 
 Conservative radio host Laura Ingraham: 
 
 “I think he’s going to win New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and a few other surprises. I think this thing is going to be close.” — Oct. 31, on the Laura Ingraham Show. 
 
 The Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol: 
 
 “I’m cautiously optimistic that Romney’s going to win.” — Oct. 31, on the Laura Ingraham Show. 
 
 Conservative columnist George Will: 
 
 Romney 321, Obama 217. “The wild card in what I’ve projected is I’m projecting Minnesota to go for Romney.” — Nov. 4, on ABC’s “This Week.” 
 
 UnskewedPolls’ Dean Chambers: 
 
 Romney 311, Obama 227. “Despite the pattern of skewed polls, most of them commissioned by the mainstream media, the overall electoral landscape is looking more and more favorable for Romney.” — Nov. 1, on examiner.com. 
 
 The Washington Examiner’s Michael Barone: 
 
 “Bottom line: Romney 315, Obama 223. That sounds high for Romney. But he could drop Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and still win the election. Fundamentals.” — Nov. 2, writing in The Washington Examiner. 
 
 House Speaker John Boehner: 
 
 “I think Ohioans vote with their wallets. That’s why I think Romney’s going to win on Tuesday.” — Nov. 4, on CNN. 
 
 Sarah Palin: 
 
 “I do believe that enough Americans have awakened and understand it’s time for a shift.” — Nov. 2, on Fox News. 
 
 Fox News’s Sean Hannity: 
 
 “I got this, Romney three points.” — Nov. 2, on Fox News. 
 
 CNBC’s Larry Kudlow: 
 
 ”I am now predicting a 330 vote electoral vote landslide. Yes, that’s right — 330 electoral votes.” — Oct. 25, on CNBC. 
 
 Fox News contributor Charles Krauthammer: 
 
 “Romney, very close. But he’ll win the popular by I think about half a point, electoral college probably a very narrow margin.” — Nov. 2, on Fox News. 
 
 Rush Limbaugh: 
 
 “All of my thinking says Romney big. All of my feeling is where my concern is. But my thoughts, my intellectual analysis of this — factoring everything I see plus the polling data — it’s not even close. Three hundred-plus electoral votes for Romney.” — Nov. 5, on his radio show. 
 
 The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan: 
 
 “I think it’s Romney. … While everyone is looking at the polls and the storm, Romney’s slipping into the presidency. ”— Nov. 5, on her Wall Street Journal blog. 
 
 Former Bush White House press secretary Ari Fleischer: 
 
 “My prediction: Romn 50.1%-49.5%. Romn w minimum 271 EVs (FL, VA, CO, WI, NH). 309 EVs if he takes OH&PA. Pres-elect Romney.” — Nov. 4, via Twitter. ||||| ASSOCIATED PRESS Nate Silver sits on the stairs at Allegro hotel in downtown Chicago on Nov. 9, 2012. The statistician correctly predicted the 2012 presidential winner in all 50 states and almost all the Senate races. 
 
 During the 2012 election, Republicans who hated the daily onslaught of polling showing that Mitt Romney was headed toward a comfortable defeat turned to Dean Chambers, the man who launched the website Unskewed Polls. The poll numbers were wrong, he said, and by tweaking a few things, he could give a more accurate count. His final projection had Romney winning close to all 50 states. 
 
 Chambers has wisely abandoned the field of election forecasting, and this year says he thinks the various models predicting a Hillary Clinton victory are probably accurate. The models themselves are pretty confident. HuffPost Pollster is giving Clinton a 98 percent chance of winning, and The New York Times’ model at The Upshot puts her chances at 85 percent. 
 
 There is one outlier, however, that is causing waves of panic among Democrats around the country, and injecting Trump backers with the hope that their guy might pull this thing off after all. Nate Silver’s 538 model is giving Donald Trump a heart-stopping 35 percent chance of winning as of this weekend. 
 
 He ratcheted the panic up to 11 on Friday with his latest forecast, tweeting out, “Trump is about 3 points behind Clinton ― and 3-point polling errors happen pretty often.” 
 
 So who’s right? 
 
 The beauty here is that we won’t have to wait long to find out. But let’s lay out now why we think we’re right and 538 is wrong. Or, at least, why they’re doing it wrong. 
 
 The short version is that Silver is changing the results of polls to fit where he thinks the polls truly are, rather than simply entering the poll numbers into his model and crunching them. 
 
 Silver calls this unskewing a “trend line adjustment.” He compares a poll to previous polls conducted by the same polling firm, makes a series of assumptions, runs a regression analysis, and gets a new poll number. That’s the number he sticks in his model ― not the original number. 
 
 He may end up being right, but he’s just guessing. A “trend line adjustment” is merely political punditry dressed up as sophisticated mathematical modeling. 
 
 Guess who benefits from the unskewing? 
 
 By the time he’s done adjusting the “trend line,” Clinton has lost 0.2 points and Trump has gained 1.7 points. An adjustment of below 2 points may not seem like much, but it’s enough to throw off his entire forecast, taking a comfortable 4.6 point Clinton lead and making it look like a nail-biter. 
 
 It’s enough to close the gap between the two candidates to below 3 points, which allows Silver to say that it’s now anybody’s ballgame, because “3-point polling errors happen pretty often.” 
 
 By monkeying around with the numbers like this, Silver is making a mockery of the very forecasting industry that he popularized. 
 
 That line in itself is disingenuous, though. For the polls to be wrong, there wouldn’t need to be one single 3-point error. All of the polls ― all of them, as Brianna Keilar would put it ― would have to be off by 3 points in the same direction. That’s happened before, but in 2012 the error favored President Barack Obama. In 2014, it favored Republicans. Errors are just as likely to favor Clinton as they are to favor Trump, and they would have to favor Trump. And we still haven’t accounted for the unique fact that one campaign has a get-out-the-vote operation, while the other doesn’t. 
 
 By monkeying around with the numbers like this, Silver is making a mockery of the very forecasting industry that he popularized. “The idea that she’s a prohibitive, 95 percent-plus favorite is hard to square with polling that has frequently shown 5- or 6-point swings within the span of a couple weeks, given that she only leads by 3 points or so now,” he told Politico recently. “[E]verything depends on one’s assumptions, but I think that our assumptions ― a Clinton lead, sure, but high uncertainty ― has repeatedly been validated by the evidence we’ve seen over the course of the past several months.” 
 
 I get why Silver wants to hedge. It’s not easy to sit here and tell you that Clinton has a 98 percent chance of winning. Everything inside us screams out that life is too full of uncertainty, that being so sure is just a fantasy. But that’s what the numbers say. What is the point of all the data entry, all the math, all the modeling, if when the moment of truth comes we throw our hands up and say, hey, anything can happen. If that’s how we feel, let’s scrap the entire political forecasting industry. 
 
 Silver’s guess that the race is up for grabs might be a completely reasonable assertion ― but it’s the stuff of punditry, not mathematical forecasting. 
 
 Punditry has been Silver’s go-to move this election cycle, and it hasn’t served him well. He repeatedly pronounced that Trump had a close to 0 percent chance of winning the Republican primary, even as he led in the polls. “Trump’s chances [are] higher than 0 but (considerably) less than 20 percent,” he wrote in November. 
 
 Silver was far from alone in being wrong. I said myself, at the time, that Trump had no chance of winning the primary. But I did so as a pundit, and, as a pundit, I am endowed by my creator the inalienable right to be consistently wrong and never apologize. But our polling model always forecast a Trump win, and our polling team, led by Natalie Jackson, stuck by that prediction, because their job is to follow the numbers. They were right, while pundits like me and Silver were wrong. 
 
 MANDEL NGAN via Getty Images 
 
 Even though the HuffPost and New York Times models both have very high confidence that Clinton will win ― and The Upshot’s Nate Cohn has consistently said Clinton is the runaway favorite, even after Jim Comey’s entrance into the campaign ― we differ on how big the current gap is. Much of the disagreement comes from using a different style of regression analysis. The difference between the Upshot’s 3 percent and 538’s 3 percent is that the Upshot is using one style of regression analysis to get theirs ― whereas 538 is actually moving the polling numbers and then running its regression analysis. 
 
 The HuffPost model uses a stickier regression, which assumes that the populace does not swiftly change its mind on a dime about a candidate based on a bad news day. After all, one difference between pundits and regular people is that the former live on Twitter with cable news on in the background, while regular folks catch campaign developments in snippets, if at all. That makes it really, really hard for even the worst day to cause a real 6-point swing. 
 
 So when new polls come out showing a candidate surging, that surge has to sustain itself to register fully in our model. The Times model, which actually relies on HuffPost data, puts a bit more grease in its charts, and so the numbers can move up or down more quickly. In the last week, the model’s confidence in a Clinton win fell from 93 to 85, while HuffPost’s barely dropped. 
 
 So if Nate Cohn and Nate Silver both see a roughly 3-point race, why is one Nate confident in a Clinton win and the other sparking a collective global freakout? 
 
 Because Silver is also unskewing state polls, which explains, for instance, why 538 is predicting Trump will win Florida, even as we and others (and the early vote) see it as a comfortable Clinton lead. To see how it works in action, take the Marist College poll conducted Oct. 25-26. Silver rates Marist as an “A” pollster, and they found Clinton with a 1-point lead. Silver then “adjusted” it to make it a 3-point Trump lead. HuffPost Pollster, meanwhile, has near certainty Clinton is leading in Florida. 
 
 In response to this article, Silver tweeted: 
 
 The reason we adjust polls for the national trend is because **that's what works best emperically**. It's not a subjective assumption. — Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 5, 2016 
 
 “Every model makes assumptions but we actually test ours based on the evidence. Some of the other models are barley even empirical,” he said in another post. 
 
 We’ll have to wait and see what happens. Maybe Silver will be right come Election Day ― Trump will win Florida, and we’ll all be in for a very long night. Or our forecast will be right, she’ll win nationally by 5 or 6, and we can all turn in early. 
 
 If he’s right, though, it was just a good guess ― a fortunate “trend line adjustment” ― not a mathematical forecast. If you want to put your faith in the numbers, you can relax. She’s got this. 
 
 This story has been updated with a response from Nate Silver. 
 
 CORRECTION: Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this post incorrectly implied the HuffPost model had Clinton winning Florida by 5 or 6 points. The forecast shows her winning by that much nationally. ||||| Not only did FiveThirtyEight's Silver pick all 50 state winners in the presidential race, he also beat out his polling aggregator rivals for sheer margin of accuracy. 
 
 FiveThirtyEight blogger and statistician Nate Silver. (Credit: CBSNews.com) 
 
 While there's already been whole swimming pools of ink devoted to the Election Day prediction performance of polling aggregators like FiveThirtyEight blogger Nate Silver, CNET is ready to hand out one more round of kudos to the king of the quants. 
 
 By now, anyone following the presidential election knows that Silver successfully predicted the winner in the race between President Barack Obama and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in all 50 states. That performance was one for the ages, earning him worldwide admiration and validating a polling aggregation model that had drawn mockery and ire from many pundits. 
 
 This CNET chart shows that, among polling aggregators, FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver was more accurate than anyone on Election Day. (Credit: Data by Daniel Terdiman/CNET) 
 
 But Silver wasn't the only one to do exceptionally well in the prediction department. In fact, each of the five aggregators that CNET surveyed yesterday -- FiveThirtyEight, TPM PollTracker, HuffPost Pollster, the RealClearPolitics Average, and the Princeton Election Consortium -- successfully called the election for Obama, and save for TPM PollTracker and RealClearPolitics handing Florida to Romney, the aggregators were spot on across the board when it came to picking swing state victors. 
 
 Read: The post-election tech tally: Winners and losers 
 
 Still, even within the club of those who used computational analysis of thousands of national and statewide polls to peg the outcome of the election, someone had to be the most accurate. And a CNET examination of each aggregator's performance reveals a single winner -- unsurprisingly, Silver. 
 
 In addition to picking the winner in all 50 states -- besting his 49 out of 50 slate in 2008 -- Silver was also the closest among the aggregators to picking the two candidates' popular vote percentages. All told, he missed Obama's total of 50.8 percent by just four-tenths of a percentage point (50.4) and Romney's 48 percent by just three-tenths of a point (48.3) for an average miss of just 0.35 percentage points. HuffPo Pollster and RealClearPolitics tied for second with an average miss of 0.85 points. 
 
 In preparing to make these comparisons, CNET surveyed 11 swing states. In the end, Silver was closest to the final margins among the candidates in seven of them and also had the best overall record, missing by an average of just 1.46 points in the 11 states. TPM PollTracker was second with the closest predicted margins in three states, and the second-best average margin, 1.80 points. 
 
 It is worth noting that while Silver's final pre-election calculations showed a tie vote in Florida, he still predicted a 50.3 chance that the president would prevail in the Sunshine State. 
 
 The performances by Silver and his fellow polling aggregators should be sounding alarm bells in the halls of long-venerated pollsters like Gallup -- which, by the way, predicted that Romney would win the national popular vote by a point. 
 
 For the Nate-haters, here's the 538 prediction and actual results side by side twitter.com/cosentino/stat... -- Michael Cosentino (@cosentino) November 7, 2012 
 
 But the situation does create a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. While the results of pollsters like Gallup and many of its competitors are looking increasingly suspect in the face of more accurate predictions by Silver and other aggregators, and while some may begin choosing to ignore those traditional polls, the aggregators could not do what they do without the standard polling systems. 
 
 In the meantime, even Silver may need to tip his cap to someone who seems to have done an even better job at prognosticating the final presidential election results. In a blog post today, dailyKos founder Markos Moulitsas noted that he had predicted exactly the final Electoral College vote totals and reported an average margin in the swing states that was less than Silver's or that of any aggregator. Moulitsas' methodology? A savvy but seemingly manual reading of last-minute pre-election polls. Maybe the quants don't have all the answers after all. 
 
 Correction, November 8, 4 p.m. PT: The above chart originally misreported the number of points by which TPM PollTracker was off in Florida. The correct figure is 1.7 points.
– The official results from Florida aren't in yet but it looks like Nate Silver—whose blog accounted for a fifth of the New York Times' web traffic Monday—correctly called 50 out of 50 states after getting 49 right in 2008. "You know who won the election tonight? Nate Silver," said Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, a sentiment echoed even by Bret Baier at Fox News, the Huffington Post reports. But while Silver triumphed, there were plenty who got it wrong, notes Politico, which lists more than a dozen pundits who predicted a Romney win with varying degrees of confidence. Among them are assorted Fox pundits, Sarah Palin, and Peggy Noonan at the Wall Street Journal, who wrote "I think it’s Romney ... While everyone is looking at the polls and the storm, Romney’s slipping into the presidency." Rush Limbaugh was also way off. "All of my thinking says Romney big," he said Monday. "My thoughts, my intellectual analysis of this—factoring everything I see plus the polling data—it’s not even close. Three hundred-plus electoral votes for Romney."