Our fictional pundit predicted more correct primary results than Nate Silver did [View all]

[bemildred]

Covering elections isn't just about math.

He went from being a hostage of Russian security forces to predicting the exact results of the Iowa presidential caucuses, right down to the third- and fourth-place finishers. He called Bernie Sanders’s upset win in this past week’s Indiana primary, when his competitors all said Hillary Clinton had it locked down. He has correctly predicted the results of 77 out of 87 races in this year’s primaries, an 89 percent accuracy rating that equals that of FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver while tackling nearly twice as many contests.

And he’s a fictional character.

Carl “The Dig” Diggler is a parody of political pundits written by Felix Biederman and me for CAFE. Carl exists to satirize all that is vacuous, elitist and ridiculous about the media class. From his sycophantic love of candidates in uniform to his hatred of Bernie Bros, from his reverence for “the discourse” to his constant threats of suing the people who troll him on Twitter, Carl is predicated on being myopic, vain and — frankly — wrong.

But something funny happened along the way. Biederman and I, who are neither statisticians nor political scientists, started making educated guesses for our parody about the results of the primaries. And we were right. A lot.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/05/09/our-fictional-pundit-predicted-more-correct-primary-results-than-nate-silver-did/