Nate Silver, Election Predictor at FiveThirtyEight, Comes Out As Gay; Credits His Success to Being An "Outsider"

Election prediction guru Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight credits his interest in math and numbers with being an outsider when he was young-nerdy, agnostic and gay.

Silver is obviously an intelligent number-cruncher with a head for stats, poker and baseball, but he's also been "out" for years.

But this is the first time he's explicitly acknowledged his sexual orientation. He did so in an interview with The Guardian, saying, "I've always felt like something of an outsider. I've always had friends, but I've always come from an outside point of view. I think that's important. If you grow up gay, or in a household that's agnostic, when most people are religious, then from the get-go, you are saying that there are things that the majority of society believes that I don't believe."

Obviously, Silver's sexual preferences have no bearing on his accuracy as a pollster, but that didn't stop some conservatives from more-than-hinting that might be the case.

In October, Dean Chambers of Unskewed Polls, a terrible website I never referenced or mentioned during the campaign because it is mathematically unsound, said Silver's predictions couldn't be trusted.

"Nate Silver is a man of very small stature, a thin and effeminate man with a soft-sounding voice that sounds almost exactly like the 'Mr. New Castrati' voice used by Rush Limbaugh on his program," said Chambers.

"Nate Silver, like most liberal and leftist celebrities and favorites, might be of average intelligence but is surely not the genius he's made out to be. His political analyses are average at best and his projections, at least this year, are extremely biased in favor of the Democrats," concluded Chambers.

Chambers turned out to be astoundingly wrong, and Silver is now hailed as a prescient analyst, whose main concern these days is not getting lulled into complacency by all the applause.

"I've become invested with this symbolic power. It really does transcend what I'm actually doing and what I actually deserve," he said.

"And I'd be the first to say you want diversity of opinion. You don't want to treat any one person as oracular."

For now, he can bask in the warmth of his $700,000 book deal and the knowledge that he was very, very right.