Nate Silver is a writer and statistician who maintains a blog, FiveThirtyEight, currently licensed by The New York Times.

Where most pundits predicted a down-to-the-wire no-clear-favourite race between Obama and Romney, Silver gave Obama a 91 percent chance of winning on election day, and correctly forecast every state outcome as well.

Silver’s “secret” is a proprietary statistical model of presidential elections. He runs the model thousands of times every day, using the latest numbers — polling figures and economic data, mostly — and watching who wins more often, and how frequently.

And it works. On the day before the election, 20 percent of visitors to the Times website visited FiveThirtyEight. And his 50 for 50 record speaks for itself.

But perhaps the real winner is data-driven political analysis.

Data is the new oil, after all.

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