He effectively gave us the equation and kept secret most of the coefficients (though he explained how to choose many of those coefficients). That wouldn't be acceptable for academic purposes, but it seems quite reasonable for journalistic purposes (and is certainly more than any typical political "analyst" provides). He also couldn't give out all the raw data that went into the analyses, because much of it was stuff he had to pay for. Getting past those paywalls and assembling a comprehensive database of polling information is almost certainly the bulk of the work necessary for reproducing his results.

If only the FICO score algorithm was available somewhere...

I feel like we followed a different 538...

Silver basically said "here are the exact probabilities we have calculated for these races and here is the gist of our methodology [1]". If that doesn't cut through the rhetoric, opinion, and 'expert analysis' that plagues MSM political coverage, I don't know what else possibly could.

[1] - http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/methodology/

> 538 is awash with numbers but the algorithms used to generate them are the very definition of "eye-of-newt and other secret ingredients".

I agree. I much prefer the (simpler) work of Sam Wang from the Princeton Election Consortium (http://election.princeton.edu/) who did release MATLAB code of his work and his data sources so you could do it yourself. Somehow, Nate Silver got all the media attention though.

>Somehow, Nate Silver got all the media attention though.

Yes, somehow the young, geekily attractive popular sports author, whose blog on an extremely popular alternative news site grew a significant cult following, got all the mainstream media attention. It is extremely surprising that said media attention did not go to the duo of crusty, obscure, highfalutin Ivy-league academics instead.

Somehow, that happened. How, we'll never know.