The Rise of the Quants in Political Prognostication

As President Barack Obama celebrated re-election, number-crunching geeks everywhere could revel in redemption.

For months, political pundits and reporters said that the race between Mr. Obama and Mitt Romney was too close to call.

Not so, insisted a new breed of political analysts who rejected intuition and relied instead on data — vast amounts of it, run through computer algorithms — to arrive at their election predictions. [cont.]

Eric Pfanner, New York Times / International Herald Tribune

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