History
When Silver started FiveThirtyEight.com in early March 2008 he initially published under the name "Poblano", the same name that he had used since November 2007 when he began publishing a diary on the political blog Daily Kos. Writing as Poblano on Daily Kos, he had gained a following especially for his primary election forecast on Super Tuesday, February 5, 2008. From that primary election day, which included contests in 24 states plus American Samoa, "Poblano" predicted that Barack Obama would come away with 859 delegates, and Hillary Clinton 829; in the actual contests, Obama won 847 delegates and Clinton 834. Based on this result, New York Times op-ed columnist William Kristol cited "Poblano" thus: "And an interesting regression analysis at the Daily Kos Web site (poblano.dailykos.com) of the determinants of the Democratic vote so far, applied to the demographics of the Ohio electorate, suggests that Obama has a better chance than is generally realized in Ohio".
FiveThirtyEight.com gained further national attention for beating out most pollsters' projections in the North Carolina and Indiana Democratic party primaries on May 6, 2008. As Mark Blumenthal wrote in National Journal, "Over the last week, an anonymous blogger who writes under the pseudonym Poblano did something bold on his blog, FiveThirtyEight.com. He posted predictions for the upcoming primaries based not on polling data, but on a statistical model driven mostly by demographic and past vote data.... Critics scoffed. Most of the public polls pointed to a close race in North Carolina.... But a funny thing happened. The model got it right". Silver relied on demographic data and on the history of voting in other states during the 2008 Democratic primary elections. "I think it is interesting and, in a lot of ways, I'm not surprised that his predictions came closer to the result than the pollsters did", said Brian F. Schaffner, research director of American University's Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies.
On May 30, 2008, Silver revealed his true identity for the first time to his FiveThirtyEight.com readers. After that date, he published just four more diaries on Daily Kos.
As the primary season was coming to an end, Silver began to build a model for the general election race. This model, too, relied in part on demographic information but mainly involved a complex method of aggregating polling results. In 2008, Rasmussen Reports had an apparently short-term partnership with FiveThirtyEight.com in order to include this unique methodology for generating poll averages in their "Balance of Power Calculator". At the same time, FiveThirtyEight.com's daily "Today's Polls" column began to be mirrored on "The Plank," a blog published by The New Republic.
By early October 2008, FiveThirtyEight.com approached 2.5 million visitors per week, while averaging approximately 400,000 per weekday. During October 2008 the site received 3.63 million unique visitors, 20.57 million site visits, and 32.18 million page views. On Election Day, November 4, 2008, the site had nearly 5 million page views.
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