Which I basically agree with by the way.
The most accurate probability data I saw on Election Night came from the New York Times, of all places. They basically had dials of each battleground state and the race overall that changed as the night went on based on how many votes came in from each state and from those results, calculated how the remaining votes (from each precinct and county) would come out. From what I could tell, those dials were fully attuned to actual incoming data with no human intervention or bias.
With uncanny accuracy, those NY Times dials successfully predicted the outcome hours before the networks called the race for Trump. Matt Drudge started linking to them early that evening on his main page. It was there that I saw that the needles were moving in Trump's favor in states like OH, FL, PA, MI, WI and NC quite a bit of time before the networks started calling them. By 9:30PM, I was convinced of a Trump win even though the networks and their overpaid pundits continued for hours droning on and on about possible paths for Hillary to still win.
I also saw that the NYT had Trump losing NH, MN, CO and NV early on and they ended up being right about that as well.
My point is, I think the era of election night punditry by so-called experts like Karl Rove and Nate Silver are over. Incoming voting data will be processed and accurate predictions will be made on the remaining votes based on statistical data with no human intervention or bias.
“With uncanny accuracy, those NY Times dials successfully predicted the outcome hours”
I was glued to those dials...and it was really something to know, for example, that Trump would take Florida because most of the votes in the Panhandle and a few large counties north of Orlando had not been counted. You could say he would win, even though CNN had Hillary up by 80,000 votes.
The best moment of the night was watching 140,000 Panhandle votes drop at once...you knew it was coming and the look on Wolfe Blitzer’s face was comedy gold!
The NYT dials were basically doing the same thing Silver does, only with better and more up to date data. I would agree that what Silver does is nothing particularly special; anyone with some statistical knowledge could do the same.