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Nate Silver was vilified by some Republicans and political journalists during the 2012 election, and embraced by Democrats looking for a fix of reassuring political news during rocky periods

of President Obama's re-election bid. This week, the seemingly prophetic New York Times–employed political polling aggregator told an audience of students at Washington University in St.

Louis that "the polls can certainly affect elections at times." They're not supposed to, Silver added, but some voters may "take the forecasts too seriously."

Then, says Michael Tabb at the Washington U. newspaper Student Life, Silver dropped this juicy little bit of news: "If it gets really weird in 2014, in 2016, then maybe I'll stop doing it. I

don't want to influence the democratic process in a negative way.... I'm [hoping to make] people more informed. I don't want to affect their motive because they trust the forecasters."

Politico's Dylan Byers says he "reached out to Silver to ask how much of an effect he believed his data and analysis had on voters in 2012, if any," but got no reply — perhaps, Byers

speculates, because Silver has "been a critic of this blog and of Politico in the past." (Byers then goes on to archly note that Silver "inaccurately predicted that the New England Patriots

and Seattle Seahawks would meet in the Super Bowl, and then inaccurately predicted that the San Francisco 49ers would beat the Baltimore Ravens in the Super Bowl.")

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Had Nate chosen not tell us what the polls were really saying, he would have still been influencing the results. Think about it. Obama voters were fretting, we now know needlessly, that our

guy was losing, and was going to lose. Nate showed us that in fact our concerns that the president didn't have enough votes to win were factually incorrect. We were basing our sense of who

was going to win, and our dispiritedness, on incorrect information. Nate provided us with correct information instead....

The question is whether any one piece of information unfairly influences the election, and that's hard to say. There is an argument to be made that Nate doesn't just have the influence of

any other lead actor, even a large actor, in the electoral debate — Nate is a super-actor, with inordinate, unique influence. And he is. But he also happens to be right. I just have a hard

time with anyone who would argue that voters are better off relying on less-accurate, rather than more-accurate, information. [AmericaBlog]

Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career

began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.