Nate Silver bets MSNBC host $1,000 on an Obama win

FiveThirtyEight blogger Nate Silver is so confident that President Barack Obama will be re-elected that he bet $1,000 on it.

In a Tweet to MNSBC host Joe Scarborough Sliver said:

“.@JoeNBC: If you think it’s a toss-up, let’s bet. If Obama wins, you donate $1,000 to the American Red Cross. If Romney wins, I do. Deal?”

The wager, which Scarborough has yet to publicly respond to, comes after a back-and-forth, which began when Scarborough criticized Silver’s math model, which says that Obama has much better odds of winning than Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

On his show, Morning Joe, Scarborough called Silver an ideologue and a joke saying:

“Nate Silver says this is a 73.6 per cent chance that the president’s going to win. Nobody in that campaign thinks they have a 73.6% — they think they have a 50.1 per cent chance of winning. Both sides understand that it is close and it could go either way. Anybody that thinks that this race is anything but a tossup right now is such an ideologue — they should be kept away from typewriters, computers, laptops and microphones for the next 10 days, because they’re jokes.”

This, and other criticism saying that Silver is putting his reputation at risk by predicting an Obama victory, had Silver on the defensive all week.

Silver remains confident in his numbers, though. On Thursday, he gave Obama a 79 per cent chance of winning on Nov. 6., an eight-point improvement over his estimation on Oct. 24.