Love him or hate him—and God knows, pretty much every political junkie in America does one or other, while countless civilians simply obsess over him and his pronouncements around this time every four years—what no one who follows Nate Silver disputes is the outsized influence of his output. Since he burst onto the scene in 2008 with FiveThirtyEight, his seminal platform that turned polling aggregation, election forecasting, and the data journalism based on said aggregation and forecasting into wildly popular and ultimately inescapable features of modern political media, Silver’s work (at The New York Times, then at ABC News and ESPN) has transformed the way that millions of people follow elections and understand their outcomes.