Nate Silver is a guy who got lucky one year, and managed to convince everyone he's a genius.
(1) The website doesn't "predict" a state when it reports that the probability of (e.g.) an Obama victory in Florida is 50.3%, which I believe is what 538 assessed in 2012. If you think that a state's probability distribution is 50/50 between Candidate X and Y, and the outcome is Candidate X, obviously you don't get any points for a good prediction. You didn't make a prediction. And if you say it's 50.3% probability, it's essentially the same situation. You didn't make (much of) a prediction. Which is okay!
(2) In terms of Brier Scores or entropy scores, which compare the probability with the outcome and give more "points" the stronger the prediction was made (vs. what actually happened), FiveThirtyEight's predictions are generally just middle-of-the-pack compared with other websites and mechanisms of aggregating these polls. (See, e.g., https://web.math.princeton.edu/~sswang/Wang_Origins_of_Presi...) There's no strong evidence that 538's predictions are much better or worse than other reasonable ways to weight and aggregate the recent polls that anybody else might come up with.
(3) And... almost everything that tries to quantify the accuracy of the predictions is talking about the state of the 538 website ON THE MORNING OF THE ELECTION. But that's probably the least useful day to be looking at FiveThirtyEight. By then, you can just wait a few hours and get the actual results. :-) The predictions that are really valuable are the ones that are made some time in advance, e.g. one or two months.
But (a) it's hard to directly measure the "accuracy" of a prediction like that, because... things change and we can't rerun the universe, and (b) it's not like the model is somehow time-invariant to be able to measure the accuracy indirectly by proxy; there are various "time until election" factors included in these model itself, the dynamics of the election itself probably have a "time until election" dependency, AND the website operators, including 538, are generally manually tweaking the model parameters or behavior in ways they don't always disclose as the election evolves.
So basically... it's hard to say. I think 538 has done great work, and in general it's incredibly useful to have a consistent world model that you can rationally update to discuss the effect of recent news. The FiveThirtyEight political models are as good as any for that! But I don't think there's much strong evidence they're better.
Its hard to measure the accuracy of a prediction like that, but with a big collection of predictions (and since every cycle Silver predicts a lot of individual elections – not just each of the state elections for presidential electors, including both the statewide electors and the by-district electors where those exist, but also house, senate, gubernatorial, and some other races – each election cycle, this exists) you can bucket them in similar probability buckets and say, for instance, and see how often things Silver predicted in each probability bucket came true vs. the probability range of the bucket, and get a good idea of the accuracy of the predictions.
I find that most people with negative views of Nate's approach are innumerate with regards to statistics. They don't criticize the model because they can't be bothered to understand it, or even basic probability, and certainly don't rank his performance vs other modelers which wouldn't require understanding the model.
Did you Google any other good blog posts?
Nate Silver is a guy who is very good at applying statistical modelling to a number of domains (including election analysis, where he basically revolutionized the field with everyone else doing poll-aggregate-based-prediction – which no one was previously – following in his footsteps, but mostly doing a worse job), but who morphed into another generic center-right Democratic political talking head. Whether that’s a structural demand of Disney that will go away now that he is leaving Disney or whether its what he feels his groove is now…will be interesting to see.
(The 2020 election was the last time I really heard about him, and the most controversial takes he had was some very mild reservations on lockdowns and school closures... at a time when the entire world reopened schools except for the USA, which is why it didn't register like a hot/right wing take at all to me.)
This makes a fundamental error of confusing “polls” (which is not a category Silver’s work falls into) with statistical predictions based on aggregates of polls (which is what it is.)
He found a trend and published it widely.
He changed the very thing he was studying. Because politics was already a statistical game, his original models failed to reproduce.
He clearly published a single result.
But in his defense, I think he’s been more the victim of the secular decline in polling quality than anything else.