His approach is pretty sound, and straightforward if you listen to his podcast. Proper treatment of fat tails via student t distributions and correlated variables with good (subjective) judgement on polling quality.

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.