Election statistics blogger Nate Silver gay

Nate Silver (Photo by Randy Stewart via wikimedia commons)

NEW YORK — The statistician who correctly predicted the electoral vote counts in both the 2008 and 2012 elections has officially come out as gay.

Nate Silver, whose blog fivethirtyeight.com was picked up by the New York Times after his rise to fame during the 2008 election, told The Observer that the secret to his success is having grown up as an outsider in East Lansing Michigan as an agnostic gay geek.

“I’ve always felt like something of an outsider,” Silver told the website. “If you grow up gay, or in a household that’s agnostic, when most people are religious, then from the get-go, you are saying that there are things that the majority of society believes that I don’t believe.”

When asked by Carole Cadwalladr which made him more of a misfit, being gay or a geek, Silver replied, “Probably the numbers stuff since I had that from when I was six.”

Silver had appeared in last year’s Out 100, but had not yet answered questions in the press regarding the matter.