He'll lose because people will not trust him anymore if he is off by a wide margin. Goodbye career.
Oh I agree, but it shouldn't be the case, because if he misses, it just means that the polls were wrong. He makes no bones about the fact that he's mostly relying on polls to make his prediction, so if the polls are wrong he'll be wrong, too. People should be pissed that the polls are wrong, instead of turning on Nate Silver. But Polls are wrong sometimes. For example, Hillary Vs. Obama in New Hampshire. Everybody missed that. Some by a mile. There are always a few like that, and sometimes it's hard to understand why it happens.
And actually, I think Silver will take a lot of heat even if it is a
narrow Romney victory, but he shouldn't, because all he's really saying is that Romney is a long shot, which is obviously true. Any reasonable minded person would have to say a Romney victory would be an upset based on the current polling. Romney would have to outperform the polls to win, thereby defying the odds But long shots occasionally win. Politics is like any sport, you can crunch numbers all day long and run simulated games, but at the end of the day, real people have to go out and take action, which introduces a level of noise and randomness that you can't totally account for when the margins are narrow enough.