In the political press, hacks and shills are among the biggest problems -- and they're unwilling to risk their own money on being right.
On Nate Silver's Wikipedia page, he is described as "an American statistician, sabermetrician, psephologist, and writer." Put more simply, he is far more numerate than the vast majority of people who write about politics for a living. In 2008, he correctly predicted the outcome of the presidential election in 49 of 50 states, and accurately identified the winner in all 35 Senate races.
I seldom read Silver's blog at the New York Times, having developed my own method for discerning with 100 percent accuracy the victor in every presidential, Senate, House, and gubernatorial race in America. For reasons that are mysterious to me, the public lacks the patience for my "just wait until the votes are counted" method, preferring to obsess for months on end about who is up, who is down, and the precise statistical likelihood of still uncertain events. But if someone interested in that sort of thing asked me where to find it, I'd send them to Silver, both because there's no one more skilled at what he does and because his work seems to have integrity. What I mean is that when Silver makes an electoral prediction, I trust he believes it. His seems extremely interested in excelling at his craft, and uninterested in influencing elections by using his prominence to exaggerate the chances of his favored candidate. I am not sure if his Election 2012 predictions will be as accurate as the ones from four years ago, but neither is anyone else.