He has clearly stated that he is the "most bullish on Trump" of all of those that are projecting.
He was way off on the primaries and he is now making manual adjustments to his numbers to enhance Trumps numbers. This "unskewing" is unprecedented for 538, discussed here by Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/nate-silver-election-forecast_us_581e1c33e4b0d9ce6fbc6f7f
You missed the point about counting Early Vote. Count them or don't count them and your model will stand or fall by the conclusions it arrives at. Enten in his article today is making arguments against the EV totals being accurate predictors because he is saying polls indicate that there is a sizeable move of Democrats voting for Trump. There are NO polls that show that there is any move by Democrats in Nevada to support Trump at lower levels of Republican support for Clinton, none.
The reason that Sam Wang gets more love is because he uses the most reliable polls: state polls and doesn't try to manipulate state polls with national polls which Silver openly concedes that he does.
National polls versus state polls
To recap, the model mostly uses state polls. But national polls can influence the forecast in some subtle ways:
◾They’re helpful for calculating adjustments to the polls, especially the trend line adjustment and house effects adjustment.
◾They’re used, in conjunction with the state polls, in estimating the national popular vote.
Its Silver's bad luck that a few national polls are probably under rating Clinton by 2-4 points, but that is what the early voting is showing, probably because they are a) under estimating Republican women voting for Clinton and b) significantly under estimating Hispanic turnout.
You suggest that people are simply "cherry picking" to find the polls that make them feel the best. That might be partially true that people are looking for polls that they think most accurately reflect their "feeling" but actually DUers are much more sophisticated consumers of polling data than your slam would give them credit for.
538 is the most complex model. Peer review analysis has showed however that more complex models don't have a better outcome than simpler models.
The most simple model is Polyvote
http://pollyvote.com/en/ and are showing Clinton 53 Romney 47, while 538 is showing 48/43. Let's revisit the numbers after the election and see who got closer.
The fact is that for all its pretense of being an objective data driven model 538 "readjusts" the data for historical, economic, national poll factors. There is substantial criticism against 538 that has nothing to do with "cherry picking" polls but with substantial criticisms with their methodology and the frustration that they have a higher media profile than other election forecasters that are, in fact, more empirically based that Silver.
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