What value is Silver providing? If he's not more right than other pundits, what's the point of him?
Not everything he posts amounts to a quantitative prediction of anything. Some of it is just discussion of what's going on, and what might happen, and how it could happen. It's usually synthesized in a way that's enjoyable to read, even if most of it isn't something you couldn't find somewhere else.
In terms of actual quantitative predictions, he can't be right or wrong because all he ever does is provide probabilities. If he predicts Walker has a 25% chance of winning the nomination, with others trailing behind, that's not a prediction that Walker will do well, but most people who read his column interpret it as such. You can take the probabilities however you want: seriously, for fun, or not at all. It doesn't really matter in the end since they can't be right or wrong. That's not a copout, it's just math.
He's not the only one making quantitative predictions using poll aggregation, but he was one of the first to do it rigorously.
Sometimes he does make an actual prediction on a result but labels it as subjective, so there's no attempt to be rigorous, he's just acquiescing to the fact that he's a human being with subjective ideas.
Actually, this whole year, his predictions for the nomination have been labeled as
subjective odds. He's just trying to make educated guesses, he's not using his model to do it.
And the whole Nate Gospelism thing is that he is better than the media - he can tell when they're going to be wrong and goes against them when they're going to be. This year, all he's done is run with the failed media consensus - he said that Bush and Walker would be top contenders for the nomination, they aren't. He continues to say that Trump will fade shortly, even though all evidence points to Trump making it to at least Super Tuesday - Sure, these are things that Atlas ran with for a time, but we're just commoners - Nate, according to his fans, is supposed to be better than that, and he's not.
Finally, while what you say about his statistics is technically correct, that's not how Nate takes it, really. When he gave Brazil the best chance of winning the world cup and then they didn't, he outright called it an error. He didn't say "Hey, well this is supposed to happen 45% of the time, and we're living in the 45%.", he instead admitted that he, or rather, his model, had made an incorrect prediction and acknowledged it as such. In 2012, when he made his famous all 50 states correct prediction, he took in all the praise for it. He didn't say "Well, I can't really be right, I'm just throwing out percentages and we just happen to be in the right universe out of the 1000 I simulated", No, he took in all the praise and worship he could. The only time he's used the "It's just percentages" excuse is when it benefits him greatly - best example is when he gave Heitkamp a >90% chance of losing and she won, his claim was "Hey, this shows how good I am - these low probability things are supposed to happen sometimes - if they never did, I wouldn't be good." - it was a clear desire to win some support out of a prediction he knew was terribly wrong through pure spin.
