Here is an excerpt from an article written by Marc Tracy and published by The New Republic magazine. To read the complete article, please click here.

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“FiveThirtyEight is drawing huge traffic,” New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson told me yesterday. She added, “What’s interesting is a lot of the traffic is coming just for Nate.”

There has been plenty of controversy over Nate Silver’s presidential forecast, which currently reports a roughly nine-in-ten chance of a Barack Obama victory, down slightly from this morning. But supporters and detractors have at least one thing in common: they all visit his site. And so have many, many others over the past weeks and months. During the highest-profile period for the New York Times’ political coverage—and perhaps the newspaper as a whole—Silver’s blog, FiveThirtyEight, which the Times licensed for three years and began hosting in the summer of 2010, plays an astoundingly outsize role in the paper’s online political coverage, at least measured by page views. It suggests that even though Silver is a long-term contractor rather than a staff writer, the Times is closely associated with his forecasts, and therefore could itself come in for much of the criticism Silver has.

The Times does not release traffic figures, but a spokesperson said yesterday that Silver’s blog provided a significant—and significantly growing, over the past year—percentage of Times pageviews. This fall, visits to the Times’ political coverage (including FiveThirtyEight) have increased, both absolutely and as a percentage of site visits. But FiveThirtyEight’s growth is staggering: where earlier this year, somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of politics visits included a stop at FiveThirtyEight, last week that figure was 71 percent.

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To read the complete article, please click here.

Marc Tracy is a staff writer for The New Republic. To read other articles, please click here.