Well, Nate Silver is kind of to politics what Nate Silver is to baseball. There had been forecasting systems prior to PECOTA, but it upped the bar.

More the Bill James of politics. (Bill James, created Sabermetrics, which are many of the models that Billy Beane utilizes)

Billy Beane is more a someone who utilizes new types of stats in player evaluation, then the person who creates the stats, I'm not sure who the "user" of Nate Silver's metrics are.

It is interesting to note that much of Nate's work stems from his work in Baseball.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_James

I think Beane probably had a lot more institutional resistance to his methods. The pundit class is much stronger in sports, since commentators are the mediators of entire sports for most fans (i.e. the majority don't attend games).

And this is different from US politics, how?

Commentators are mediators of politics for most people in the US.

No, I'm making a wry comment about the political apathy of most US citizens, and you are either not getting the joke or trolling by not getting the joke.

The risk of sarcasm is that you are taken seriously. You probably should have just deleted your comment rather than drag it out.