In the Washington Post, Michael Gerson writes a rant against Nate Silver. He also takes a lot of potshots at political science, too. 

The current mania for measurement is a pale reflection of modern political science. Crack open most political science journals and you’ll find a profusion of numbers and formulas more suited to the study of physics. In my old field of speechwriting, political scientists sometimes do content analysis by counting the recurrence of certain words — as though leadership could be decoded by totaling the number of times Franklin Roosevelt said “feah” or George W. Bush said “freedom.”

There is a certain amount of political science that is overly wed to a quantitative method. I remember one paper that utilized a three page long methodology and utilized an army of grad students as coders. Its main finding was that the Daily Kos had a liberal bent. No, really. 

By being overly wed to questions that can be answered with quantification, major questions in political science go unanswered. "Who benefits?" is the basic question in political science. Sometimes that answer requires going into the field and talking to people. 

I think that not enough political scientists look at their projects with a critical eye. "Who gives a shit?" should be a question that some academics should ask more often. 

But that's neither here nor there, because that's not really what Gerson is saying. He's just saying that we shouldn't listen to Nate Silver with his bad news, because numbers are bad. Now, that's just silly.