These questions seemed particularly relevant in our current moment, as virtually every political pundit is in the business of making predictions about who will win the presidency on November 3. Some of these predictions are based purely on the numbers -- figures are placed into a model and a result is spit out -- while others are based on a blend of numbers and, for lack of a better word, gut instinct. So, who's right? Or is there even a right in all of this? I asked those questions -- and a few more -- of Christopher Beha, the author of "The Index of Self-Destructive Acts" and also the editor of Harper's magazine. Our conversation, conducted via email and lightly edited for flow, is below. CIllizza: The novel's main character -- Sam Waxworth -- is a numbers guy who made his name by predicting every state right in the 2008 election. The obvious comparison is Nate Silver. Was Nate (or anyone else) in your mind when writing the character of Sam? Beha: I started thinking about this book in the early years of Obama's first term, more or less in the same period when the book itself is set. Most traditional pundits thought the 2008 election would be a nail-biter, but a few data-driven outsider types (Nate Silver most prominent among them) predicted a near-landslide for Obama, which is what happened. If Obama himself appeared to represent something entirely new -- not just because of his race, but because he was the first post-Boomer president, seemingly untouched by the Boomer-era culture wars that Bill Clinton and George W. Bush in different ways represented; because he seemed pragmatic, technocratic, non-ideological; because he had not "waited his turn" and seemed less beholden to the traditional political power structures -- these "data journalists" were the media equivalent of this newness. They quickly established themselves in the mainstream, despite predictable grumbling from the old guard. I found this generational tension interesting, and it was one of the elements that led me to create a character (very loosely) based on Silver. I was also interested in the limits of the kind of quantitative thinking that this new guard represented. Here it's worth mentioning in fairness to Silver -- whom I don't know at all -- that he is generally very thoughtful about the way he uses data, and that he actually talks quite a bit about the limits of quantification. But there are many people in the "quant" camp who do not share this humility, and more extreme characters are naturally more interesting for a novelist. So I would say that I borrowed some broad facts from Silver's biography -- Waxworth is from the Midwest; he went from baseball modeling to political modeling; he rose to fame after correctly predicting the outcome of the 2008 election -- but that I borrowed Waxworth's mindset from some of Silver's less thoughtful brethren (whom I won't name here). Cillizza: A novel at least partly about electoral predictions, polls and modeling -- and their limits. How much was this book influenc