1) People only care about election handicapping every 4 (or 2) years in the US.
2) Nate Silver especially made political predictions look really easy (in comparison to the partisan clowns who populate cable news). The outcome you're trying to predict is how people will vote, and you're free to go and ask them how they will vote.
Compare to sports where (1) you have sporting events all the time and (2) you are trying to predict something that is much more uncertain. For someone who is in to sports, I could easily see that being much more interesting.
The counter to this is that politics is (arguably) more important, and is associated with more fame.
He got his start doing sabermetrics (statistics for baseball) and, after reading his book and his column, it honestly seems like he's a lot more passionate about sports than politics.
(I don't think this conflicts with your point about sports' immediacy and uncertainty.)
The outcome you're trying to predict is how people will vote, and you're free to go and ask them how they will vote.
True, but what Nate Silver brings to the table goes far beyond that. Polls are inaccurate. His statistical models adjust for all sorts of information you don't get from polling. Like which way undecideds will swing late (towards the incumbent) or sampling bias (poll respondents lean Republican) or even outright lying ("sure I'd vote for a black president", then doesn't in the privacy of the voting booth.) That's what set Silver's predictions far above all others in accuracy, and how he correctly captured the election swinging decisively for Obama as hardly anyone else foresaw.
1) People only care about election handicapping every 4 (or 2) years in the US.
2) Nate Silver especially made political predictions look really easy (in comparison to the partisan clowns who populate cable news). The outcome you're trying to predict is how people will vote, and you're free to go and ask them how they will vote.
Compare to sports where (1) you have sporting events all the time and (2) you are trying to predict something that is much more uncertain. For someone who is in to sports, I could easily see that being much more interesting.
The counter to this is that politics is (arguably) more important, and is associated with more fame.