Nate Silver's move to ESPN is no big surprise.

It seems to me this was a fairly obvious move. Nate Silver most likely wants to concentrate more on sports statistics. He probably wants to write more about sports than the New York Times wants him to. It's no stretch to assume that ESPN won't mind that.

Besides, to a first approximation, no one cares about political statistics outside of presidential election campaign years. Plenty of people care about sports statistics every year.