Statistical analyst Nate Silver has posted a new entry in his FiveThirtyEight blog's new home at The New York Times, this time trying to figure out a way polls can better anticipate "shocking" results like Joe Miller leading the Alaska Republican Senate primary. He cites several factors that may have been overlooked in that race to make the pending result more surprising than it probably should have been. He's careful to note that there are limits to what we can learn from the race, though; there wasn't much polling going on in Alaska in the weeks leading up to Election Day. And it's not central to his analysis, but Silver notes that spending $500,000 on advertising in an Alaska primary election (which is about $60,000 shy of what the Tea Party Express spent on Miller's behalf) is equivalent on a per-voter basis to spending $8.5 million on such a race in California. Read much more, here.