This is exactly why the 2016 election was interesting. Silver called it about 33% chance Trump would win. And then he did, and people said "AHA! You were WRONG!"
But he gave Trump a higher probability of winning than just about anyone, other than Trump himself. One of Silver's detractors, Sam Wang, even said it was so impossible Trump would win that he'd eat a bug if he got more than 240 electoral votes. (he chose a gourmet cricket https://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/sam-wang-poll-expert-...)
Nate and team do modeling well. Fat tails, correlated populations, and they deal with the crap datasets they get from pollsters. I always tune into his podcast when an election rolls around.
> This is exactly why the 2016 election was interesting. Silver called it about 33% chance Trump would win. And then he did, and people said "AHA! You were WRONG!"
What was funny about that one was he also got a bunch of "LOL no way you lunatic, he can't possibly have that large a chance and no-one else is saying so, so you're dumb, or maybe you're secretly a pro-Trump shill".
But he gave Trump a higher probability of winning than just about anyone, other than Trump himself. One of Silver's detractors, Sam Wang, even said it was so impossible Trump would win that he'd eat a bug if he got more than 240 electoral votes. (he chose a gourmet cricket https://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/sam-wang-poll-expert-...)