@izzythepush,
He's claimed in the last week that this election isn't behaving to his modeling and that he will not be accurate. I honestly think there will be a blowout for Clinton. Trump will get a royal shellacking. A huge part of the early voters are people who hardly ever get on a poll.
My little Onion piece was about that guy, Nate Silver.
How Nate Silver Missed Donald Trump
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The election guru said Trump had no shot. Where did he go wrong?
By Leon Neyfakh
silver trump.
Polls whiz kid Nate Silver and presidential candidate Donald Trump.
Photo illustration by Slate. Images by Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images and Ethan Miller/Getty Images.
For the past six months, one big question has loomed over the 2016 election: Is the candidacy of Donald J. Trump an amusing bit of reality TV or a terrifying and dangerous challenge to the country’s political system? At first, Trump’s popularity was easy to dismiss. It was nothing more than a phase, the result of Trump’s celebrity status and his talent for provocation. His antics made it hard to look away, but it was easy to convince yourself that Trump mania would never lead to anything serious, like the Republican nomination.
Leon Neyfakh Leon Neyfakh
Leon Neyfakh is a Slate staff writer.
It was especially easy to come to that conclusion if you were reading FiveThirtyEight, the statistics-driven news website founded by Nate Silver. Since the beginning of Trump’s campaign last June, the election guru and his colleagues have been consistently bearish on Trump’s chances. Silver, who made his name by using cold hard math to call 49 out of 50 states in the 2008 general election and all 50 in 2012, has served as a reassuring voice in the midst of Trump’s shocking rise. For those of us who didn’t want to believe we lived in a country where Donald Trump could be president, Silver’s steady, level-headed certainty felt just as soothing as his unwavering confidence in Barack Obama’s triumph over Mitt Romney four years ago.
@iglvzx Did you read Nate Silver’s article regarding Trump and the polls? He brings a lot of sanity and perspective. tl;dr: Don’t worry.
— Jason @ #AnimeLA2016 (@yuusharo) November 26, 2015
Nate Silver says that, mathematically, Trump is just Sideshow Don, mathematically, so I’m not going to worry too much. Mathematically.
— RC (FoO) (@shadowbottle) December 11, 2015
If any of you are worried about a Trump presidency just read some of Nate Silver's stuff and you will see how unlikely it is
— Tribune of the Plebs (@Handsome_Jake_) August 19, 2015
What exactly has Silver been saying? In September, he told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that Trump had a roughly 5-percent chance of beating his GOP rivals. In November, he explained that Trump’s national following was about as negligible as the share of Americans who believe the Apollo moon landing was faked. On Twitter, he compared Trump to the band Nickelback, which he described as being “[d]isliked by most, super popular with a few.” In a post titled “Why Donald Trump Isn’t A Real Candidate, In One Chart,” Silver’s colleague Harry Enten wrote that Trump had a better chance of “playing in the NBA Finals” than winning the Republican nomination.
Multiple times over the past six months, Silver has reminded his readers that four years ago, daffy fly-by-nighters like Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann led the GOP field at various points. Trump’s poll numbers, he wrote, would drop just like theirs had. In one August post, “Donald Trump’s Six Stages of Doom,” Silver actually laid out a schedule for the candidate’s inevitable collapse.
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That collapse is running late. Here we are, a few days from the Iowa caucus, and Trump’s poll numbers haven’t gone down at all. The latest data suggest that he leads his closest rival, Ted Cruz, by about 5 points in Iowa and almost 20 points in New Hampshire. He has also recently become the top GOP contender according to the betting market Betfair. Meanwhile, members of the so-called GOP establishment, who previously expressed open contempt for Trump, now seem to be warming to him. On Jan. 16, the Washington Post quoted the former finance chairman for Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign saying there was a “growing feeling” among many in the GOP that Trump “may be the guy.” Bob Dole praised Trump in the New York Times as a dealmaker who has the “right personality” to do business with Congress. Orrin Hatch, the most senior Republican in the Senate, told CNN he was “coming around” on Trump.
It’s clear, now, that Silver and his fellow analysts at FiveThirtyEight underestimated Trump. Silver himself recently admitted as much, writing in a blog post published last week that he’d been too skeptical about Trump’s chances. “Things are lining up better for Trump than I would have imagined,” he wrote, adding that “
f, like me, you expected” the show to have been over by now, “you have to revisit your assumptions.”
Everyone makes mistakes—even Nate Silver. It’s also entirely possible that the Trump collapse is still to come and that as soon as we see the actual voting process play out, the hollowness of his popularity will reveal itself. Still, Silver is right that his assumptions are worth revisiting. Maybe the Trump phenomenon is so unprecedented that no statistical model could have foreseen it. Or maybe it took a candidate as unique as Donald Trump to reveal the flaws and limitations of Silver’s prediction machine.
* * *
To understand how Silver got Trump wrong, it helps to understand what exactly he was skeptical about, and why. A look at his campaign coverage reveals that two basic beliefs guided Silver’s thinking.
The first centered on the polls showing Trump miles ahead of his rivals. These polls have been plentiful, and they have been consistent. To pick two more or less at random, CNN showed Trump’s support in Iowa grow from 22 percent in August to 37 percent this past week. According to national polls conducted by CBS and the New York Times, he has gone from polling at 24 percent nationally in August to 36 percent earlier this month.
None of this has impressed Silver. No matter what the polls said, as he wrote on FiveThirtyEight week after week, it was important to remember they were fundamentally unreliable and not at all indicative of how primary voters would ultimately cast their ballots. This has always been true of pre-primary polls, Silver argued, in part because primary voters have historically waited until the last minute to decide whom to support and in part because the people answering questions from pollsters are not necessarily the ones who will end up actually voting.
Anything Silver says about polling carries weight. Polls are his bread and butter—the raw materials he filters through his proprietary model to predict the outcomes of elections. His expertise on which polls to ignore, which ones to trust, and how much to trust them is central to his political wisdom. The early national polls showing Trump in the lead, Silver wrote, were basically worthless. As he put it in a post titled “Donald Trump Is Winning The Polls—and Losing the Nomination,” they not only “lack empirical power to predict the nomination” but “describe a fiction.”
Silver thought that it was foolish of reporters and columnists to act like Trump’s numbers were significant. The fact that pundits insisted on investing them with so much importance proved they were motivated more by the demands of the news cycle than by a commitment to truth—a tendency Silver has always taken pride in avoiding.
Media: Trump's doing great! Nerds: No. Those polls don't mean what you think. Media: A new poll shows Trump doing great! Proved you wrong!
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) August 9, 2015
The problem, Silver believed, wasn’t just that the media legitimized polls that didn’t deserve people’s attention. It was worse than that: By talking about Trump’s poll numbers like they mattered, the media risked distorting future polls, thereby reinforcing the false narrative of Trump’s dominance. “Some voters may be coughing up Trump’s name in polls because he’s the only candidate they’ve been hearing about,” Silver wrote in December, noting that the media has given Trump’s campaign “more coverage than literally all the other Republicans combined.”
Rest of the article: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/01/nate_silver_said_donald_trump_had_no_shot_where_did_he_go_wrong.html
I'll find that other article I mentioned.
