How Nate Silver Failed To Predict Trump [View all]

[Jefferson23]

The political world’s go-to numbers guy now predicts a series of likely wins for the Republican front-runner.

by Tina Nguyen

If you want to understand how the entire American political establishment failed to predict the hugely successful candidacy of Donald Trump, look no further than the existential bafflement gripping Nate Silver, the election-predictions prophet who, after insisting for months that Trump had no shot at the nomination, is now close to accepting the reality that the billionaire real-estate developer could become the Republican presidential nominee.

Silver, a statistician by trade, gained a sterling reputation in the 2008 and 2012 election cycles by predicting the exact outcome of the presidential elections, nailing every state's electoral college vote in 2012. So it was natural when the wonks of the world accepted his premise last year that Trump was a fad and that Hillary Clinton would coast to the nomination. “Dear Media, Please Stop Freaking Out About Donald Trump’s Polls,” blared one Silver headline as late as November 23.

While Silver admitted in August that he and his FiveThirtyEight team were “going to make plenty of bad predictions over the course of the 2016 campaign,” it was easy to assume that those “bad predictions” would be due to the normal series of poll-dingers: steamy scandals, gaffes and blunders, and flagging fundraising. Yet here we are on the first caucus of the election, and Trump is poised to win not only Iowa, but nearly all the primaries leading up to the nomination.

In the past few days, Silver has published a long article parsing several theories as to why Trump has continued to have staying power and, in a telling move, conceded that perhaps his initial working premise, adapted from the book The Party Decides, is flawed. The 2008 book had become the go-to tome for analysts headed into 2016, in part because of its intuitively simple premise: that the political “establishment,” i.e., a group of ideologically aligned influencers such as politicians, celebrities, and donors, hold the authority to direct Americans to vote for one party and to further their own personal interests. “The book does presume that, in part because of their breadth and diversity, American political parties are strong institutions,” he wrote. “Furthermore, it assumes that strong, highly functional parties are able to make presidential nominations that further the party’s best interest.”

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/02/donald-trump-iowa-nate-silver