Hmm, here is his article from April 27: "It's Trump's Nomination to Lose"
Tuesday night went about as well as possible for Donald Trump.Nate was very skeptical about Trump before any voting started, like in the Aug 2015 article: Donald Trump's Six Stages of Doom".Two weeks ago, after a rough stretch of states for Trump, we issued a series of delegate projections that included something called a “path-to-1,237” projection, a set of targets that would allow Trump to clinch a delegate majority without having to rely on uncommitted delegates. With Trump’s terrific results in New York last week and even better ones in the five states that voted on Tuesday, Trump is running a little ahead of that path.
But I don't think he's a great soft analyst of elections. Guys like Barone and Pat Caddell have more of a feel for how races can run early on. Nate is a modeling/data guy, with no data he's just another New York jerk with an opinion.
And, most impressively, he did admit that he screwed up and wrote a whole column about it:
How I Acted Like A Pundit And Screwed Up On Donald Trump. I find that refreshing.
In it he gives his own stats: "We could emphasize that track record; the methods of data journalism have been highly successful at forecasting elections. That includes quite a bit of success this year. The FiveThirtyEight “polls-only” model has correctly predicted the winner in 52 of 57 (91 percent) primaries and caucuses so far in 2016, and our related “polls-plus” model has gone 51-for-57 (89 percent). Furthermore, the forecasts have been well-calibrated, meaning that upsets have occurred about as often as they’re supposed to but not more often.
That does not substantiate your "totally sucked" claim. 89% is damn good for prediction election outcomes. Shit, if you could get to that in Football you'd never work again!
So, yeah, he made some mistakes early on, but when it got to the actual job of forecasting elections based on polls a few weeks out he did really well. Again.
Of course, you are free to dislike him anyway.
Of course, you are free to dislike him anyway.
regarding the article cited on this thread, it is odd that that Silver’s foibles are being recounted; it would seem that those doing so would logically reject his perfectly reasonable premise that Hilary Clinton cannot simply lie low and tally up her votes from the ‘Blue Firewall’, and thus would be implying that said block of votes can indeed be wrapped up for her, like some electoral birthday present...
I was specifically (maybe not clearly) referring to the state by state predictions. Many times he predicted Hillary would win, but Bernie won in a landslide and many times he predicted Cruz would win but Trump did.
l looked for those states on his website, but (shock) all evidence has been erased.