Nate Silver says conventional wisdom, not data, killed 2016 election forecasts
Democrats and Republicans in recent years haven’t seemed to be able to agree on the time of day, but there is one assertion on which they’ve found common ground: Polling and data analytics took a spectacular face-plant in the 2016 election. On Election Day, nearly every public polling firm predicted that Hillary Clinton would win the presidency. The only real debate was by how large a margin. Even leading statistical analysis site FiveThirtyEight.com gave Donald Trump a less than 1 in 3 chance of winning. So when he surged to victory with 306 Electoral College votes, stunned political pundits blamed pollsters and forecasters, proclaiming “the death of data.” But statistician Nate Silver, the founder and editor in chief of FiveThirtyEight.com, says it wasn’t data analytics that failed, but the major media outlets that didn’t properly understand probability and instead leaned on shopworn conventional wisdom. Silver helped popularize the application of statistical analysis...