How Nate Silver Missed Donald Trump

[fleur-de-lisa]

The election guru said Trump had no shot. Where did he go wrong? By Leon Neyfakh

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

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.

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.”

more at link . . .

[Kip Humphrey]

1. Nate, smell the anger: this is a change election.

and you are getting it wrong!

[Xolodno]

2. Hell....

....I thought "Jeb!" would be surging back up in the polls by now to be the eventual nominee.

Now...I'm thinking Trump may actually just take this.

Of course, if he is the nominee, a box of rocks could beat in the general election. But if he did win his ticket to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.......told the wife I would dust off the Resume and start looking at possibilities of work abroad.

[Cleita]

3. I missed it too.

I really thought that Koch bros darling Scott Walker would be the nominee. I really didn't see him being discredited so early and crashing so loudly like he did. However, there still could be a brokered convention and who knows who the PTB will install as their candidate. I'm certain they will do every dirty trick in the book to derail Trump.