How Will We Know if Nate Silver Was Right?
If you think these disagreements must take place in the neutral emotional tone of an algebra textbook, you don’t know math people. We can be feisty. On Sunday, Ryan Grim of the Huffington Post accused Nate Silver of jiggering his estimates to make the race look closer, all the better to harvest the clicks of worried Democrats and hopeful Trumpists. He even called Silver a “pundit”—the worst insult imaginable in these quanty circles. The usually mild-mannered Silver returned fire:
He also called it “not defensible” to see Clinton as a 99 percent favorite, as Sam Wang does.
Who will turn out to be right, Nate Silver or his critics? That’s where things get sticky. Silver, after all, is telling us that Clinton might win and Trump might win. Can he even be wrong?