Predictions

No, Nate Silver’s Not ‘Predicting’ Who Will Win the Presidency

This hasn't been the best political year so far for pioneering data journalist Nate Silver. Partly because of the hype he earned in 2012 over the accuracy of his late projections, and partly because he shows up a lot of lazy and data-averse journalists all the time, Nate's taken a real pounding for underestimating, like virtually everybody else, Donald Trump's appeal. It could get worse for him if people keep misunderstanding what he is saying.

Today Nate's FiveThirtyEight site is releasing its first "projections" of the presidential general election. That's a regularly updated estimate of the odds of each candidate winning, mostly based on polling averages and state electoral histories. He set HRC's win probability at 79 percent, and Trump's at 20 percent, which seems reasonable at the moment.