The election result landslide that went mostly-unpredicted has political guessers fighting.
Allan Lichtman, a famed election forecaster and historian who predicted a Harris win, made an X post conceding to his wrong guess-- but not without a swipe at Nate Silver, another election forecaster.
Silver, a statistician who builds his predictions on polling and other data points like voter turnout, pulled his prediction model at around 10:30 p.m. on Tuesday, citing that it wasn’t “capturing the story of this election night well.”
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American University professor Lichtman has predicted almost every presidential race since 1984, and bases his result on a formula of 13 true-or-false questions. The last time Lichtman was wrong was in 2000, in the presidential race between George W. Bush and Al Gore. Now he’s adding another wrong prediction to that list.
In an X post after the election results showed a Trump win, Lichtman admitted that he was wrong—and wouldn’t be like Silver, the FiveThirtyEight founder.
Silver’s model predicted an incredibly close race. He, and wrote an opinion piece in The New York Times at the end of October saying his gut is predicting a Trump win.
“But I don’t think you should put any value whatsoever on anyone’s gut—including mine,“ Silver wrote. ”Instead, you should resign yourself to the fact that a 50-50 forecast really does mean 50-50.”
This isn‘t the first time the two have feuded. In September, Lichtman posted that Silver “doesn’t know how to turn the keys.”
“He’s not a historian or a political scientist. He has no academic credentials. He was wrong when he said I could not make an early prediction of Obama‘s re-election. He’ll be wrong again in trying to analyze the keys,” Lichtman wrote.
The next day, Silver posted that the professor was “comedically overconfident.”
“Lichtman is comically overconfident and doesn’t own up to the subjectivities in his method,” Silver posted. “But you’ll legit learn a lot about presidential elections by reading his work, and he’s at least putting himself out there making testable predictions.
Silver stayed off of X for a majority of Election Night, but posted on the Silver Bulletin that he felt like Trump was going to win.
“That article I wrote for The New York Times was misinterpreted as my secret ‘prediction’ for Trump,” Silver wrote. ”As much as I’d like to take credit for it, it wasn’t. The whole point, right there in the headline, was that I didn’t trust anyone’s gut when it comes to presidential elections."
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