alt Hacker NewsWhen pressed before the election, Silver did not explain where Trump's much higher probability of winning came from. He predicted a Trump loss, Trump won, and he claimed victory because he gave Trump a better chance of winning. There's no way that strategy could have failed.
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hungryhobbit • yesterday at 9:17 PM
Nate Silver is not a magician! He can't magically make polls reliable!
All he (or anyone) can do is interpret or analyse poll results, and then surface their findings in a way a larger audience can understand. 538 did that better than any other poll analyst ... but they all got it wrong because the polls themselves were faulty.
TLDR; You can't get water from a stone, and no one (not even Nate Silver) can get perfectly accurate predictions from (inherently flawed) polls!
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Silver claimed that his model was better because it predicted a high correlation between PA/MI/WI.
A model that predicts a 30% chance of winning the election will be wrong 1 out of 3 times, which is not quite a coin flip but close enough.