On Media Blog Archives Select Date… December, 2015 November, 2015 October, 2015 September, 2015 August, 2015 July, 2015 June, 2015 May, 2015 April, 2015 March, 2015 February, 2015 January, 2015

Nate Silver. | AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh A measure of vindication for Nate Silver

Though none of the major pollsters and data journalism types predicted Trump’s shocking victory, FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver was closer than most.

In the last week of the campaign, Silver was harshly criticized by many liberals for predicting that Trump had a roughly 1-in-3 shot of winning the presidential election, even as other poll aggregators predicted that Clinton had a lock on the presidency. On Tuesday, The New York Times’ Upshot gave Clinton an 84 percent chance of winning and the Huffington Post’s Pollster gave Clinton a 98.2 percent chance of winning.

On Nov. 5, Huffington Post Washington bureau chief Ryan Grim published a blog post accusing Silver of “putting his thumb on the scales” by adjusting poll results in a way that gave Trump a better shot of winning.

As the election returns rolled in on Tuesday night, Silver felt some schadenfreude.

“This doesn't seem like an election in which one candidate had a 99% chance of winning [to be honest],” he tweeted just after 9 p.m. , once it became clear that Trump could win.

And Grim later admitted defeat.

“Yes,” he tweeted . “You were right that there was far more uncertainty than we were accounting for. I apologize. Gonna stick to punditry.”