HOW I GOT NATE SILVER TO TURN THE 2016 ELECTION FOR TRUMP

(Based on my public Facebook posts from Oct 21, 2021)

I am going to make a preposterous claim: I, a nobody like yourself, wrote something on a public forum that caused the most consequential election of our lives, the 2016 election, to flip for Donald Trump.

(2016 is the most consequential election because it made Trump's 2024 win, and everything that is about to follow, possible.)

This crazy claim may seem less crazy if we break it into two parts: 1) one man, unfamiliar to most people but with an enormous influence on the election, did something which, had it not been done, would have caused Hillary to win by default, and 2) he did it because I had written in a small public forum, owned and read by that man and the handful of his staff, a particular argument concerning his and his small firm's future, which caused him to change course and inadvertently and unwillingly deprive Hillary of her victory.

If what I claim is true, it is important for two reasons: 1) the charlatanism that is polling as a means to influence elections must be destroyed, and 2) it shows that we have achieved genuine, unfettered two-way mass communication.

What I am going to do in the pages below is present you with evidence that the first part of the claim is true: Nate Silver, then of FiveThirtyEight, caused Hillary to lose by erasing her artificially created advantage. I promise you that it will be the best explanation you have heard why Hillary Clinton lost. 

I will also present to you the reasoning for the second part -- that I am to "blame" for Nate's actions -- but I cannot prove it to you beyond reasonable doubt; only Nate could. Of course, I could not have known at the time what the outcome of my writing would be. But I sensed that there was an enormous power at where I was hitting, and that the opportunity to reach a small circle of people behind it was its weak spot, an exhaust port to this Death Star of public opinion manipulation, so I delivered my payload and hoped for the best.

Once you accept that a single person outside of the regular centers of power could decide the election, even if in only one direction, it may be a lot easier to accept than someone else, no matter how obscure, could have influenced that person and thus the election.

Broken down in more detail, the first part of my claim, and we'll revisit the second part later, is this: Nate Silver, a liberal election forecasting prodigy who correctly guessed all 50 states in 2012 which made him the most prominent forecaster of the news media in 2016, his forecasts being featured just on MSBNC as often as 15 times a day in the peak election season, flipped the election for Trump by "hand-weighting" all the polls in Trump's favor in the final weeks of the election, demotivating reluctant Clinton voters into staying home and encouraging reluctant Trump voters into going to the polls, with 1% of all Hillary voters flipped into staying home and 1% of all Trump voters flipped into going to the polls being enough to give Trump the 80,000 votes in PA, MI and WI he needed to win the election.

The evidence and the presentation that follows is by necessity long, because the topic is complex, but all you need to follow it is a bit of math and the general everyday understanding of people and their hopes and fears. I believe you will also find it interesting, if for no other reason than by virtue of it having lead to the most significant reshaping of America and the world in modern history that is about to take place as the consequence of Trump's 2024 win.

(When I first published this on FB in October of 2021, people asked me why dredge up unpleasant memories of something that had long passed. Trump had been defeated, humiliated, deplatformed, stripped of virtually everything and likely to be thrown in prison. It was clear he was finished, forever.)

We'll start with a graph, Nate Silver's (538's) historical forecast vs. NYT's historical forecast for 2016, that we will return to at the end.



#1/3: The Panic

Two days before the election, the lead HuffPo pollster -- who gave Clinton 98% chance of winning -- accuses Silver that he has been fudging the data. He goes on to say,

"There is one outlier, however, that is causing waves of panic among Democrats around the country, and injecting Trump backers with the hope that their guy might pull this thing off after all. Nate Silver’s 538 model is giving Donald Trump a heart-stopping 35 percent chance of winning as of this weekend."

As to how Nate's doing it: 

"The short version is that Silver is changing the results of polls to fit where he thinks the polls truly are, rather than simply entering the poll numbers into his model and crunching them."

Where Nate THINKS the polls truly are. A subjective call if there ever was one. And an uncharacteristic one for him too.

"By monkeying around with the numbers like this, Silver is making a mockery of the very forecasting industry that he popularized."

Note that this HuffPo propagandist is still being honest -- waves of panic, injecting hope -- saying exactly what I say. In panic, people do not fight, they flee. When injected with hope they run towards the battle. The very fact that he found it NECESSARY to write this article betrays his deepest concerns. If it really had been about science, it would have been more like, interesting, let's see whose model works better. As it was, he tried to limit the damage from Nate's deflection and to pep talk his fellow Democrats: "If you want to put your faith in the numbers, you can relax. She’s got this."

Famous last words.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/nate-silver-election-forecast_n_581e1c33e4b0d9ce6fbc6f7f



Comment #1: 

Now if you are doubting for one second that Nate Silver wasn't aware of the danger of what he was doing, read below. Why would Silver *rage* at his accuser? Where did such explosive emotion come from? A disagreement about math would remain civil, and Nate himself would stay calm: I'm the wiz here, wait and see bro. But Nate raged because the gist of the accusation was that Nate -- a leftist, though closer to the center -- was helping Trump. 

"And that, apparently, enraged Silver, whose track record of correctly predicting elections -- and explaining how he does it in painstaking, but accessible detail -- has made him a celebrity whose very name is synonymous with the art of data-driven prognostication, and whose model is widely considered the gold standard in election forecasting."

Now Nate is being torn by two opposing forces: to please his side and to keep his brand. If he keeps skewing his polls, he keeps helping Trump by depressing Clinton's voters and encouraging Trump's. If he doesn't and he keeps giving Trump a low chance but Trump wins anyway, his brand is dead. People will rage at him -- for misleading them, for making them complacent, for proving "science" worthless; he would turn to be their false prophet and he would pay the price.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't. So Nate did. But what, or who, gave him the encouragement? Read on.

Comment #2: 

And then you have this gem from the far left Daily Kos, how they tried to keep the troops from demoralizing. 99%+ likely to win!

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/11/6/1592120/-Five-Reasons-Nate-Silver-is-Wrong-Sam-Wang-is-Right-Hillary-Is-99-Likely-to-Win


 

 

#2/3: The Science

We are all suckers for science, or whatever masquerades as it, so to further make my case I present you research that claims Nate Silver "entirely possibly" flipped the election.

But first we must understand that Nate's power, which he loathed to exercise, was only to UNDO what the pollster propaganda had done to inflate Clinton's chances. Had Silver gotten out of the prognostication game, or had he stuck to his pre-flip guns, it is very likely Hillary would have won. 2020, where they didn't waver in their bogus predictions (Nate had 85-15 Biden, The Economist had Biden at 95-5 and so on, when in reality it was 50-50), is one indirect confirmation. 

Pushing media propaganda from either side (though most heavily on the left) doesn't work, in this day and age. If you only watch CNN and don't bother to make one click to check out Fox, you're going to vote Clinton no matter what, and vice versa. But "science" propaganda does work: we are conditioned to hear claims like "92% chances of such and such" and believe it is true, even in social sciences where such claims are often as bullshit as it gets. So when "scientists" say Clinton's chances are 98%, it sounds like a done deal.

Without further ado:

“We cannot say with certainty,” Sean Westwood, one of the authors, said in an email. “But given how close the election was in some states, it is entirely possible that forecasts could have flipped the election in favor of Trump.”

While they got the outcome right, what these academics got entirely wrong is the process. People are not simpletons, the perfectly rational robots: "Oh, Hillary's chances are 98%, I can relax, I don't have to do anything". Or, "Hey, Trump's chances are only 2%, I must go to the polls to increase his chances." 

THAT IS NOT HOW PEOPLE BEHAVE.

We think, "Good, Hillary's chances have been steady at 95%, I don't like her much but it could still be close and that idiot must be stopped, let's go finish him off." And, "Oh man, Trump's chances are only 5%, why bother, there's no stopping them from shoving her down our throats, and maybe it's for the better, he is kinda crazy anyway." At least that's how people who wavered in their choice think. (I didn't: I firmly believed the polls and the forecasts were wrong, and at the same time I had doubts that I was deluded but I ignored them.) As you'll see below, Trump himself said exactly that, what low chances from fake polls do to enthusiasm.

But what happens when the forecast MOVES? Nassim Taleb says academics have a blind spot for things that move. And that is what happened here. If you look at the graph in the comment for part #1, you will see that the NYT and others kept their forecasts more or less steady, but the incline for Trump in Nate Silver's was nothing short of dramatic: from 15% to 35% in the span of two weeks right before November. Coming from Nate, the best of them all, the genius of 2012 who got every single state right, it was clear in our mind that the move was real. There was no arguing with "science."

Human beings are wired to react to change far more than to static states (it's not hard to see why: survival). This is why Nate's HuffPo accuser said Nate's forecast, that was always quoted in all the news, liberal and conservative, was "causing waves of panic among Democrats" and "injecting Trump's voters with the hope their guy can pull it off after all."

Panic and depression of sorts go hand in hand -- they lead to inaction, disengaging, pulling away. Hope has the opposite effect: it gives you strength beyond reason. Hillary's reluctant voters loathed "holding their nose" as they often said and voting for Clinton only to be DOUBLE punished when Trump wins, so they skipped the pain altogether; Trump's realized they were neither alone nor crazy, and anxiously but hopefully pushed forward. The Clintonites abandoned their defense, and the Trumpsters breached the wall.

One out of every hundred. One million souls, half of them discouraged, half of them encouraged, changed history. Because one man decided to put the polls where he THOUGHT they should be.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/02/study-fivethirtyeight-2016-voter-turnout-decrease-election-forecasts.html


Comment #1: 
 
Let's get the math straight. Often parroted was an incredibly superficial claim that the election was decided by 0.07% of votes which make for the 80,000 deciding votes in PA, MI, WI. Even if that changes anything... try going door to door and convince even one of the 80,000 to vote differently!

But things do happen at large scale that convince a large number of people to vote or not.

In order to flip those 80,000 votes for Trump -- to have extra 40,000 Clinton voters stay home and extra 40,000 + 1 Trump voters come to the polls -- you would need to flip roughly 800,000 Trump and Clinton voters in the whole country.

(Flip refers exclusively to abstinence flipping. No one changed their mind from Clinton to Trump or vice versa.)

Why 800,000? Those three states had a total of 12.2M people voting for either Trump or Clinton, and nation wide a total of 128M people voted for Trump or Clinton. 128M total vs. 12.2M for PA, MI, WI is roughly 10x, so if you flip 800,000 voters in the population of 128M, you'll flip 80,000 voters in the population of 12M which is the combined MI + WI + PA Trump/Clinton voting body.

So if Silver's last minute panicked adjustment flipped 0.8M of 128M, he changed the election. That comes down to about one person for every 160. We'll never know for sure, but I believe Nate's influence was stronger than that; had he not wavered, Clinton would likely have had a sure victory. 

Comment #2: 
 
"They also found that FiveThirtyEight in particular really did appear to have a strong influence on voters’ behavior."

"The worst perpetrator of this, according to the paper, was MSNBC, which referenced FiveThirtyEight and other forecasts 16 times a day during one part of the campaign."
 

Comment #3:
 
They give another example of the magnitude of Nate Silver's influence:

'During the 2018 midterm elections, there was a brief error that emerged in FiveThirtyEight’s algorithm that caused a spike in their forecasts, suggesting the Republicans had a good chance to win the House. When that happened, the U.S. bond market also spiked. “We’re not talking about a bunch of political wonks,” Messing said.'
 

Comment #4: 

You can intuitively grasp that what I'm saying is true if you just imagine the opposite: had Nate stuck with a Clinton 90% or 95% or even 99% chance throughout without wavering, with MSNBC and CNN gloating and waves of panic among Democrats never happening and Trump backers denied hope, fewer votes still would have been cast for Clinton and Trump would have won even more, is how their reasoning goes.

You know that is simply impossible. And 2020, when all the left forecasters did exactly that, proved things do not work that way.

The answer to the 2016 election whodunit is: Nate Silver, of his own free will. He singlehandedly collapsed the left's prognosticating house of cards propaganda that was built on a lie, on misleading polls.

But first, Nate needed to be told what deep down he already knew.


#3/3: The Nudge

This is *long* but I promise it will be worth your time. It was, after all, the most dramatic and the most mysterious election in history, and I bet you you'll find more satisfying answers here than anywhere else.

Before we jump into the story of how I -- possibly? probably? -- helped Nate Silver change his mind, we'll first look at why it must have been Nate who changed the voters' minds, at least of the 1% who flipped the outcome. Once you realize it was ONE MAN who turned the outcome, you'll see that one person -- me -- influencing the behavior of another -- Silver -- to such a dramatic end is entirely in the realm of the possible.

As before, I'll refrain from passing judgement: this is an analysis based on the known data and on our shared understanding of people.

* * *

When we ask who is responsible for Trump's victory, we mean which person or a small group of people exerted undue influence and tipped the scales. Nebulous answers like "misogyny" have been offered by some (including Clinton) which means nothing, even if true -- misogyny is an impersonal force, already present and slow to change. What we are looking for is whodunit.

Here are the possibilities:

1. No one: everything happened on a large scale and no single person or organization was able to tip the scales, apart from obviously Trump and Clinton. This is plausible but unlikely, because we know many individuals were extremely interested in directing the outcome -- the whole planet, really -- so for no one to have managed to do so implies a very stable system. A very stable system would have manifested itself with very little uncertainty: the polls would have been stable and largely correct and the outcome predictable. To even simply say that it wasn't the case is an understatement of the century.

2. Comey: see the first comment to the post. There was never a mechanism offered as to HOW would Comey's letter have swayed anyone. (The simple test is, did it sway you in any way, or anyone you know? I've yet to hear of such a person.) Comey may have helped some by making it more acceptable to oppose Clinton in public, but even with his letter, if you said you were to vote Trump, scores of angry left called you a "fascist". 

3. The forecasters, by inflating Clinton's chances and making her voters stay home. See parts #2 and #3; countering this claim is simply the fact that Nate Silver the superstar who in 2012 predicted every state correctly gave Clinton much lower chances towards the end, and, had he given her 90%+ like everyone else instead, by that logic Trump would have won in a landslide, which intuitively doesn't make sense at all (and 2020 disproves it completely).

4. Julian Assange. He certainly did help, by providing evidence of Clinton's duplicity, and deflecting somewhat from the false outrage over the Access Hollywood tape. But the exposed duplicity (e.g. in her bank speech) was fairly common for a politician of her stature, and the leaked emails did not offer anything people didn't already know or suspect. The Clinton team themselves downplayed it by saying the emails only revealed their casserole recipe.

5. Putin, commanding a team that spread conspiracy theories. This is itself a conspiracy theory. A sure sign it is wrong is that The New Yorker, the biggest idiots among intellectuals, published an article titled "How Russia Helped Swing the Election for Trump". Even WaPo wrote "The Russians didn’t swing the 2016 election to Trump. But Fox News might have."

6. Fox News, the station the left would love to shut down. I don't even buy that CNN would have swung the election for Clinton, let alone that Fox did it for Trump, being the lone (reluctantly) pro-Trump network in the sea of rabid anti-Trump propaganda. In this day and age when the opposing view is one click away, media propaganda doesn't make much difference. If you only watch Fox, you'll vote against Clinton no matter what. And likewise, people didn't hate Trump because they watched CNN; they watched CNN because they hated Trump.

7. Nate Silver and FiveThirtyEight, who, as his HuffPo accuser put it in the finial days of the election, was "causing waves of panic among Democrats and injecting Trump backers with hope that their guy might pull it off after all", demoralizing "hold-my-nose-and-vote" Clinton voters into staying home and emboldening reluctant Trump voters into coming to the polls after all.

As Sherlock Holmes says, when you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

* * *

The fated party took place one evening in June of 2016. Nice people all but they went to the same gym and they spent a lot of time talking about their workout routines. Feeling out of place, after a while I retreated to the house to check out the host's library. She's a liberal but free-spirited Jewish lady (who would later get in trouble with the Woke at the university who accused her of racism). Our interests overlapping some and her library being rather large I found a few interesting titles.

One book in particular drew my attention: "The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail - but Some Don't" by one Nate Silver. I remembered the name from the news and I started reading the first chapter. After an hour or so while much of the party was still outside I more or less skimmed the whole book.

A few days later, the book still fresh in my mind, I went to Nate's site, fivethirtyeight.com. I was surprised to see how low profile it was given that it was so often quoted on top news. Just a handful of staff, and about a dozen comments, each with between zero and maybe 20 replies. I figured the general public was not interested as the articles were full of dry graphs and drier math. 

Unsurprisingly, almost all the commenters were on the left; the site uses the Facebook Comment plugin so you have to comment with your real name. And who dared publicly support Trump in June of 2016? Me neither, so I wrote from a fake account, Clifford Banes. (That's The Onion anchor who is never at his desk.) A couple of my measured and balanced comments were mostly met with disbelief that anyone would even give Trump or his chances the benefit of the doubt. You do remember how it was, don't you?

At the time, 538 was singing the same tune regarding Trump's chances as everyone else, all based on the same polls. I knew the polls couldn't be true, simply because to support Trump at that time was almost criminal. The idea of every shy Trump supporter, whose loud Democrat coworkers and bosses would condemn any idea of supporting Trump, telling a stranger who got his phone number somehow openly that he would vote for Trump seemed preposterous.

* * *

And so sometime in July, as the leftist propaganda and threats were intensifying and polls for Trump were getting worse and worse, I commented on 538 on Nate's article forecasting Trump's poorer and poorer chances.

I wrote, "Nate is playing the game of small upsides and huge downsides. If Hillary wins, the public will say of course, there's nothing special about 538, everyone said she was going to win. But if Trump wins, they will forget everyone else and will focus on Nate alone, asking how he could be so wrong and thirsting for his blood. By failing to scrutinize the data he inputs to his model, he risks losing his reputation, his business and his brand."

A few people came to his defense in replies, saying effectively that Nate isn't a bad scientist because he doesn't fudge the data. I said "Bad scientists don't fudge their data; fraud scientists do. Bad scientists merely ignore their hunch that their data may not be valid, that they haven't done the due diligence, and are going with it anyway so they get the results they hope to see."

And then I added, "I read Nate's book. It was well written and it was clear he has a passion for the science of probability and that he loves to teach. If the polls turned out to be bad and Trump wins, the casualty won't be just Nate's business but also the science he practices and the public faith in that science." (In truth, I skimmed the book rather then read it, but the rest was true.)

And that's it. That was the last major comment I wrote on 538, and it got some discussion going as it was one of the early comments, with one or two people reluctantly agreeing and most others angrily dismissing the idea. In the following weeks I posted a rare comment here and there along those lines, until one day Clifford Banes was no more -- someone reported to Facebook it was a fake account and they closed it.

* * *

Now, I don't know that Nate ever saw my comment. He and his staff never engage. But it is very unlikely they don't read the comments: after all, this is not just their bread and butter but it's the election of their lifetimes. Pundits and statisticians, which is what 538 staff are, wanted to know about every trend and every reasoning that might bring Trump farther from -- or, Heavens forbid, closer to -- his goals, and all of us want to know what people say about our work.

It is reasonably likely that the staff read the comment, and that they engaged in a similar discussion as those who replied to it. (Commenters on 538 are generally well educated and liberal, the "rabble" stays away from the site.) 

More importantly, the point I raised seemed valid and I had not seen anyone else bring it up. I applied reasoning I learned from Nassim Taleb; later I would find out that that crowd generally doesn't like Taleb so that kind of argument may have been novel to them. But Taleb thinks clearly, and a smart person doesn't fail to notice.

So I conclude it is likely the staff read it and discussed it; it reminded them their livelihoods were at stake after all. And if Nate didn't read it himself, he was very likely to have been told about it by the staff. Their livelihoods, again -- and his -- were at stake.

I can never prove that Nate was swayed by my argument. But if he read it, or heard it, which as I say seems likely, what I am sure must have gotten him to pause and reflect was my mentioning of his book. It was not a well known book, and to see that the argument was made by someone who had read it and appreciated it (again, the former half true, the latter true) must have felt personal; it probably rattled him a bit, along with the remark as to what a Trump victory against the odds would do for the faith in statistical sciences.

Whatever the reason, some weeks later, Nate and Nate alone, of all forecasters, started re-weighting the polls, less at first but considerably towards the end. Maybe it's the right thing to do and he would have done it anyway and no one else did it. If so, it raises the question why he hadn't done it from the beginning. And to top if off, it surely raised a lot of emotions, those accusing Nate that he was wrong, and Nate furiously defending himself. Strong emotions come with strong doubt and great uncertainty.

In the end, what is important is that Nate caused "waves of panic among Democrats" and "injected Trump voters with the hope their guy might pull it off." The polls, now we know, were bad, but based on basic human psychology, I have all the reasons to believe that Nates' reversal, perhaps stemming from his desire to be a good scientist reversed the outcome: thanks to him, the 1% that decided, decided differently.


Comment #1:
 
Nate speculates it was Comey's letter that did it. But he never says why; he naively -- or rather, pretend naively, I am sure he harbors these doubts too -- assumes if Clitnon polls sink after Comey letter, the letter caused them to sink. Yet would it not be that people felt emboldened to express their support for Trump if the FBI head says Hillary is bad? Nate both treats polls as the source of truth AND reweighs them because he says they are not! And we know they are not -- the pussy grabbing tape made it impossible for anyone who cares what people think of him to say he still supports Trump, even though that was exactly what happened: they supported him nonetheless.

If you think Comey's letter is to blame for Clinton's loss, ask yourself: did it sway YOU in any way whatsoever? Do you know ANYONE who was swayed by the Comey letter?

Yeah I don't either.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-comey-letter-probably-cost-clinton-the-election/  

 

 

Comment #2:

An oft-cited (fwiw) 1984 research titled "The Impact of Polls on Public Opinion" confirms what we all know:

"Feeling that there is little support for one's viewpoint can discourage and even intimidate the advocates of a minority viewpoint, keeping that issue from being raised. Here polls can either act as a corrective or put a damper on discussion, making the minority view appear even less popular than it actually is."

The latter is exactly what happened in 2016. The great deceit that the institutions on the left almost pulled off, only thwarted by Nate Silver, was that a clear minority, the worst of the society, were to vote for Trump.

When you believe that the candidate you like has 2% chance of winning, the natural tendency is not to go to the polls to increase his chances as the bizarrely superficial logic suggests. To cast your vote for a candidate who you expect to be thoroughly defeated hurts; you'd hope for at least a good fight. A rational choice is actually to stay home and avoid the almost certain pain.

But as we know now, the 2% was a lie, and Nate Silver alone unmasked that lie (maybe or maybe not with a nudge from yours truly) and lifted the spirits of the millions of reluctant Trump supporters in the days leading to the battle, to ultimately allow the 1% to flip the outcome and change history.


Comment #3:

I believe there is one more factor that must have given my nudge to Silver an extra strength: deep down Nate wanted to be *liked* by Trump.

You can see it in this very interesting bit of human comedy and drama that took place in September of 2020. In the first four minutes of the video podcast, Nate Silver reacts to the clip of Trump mentioning Nate at the Nevada rally. Trump pretends he doesn't know who Silver is, calls his site "346" and says he gave us what like 2%. Nate appears slightly hurt, saying Mister President -- most on the left just called him Trump -- Mister President we gave you 29%, higher than anyone else; we gave you the same chance as your own internal team did.

Of course Trump knew exactly who Nate was and what he did (moments later he says "he gave us what, like, 9%"). It was a planned attack on the credibility of prognosticators because Trump knew they are the left's best propaganda weapon.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/videos/why-some-latino-voters-are-backing-trump/ 


Comment #4:

Here is the transcript. Trump is well aware who Silver is and how polls are used: to demoralize his supporters.

Donald Trump: (29:47)

I’ll tell you here, because you don’t read about that stuff. They don’t like to write that. They don’t like to write it. They have all fake polls. I’ll tell you what, the polls are worse than the writing. Actually, in my opinion, the polls, they’re suppression polls, they’re meant to make people discouraged, Even me, I’m supposed to be discouraged. And fortunately, four years ago, we weren’t discouraged, because if we would have believed the polls, nobody would have voted.

Donald Trump: (30:14)

The concept is really make people feel so that on election, they go, “Darling, let’s go out to dinner. It’s so sad about the president. I wish he was going to win, but let’s go out to dinner. Then we’ll come home. Let’s not bother voting, right? Let’s not bother voting.” See, it’s a suppression, but my people might don’t get suppressed. My people go out and vote.

Donald Trump: (30:35)

My people go out and vote. There’s no suppression. Phony polls. How about the guy? The New York times hired this pollster, this great genius. He never called one wrong. I don’t know. Three, 46.. I don’t know what the hell … It’s called three 40 … What’s his deal?

Speaker 1: (30:51)

Silver.

Donald Trump: (30:52)

Yeah. It’s Silver, Silver, Nate Silver. They pay him a fortune. He said, I think he gave us a 2% chance, A 3% chance, “Donald Trump has a 3% chance today of winning.” The damn thing was over by 10:00.

Donald Trump: (31:11)

We were given a very tiny chance. What chance did he give us? Like 9%, something like that. You know, they gave him millions of dollars shortly before, because he never called one wrong. He called that one wrong. He called that one wrong. And this is the one … I mean, I must tell you they’re a little more accurate. At least here they have us even in a lot of places. ” He’s even.” Well, we’re not even, we’re not even.

https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/donald-trump-minden-nevada-rally-speech-transcript-september-12


There is one person whose political instincts cannot be denied, who agrees with me on the effect the fake polls have on people: Trump. And not just in 2020: he said this about the infamous Iowa poll that was off by SIXTEEN POINTS in Kamala's favor, which NYT pushed just three days before the  2024 election:

'A totally Fake poll that caused great distrust and uncertainty at a very critical time. She knew exactly what she was doing.'

'Thank you to the GREAT PEOPLE OF IOWA for giving me such a record breaking vote, despite possible ELECTION FRAUD by Ann Selzer and the now discredited “newspaper” for which she works. An investigation is fully called for!' "

That fake polling is the only kind of propaganda Trump calls for criminally investigating shows he understands well that those polls do.

If you read this far, thanks and hope you enjoyed. As a bonus here is an illustration why statistical forecasting of elections is meaningless at best and fraudulent at worst.


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