Silver has such an army of fanboys that it’s impossible to even remotely criticize 538 without getting downvoted into oblivion. It’s a weird sort of fanatical s

Silver has such an army of fanboys that it’s impossible to even remotely criticize 538 without getting downvoted into oblivion. It’s a weird sort of fanatical statistical religious belief. The fact of the matter is that election polling is not really accurate anymore. People are afraid to publicly admit their support of a certain candidate, even in a supposedly anonymous phone call. Considering that people have been doxxed online for this, I really don’t blame them for being skeptical and private. That’s not even mentioning the social aspects of the media. Even if Trump were ahead in all the polls, do you think Silver and other journalist-statisticians would report it as such? I doubt it. Pundits seems to consistently miss larger geopolitical trends, like Brexit, offshoring of jobs to east Asia, rise of right wing parties in Europe and India, and so on. These qualitative trends will end up being far more influential than a collection of polls.