Why Presidential Elections Aren’t Really About the Candidates

Political pundits have had some explaining to do since the Presidential election. FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver and other analysts have come under fire for assigning a high likelihood to Hillary Clinton’s victory—their predictions ranged from a 70 percent to 99 percent chance of her winning the Electoral College. Clinton’s loss prompted people to question the trustworthiness of polling data—and the statistical models that relied so heavily on it.

But to do so is at least a little bit naïve, says Andrew Gelman, a statistician and political scientist at Columbia University. “The polls were off by two percentage points,” Gelman says. Trump was expected to win roughly 48 percent of the two-party