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As the initial shock of last week’s election slowly begins to wear off, many of us are left wondering how, despite polls predicting a Hillary Clinton victory, Donald Trump won the 2016 Presidential Race. During last night’s episode of The Daily Show, Trevor Noah attempted to pry some answers from noted statistician and the Editor-in-Chief of FiveThirtyEight Nate Silver, whose website had been forecasting a Hillary Clinton win for months.
While the complexities of polling and the overall intricacies of this nation’s current political climate are too vast for a nine minute conversation, Noah gamely attempted to unearth answers and bring a little levity to a complicated situation.
“As Nate Silver, you’re not a pollster per se; you aggregate the polls, and you try to figure out what they mean. This entire race you were wrong,” Noah quite bluntly said to Silver.
“Everyone could see that Hillary Clinton was ahead in the polls. Because she was, right?” Silver responded. “Our job is to take that data and translate that into an estimate of risk.”
Noah then questioned the validity of the polls and polling in general as he posited that the skewed figures could perhaps be because people were ashamed to admit that they were voting for Donald Trump. Silver didn’t accept that as fact asserting that the unexpected results were potentially the result of a higher turnout of Republican voters, Clinton’s campaign having myriad difficulties during the final two weeks before Election Day, undecided voters, and Trump being “halfway approaching normal” just prior to the election.
“I still find it weird, and this is what it sounds like to me: Depending on who’s going to win, determines on who is going to go out and vote,” Noah said, attempting to make sense of it all. “And yet shouldn’t it just be, you go out and vote because you want the person to be president? That sounds like a very strange world to be living in. It fundamentally doesn’t make sense.”
Silver’s response?
“I’d say that polling is like democracy: It’s the least-worst system ever invented.”
