Edward Snowden rethinks that tweet about voting third party
Edward Snowden, like many Americans, wishes he hadn't put so much faith in pre-election polls.
Snowden showed himself to be a believer in The New York Times on Oct. 21, when the Paper of Record had Hillary Clinton's odds of winning the White House at 93%.
Feeling confident the U.S. wasn't about to elect Clinton's rival Donald Trump, he told his American followers now was as good a time as ever to vote third party.
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A week after Trump's victory, Snowden was doing some reflection.
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Snowden, of course, was just going along with what experts were telling the world. The Times had favored Clinton all campaign season until halfway through Election Night. Data journalism hub 538 gave Clinton a 71% chance as Election Day began. The Princeton Election Consortium put her chances at nearly 100%.
Pollsters will likely spend the next weeks and months figuring out where they went wrong. Many of them weren't as off as they initially appeared, at least according to...538, and there is already a good amount of evidence to suggest pollsters missed Trump's huge support among "whites without college degrees." And though many national polls may wind up having done a decent job predicting the popular vote (which Clinton is likely to win), they were off enough with respect to certain states that their Electoral College predictions seem to have been totally misguided.
Maybe it's more fair to say that political science, like any brand of science, is simply evolving to figure out how the world truly works.
Colin is Mashable's US & World Reporter. He previously interned at Foreign Policy magazine and The American Prospect. Colin is a graduate from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. When he's not at Mashable, you can most likely find him eating or playing some kind of sport.
