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There is a 100% chance that Nate Silver is f**king furious

Don't mess with Nate.

Keith Wagstaff

on November 6, 2016

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Nate Silver is not some kind of election-predicting machine, people. He's a human being. And he's had it up to here with you questioning his methods.

The Huffington Post ran a story called "Nate Silver Is Unskewing Polls — All Of Them — In Trump’s Direction" on Saturday, written by Ryan Grim, the publication's D.C. bureau chief.

Grim accuses Silver of "making a mockery of the very forecasting industry that he popularized."

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How so? By "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."

Currently, Silver's FiveThirtyEight gives Hillary Clinton a 64.5 percent chance of winning the election, while HuffPost Pollster is giving her a 98 percent chance of winning.

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In the past presidential election, Silver was stunningly accurate, correctly predicting the winner in 50 states. During the Republican primaries, however, he admitted that he "acted like a pundit and screwed up on Donald Trump."

He stood by his most recent predictions and didn't take Grim's attack lightly.

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Grim defended himself ...

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... but Silver wasn't having any of it.

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Welcome to the 2016 presidential election, America, where even the discourse surrounding polling data is ugly.

Topics Elections

Keith Wagstaff

Keith Wagstaff is an assistant editor at Mashable and a terrible Settlers of Catan player. He has written for TIME, The Wall Street Journal Magazine, NBC News, The Village Voice, VICE, GQ and New York Magazine, among many other reputable and not-so-reputable publications. After nearly a decade in New York City, he now lives in his native Los Angeles.