On the morning of the 2016 presidential election, Nate Silver’s website FiveThirtyEight gave Hillary Clinton about a 71% chance of winning, and Donald Trump about 29%. Trump won, and many commentators said the forecasters had got it wrong.
Silver disagreed. “We had him with a 30 percent chance, and that’s a pretty likely occurrence,” he said in 2017. “I don’t think people have a good intuitive sense for how to translate polls to probabilities.”