Nostradamus pollster Allan Lichtman criticizes Nate Silver

The landslide in election results, which was largely unforeseen, is causing contention among political conjectures.

Allan Lichtman, a famous election forecaster and historian who predicted a Harris victory, admitted his wrong guess in an X-Post – but not without a dig at Nate Silver, another election forecaster.

Silver, a statistician who bases his predictions on polls and other data points such as voter turnout, withdrew his forecast model around 10:30 p.m. Tuesday, citing that it “doesn’t capture the story of this election night well.”

American university professor Lichtman has predicted almost every presidential election since 1984 and bases his results on a formula of 13 true-or-false questions. The last time Lichtman was wrong was in 2000, during the presidential campaign between George W. Bush and Al Gore. Now he adds another false prediction to that list.

In an X-post after the election results showed a Trump victory, Lichtman admitted he was wrong — and not like Silver, the founder of FiveThirtyEight, would be.

Silver’s model predicted an incredibly close race. He and wrote an opinion article in The New York Times In late October, he said his gut feeling was predicting a Trump victory.

“But I don’t think anyone’s gut feeling should be given any value, including mine,” Silver wrote. “Instead, you should come to terms with the fact that a 50:50 forecast actually means 50:50.”

It’s not the first time the two have argued. In September, Lichtman posted that Silver “doesn’t know how to turn the key.”

“He is not a historian or political scientist. He has no academic qualifications. He was wrong when he said I couldn’t make an early prediction about Obama’s re-election. He will be wrong again when he tries to analyze the keys,” Lichtman wrote.

The next day, Silver posted that the professor was “comedically cocky.”

“Lichtman is comically cocky and fails to recognize the subjectivity of his method,” Silver wrote. “But you actually learn a lot about presidential elections from reading his work, and he at least puts himself out there and makes testable predictions.

Silver stayed away from X for most of election night, but posted on the Silver Bulletin that he had a feeling Trump would win.

“The article I wrote for The New York Times was misinterpreted as my secret “prediction” for Trump,” Silver wrote. “As much as I want to acknowledge it, it wasn’t like that. The whole point, right in the title, was that I not Trust everyone’s gut instincts when it comes to presidential elections.”

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