PREDICTION, wrote Karl Popper, a philosopher, is “one of the oldest dreams of mankind—the dream of prophecy, the idea that we can know what the future has in store for us, and that we can profit from such knowledge by adjusting our policy to it.” It is a dream from which Donald Trump provided a shock awakening.
Over the summer of 2015, as Mr Trump surged in primary polls, analysts and journalists laid out, often in precise and gory detail, the steep trajectory of his inevitable fall. “Why the Republican Party shouldn’t worry about the Donald” and “Donald Trump’s Six Stages Of Doom” are representative headlines from those months. A year later, in an arena in Cleveland, Mr Trump accepted his party’s nomination.
But he didn’t stand a chance in the general, according to the people for whom predicting these sorts of things is their business. On the morning of November 8th, the Huffington Post gave Hillary Clinton a 98% chance of being elected president. The Princeton Election Consortium gave her a 93% chance. The New York Times arrived at 85%, and FiveThirtyEight, a data journalism website, at a more tempered 71%. But at 3am the...Continue reading
Source: United States http://ift.tt/2jibfVg
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