Slate: Nate Silver got the Trump candidacy wrong

Slate's Leon Neyfakh is calling Nate Silver out for saying Trump had no chance of being relevant in the Republican primary.

My gut feeling is that Silver is best as a predictor of outcomes as elections get close. This is when the statistics and the data matter most.

From months or a year away, data is much too fluid to be immune to subjective, rather than objective, interpretation.

Neyfakh takes this point further:

In 2008, Silver emerged as a new kind of journalist. His data-driven approach to political analysis was a necessary corrective to a media herd that too often relied on gut feelings and received wisdom. So long as punditry continues to exist, thinkers like Silver will remain essential. But the rise of FiveThirtyEight hasn’t changed the fundamental purpose of journalism: to pay attention as the world changes and to try to understand what’s driving that change.

I'm not making any predictions except for one: As the elections get closer, I'll still be checking Silver's data before reading Slate's Monday morning quarterbacking.