Using early-voting data, an emerging crop of number-crunchers predicted Trump’s win long before the pollsters and pundits did.
Six days before the election, the statistician Nate Silver issued a warning to his 3.4 million followers on X: “Just Say No to analysis of early voting. It probably won’t help you to make better predictions. But you may fool yourself.” He received a prompt reply from a Utah woman, posting anonymously under the handle @DataRepublican.
“Nate, sit down,” she wrote. “You don’t know anything about early voting.”
She turned out to be right—at least about this election.
