Things Are Getting a Little Heated Over Election Forecasts

Nate Silver just unloaded on the Huffington Post after HuffPo writer Ryan Grim accused Silver of skewing polls to favor Donald Trump. HuffPo is currently predicting an almost certain victory for Hillary Clinton—two days before the election, it's calling a 98.3% chance for a Clinton victory. Silver's website, FiveThirtyEight, is also predicting a Clinton victory, but with a much slimmer margin. In a 14-tweet tweetstorm, Silver called the HuffPo article "so f---ing idiotic and irresponsible," saying HuffPo's claim that Clinton is guaranteed victory isn't based on proper statistics or analysis, Politico reports. Silver says Clinton's 3-point lead in the polls isn't safe enough for Clinton to rest easy, ABC News reports.

Silver's FiveThirtyEight has become one of the leading sources for election forecast and poll analysis during the 2016 election. Silver first rose to prominence for his extremely accurate predictions of the 2008 and 2012 elections, including accurately predicting every state in the 2012 race. FiveThirtyEight's model currently gives Trump a 35% chance to win, much higher than other outlets. The reason for the discrepancy? FiveThirtyEight's "secret sauce" of weighting polls depending on the website's subjective ratings of the polls' reliability and accuracy. See Silver's full Twitter rant here. (More Election 2016 stories.)