Hanover
Dean Lacy, chairman of the government department, kicked off a post-election talk on Friday with Harry Enten, a 2011 graduate and senior analyst at the data journalism site FiveThirtyEight, with a pun that played on the unique and surprising nature of this election.
The talk, titled “Aftermath: What the 2016 Election Taught Us About Polls, Predictions and American Politics,” would probe the consequences (or aftermath) of the election, Lacy said.
But it also would ask what would come “after the math,” the professor said, referring to the questions that have arisen around the accuracy of polling that failed to foresee President Donald Trump’s victory.
In other words, Lacy said, “We have some ‘splainin’ to do.”
Before Lacy delved into the details with Enten, whom he once taught as an undergraduate, the government professor offered an anecdote about how they met each other.
“I arrived here in August of 2016 — ” Lacy began.
“2006,” Enten said.
“Thank you,” Lacy said. “He did this a lot in class, too.”
Back then, as now, Lacy said, Enten displayed an “encyclopedic” knowledge of elections and a passion for predicting their results. Enten now is popularly known as the “whiz kid” at FiveThirtyEight, the data news website founded by former ESPN and New York Times analyst Nate Silver.
During Monday’s talk, Enten easily remembered obscure details from past elections and corrected his former teacher, much as Lacy said he had done in the lecture hall.
And despite the furor over Trump’s surprise victory in November, Enten noted that FiveThirtyEight, which uses a sophisticated model developed mostly by Silver, had been among the most bullish on the Republican.
On the day of the election, Enten recalled, Trump’s chances on FiveThirtyEight had been about 29 percent.
“To me,” he said, “30 percent chance things happen all the time” — it’s slightly better than the odds of flipping two heads-up coins in a row, he said.
Other recent presidential elections have seen polling errors of equal or greater magnitude that received less attention because the expected result didn’t change, he noted.
Enten acknowledged, however, that an intellectual understanding of the odds of a Trump victory wasn’t the same, emotionally, as actually witnessing it happen.
“I knew mathematically that it could occur,” he said, recalling watching the results on the night of Nov. 8. “But as returns came in, I remember thinking, ‘What in the hell are we doing? We’re doing this?’ ”
Enten said polling in key swing states had underestimated Trump’s support among white non-college voters, which could have happened for many reasons: the pollsters didn’t talk to enough of them, those who answered weren’t representative of the whole, or lied, or there was late movement in the polls.
Looking to the future, Enten said he would watch whether Democrats embraced the Bernie Sanders brand of populism in response to Trump’s success. A bellwether there, he said, will be whether Sanders-backed candidate Keith Ellison, a progressive U.S. representative from Minnesota, wins his race for chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
Enten also raised the question of whether Republicans in Congress would stay loyal to Trump if his approval ratings remain low enough to threaten their own re-election bids.
“I don’t know,” Enten said. “We’ll have to wait and see.”
Rob Wolfe can be reached at rwolfe@vnews.com or 603-727-3242.