538, Nate Silver, and the Literary Digest.

In 1936 the Literary Digest, an important weekly magazine founded in 1890, published the results of its most recent straw poll for President. The poll had 2.4 million responses, a humongous number, especially in a country with about a third of today's population. Clearly, Alf Landon was going to win by a landslide.

Remember Landon's term as President? No? Oh, wait, who won the 1936 Presidential election?

The Literary Digest went out of business a couple of years later, in no small part because of their huge fail on the poll. They were wrong because they didn't understand proper polling techniques, which most people here have a decent handle on. George Gallup had founded his eponymous polling firm in 1935 and he correctly predicted the outcome of the 1936 election, and went on to become the best and most respected polling firm out there for many years.

While Nate Silver hasn't gone as far of the rails of good polling as the Literary Digest did 80 years ago, somehow he's missing some very important data this year. My take is that he simply isn't correctly accounting for the fact that back when Bernie Sanders declared his candidacy, the vast majority of people in this country could legitimately ask, "Bernie WHO?" What we've seen since last summer is that as Bernie gets out there with his message, as more people find out exactly what he stands for and how much genuine integrity he has, they start seeing Hillary for the poll-driven, weasel-faced shill that she really is. They start looking a bit more closely at her actual record and see that it does not bode well for women, for children, for the working class.

If I were a bookmaker, I'd start taking bets on when Nate Silver's website finally starts acknowledging Bernie's insurgency, and perhaps even when he finally goes back to just sports.