The polling geniuses over at Upshot told us Hillary would win NC by 7% according to their genius models. They told us Trump could never win the primaries and that Hillary would win the GE and who could forget about clown Nate Silvers prediction that Bernie Sanders has a < 0.1% chance of winning Indiana. Data and polling has its limits and they are vast.
There is no bigger menace in politics than the pollsters and consultants who keep dishing out articles like this that create self fulfilling prophecies of losses for those that read them.
So you are skeptical of them for all those reasons, but you still believe them when they say that a normal republican would've easily beaten Clinton?
All I'm saying is predictive models are bullshít because they always find some intellectual sounding excuse for when it fails. Wether or not a "generic Republican" would of beaten Hillary is anyone's guess but I seem to remember Nate Silver saying there weren't enough pissed off white people to elect Trump but I guess now we're lead to believe a generic Republican would of actually lost despite people like Lichtman saying a generic Republican would of won
Lichtman actually said in the summer of 2016 that Clinton would win:
http://dailybruin.com/2016/08/15/experts-predict-clinton-win-during-hammer-museum-lecture-2/
"Lichtman added his model currently predicts Clinton will win about 52 percent of the vote because eight of the test statements are true."
He changed his mind in late September 2016.
Prior to 2016, Lichtman claimed his model was based on the popular vote to justify the 2000 discrepancy, so paradoxically, Lichtman has to either be right about 2000 or 2016, he's trying to have it both ways instead.
Well that tells you how accurate his predictive model is. He needs to keep "adjusting" it and changing it (mostly so as not to appear as being wrong since he is considered an authority on the subject). Lichtman is no different from the average Atlas user when it comes to predictions.
He also starts with it 1860 because the Democrats had only around 4 keys in 1856, and won.
