Nate Silver goes off on Huffington Post reporter in tweetstorm: 'This article is so f---ing idiotic'
Silver's forecast has remained notably bullish on Donald Trump's chances, a departure from many other poll aggregators that show more confidence in a victory for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
As of Saturday, for instance, Silver's model said Trump has a 35.2% chance of winning the election, whereas the Huffington Post's model pegged his chances at 1.4%.
This, according to the Huffington Post's Ryan Grim, is because Silver has been "putting his thumbs on the scale" and "making a mockery of the very forecasting industry that he popularized."
FiveThirtyEight's model uses "trend-line adjustment" in its forecasts, which compares different editions of polls and adjusts the results by using a regression analysis that draws a trend line.
"Silver is changing the results of polls to fit where he thinks the polls truly are, rather than simply entering the poll numbers into his model and crunching them," Grim wrote.
He also criticized Silver for whipping up panic, and added that readers of the left-leaning website could "relax" about Clinton's chances.
Silver immediately took to Twitter to slam Grim's article as "f---ing idiotic and irresponsible."
"This article made clear you have **no f---ing idea** what you're talking about. That's why you contract (sic) people **ahead of time**."
Silver went on to defend FiveThirtyEight's model as being based on empirical evidence, and criticized the HuffPost model as "not defensible."
Here's the rest of Silver's tweetstorm: