I actually think Silver deserves some of the blame because he set the odds at basically 20-25% that Trump could win.. Many people who would have "held their noses" and voted for Hillary did not, and Trump won.
That's not fair to Silver. At all.
You're really saying he was a reason that Hillary lost? He should have been nothing more than a cheerleader? Is there no longer a place for impartiality or objectivity in polling and reporting?
So hundreds of thousands of voters in Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania first checked to see what Silver was saying, then decided that the election was in the bag for Hillary, and then decided to vote for Trump as a protest?
The media groupthink was absurd. Compared to the rest of them, Silver was an outlier. For example, Huffington Post gave Hillary a 98.2% chance of winning, and predicted she would get 323 electoral votes.[1]
Blame HuffPost if you want to blame someone. Heaven forbid you actually blame the person most at fault: Hillary Rodham Clinton. Trump didn't win, Hillary lost, because she was a worse candidate than Trump, if such a thing was possible!!!
[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/polls-hillary-clinton-wi...