Pundits misjudged the US election, so why trust them now?

Why did Trump win the US election?

And what does his win say about the current state of the United States and the future of politics in the western world?

Well those are big questions. And big questions require think pieces, op-eds, columns, and hot takes to answer.

Publications around the world have produced an enormous variety of explanations for the election result.

Trump won because of Facebook.
Clinton lost because of FBI Director James Comey
​Trump won because people stayed home

Some opinion pieces point to large scale changes in American, North American, or western society, using this election as a gauge of some greater shift in political sentiment, such as the New York Times piece 'After These Days of Rage'

There is no shortage of predictions on what the future holds for politics; a vindictive aging electorate reacting to the perceived slights of political correctness, a rejuvenated sense of nationalism, the political enfranchisement of the forgotten white working class.

But if so many great writers and thinkers were wrong about who would win the election, why should we trust them on the future of the post-Trump world?

Trump's win can't be explained, yet

According to Andrea Perrella, Director of the research centre LISPOP at Wilfred Laurier University, one challenge in assessing the state of politics is that we don't actually know why Trump won.

There are theories, and those theories show up in the op-eds of the world, but Perrella says those only scratch the surface of what was going on on election day. 

It is constantly changing and it is always playing tricks on us. There is more mystery than there are solutions. But people look for these forces.- Andrea Perrella, Wilfred Laurier University

"I like to read these post-hoc analyses, they provide very useful insight, and a lot of them are written by people with a lot of experience. Now, whether they miss the mark or not is a challenge to anybody who tries to make sense of the social world. It is constantly changing and it is always playing tricks on us. There is more mystery than there are solutions. But people look for these forces. They want to know that a result is pegged to some kind of meaning, and interpret a result in these grand terms as opposed to just saying "well, Trump was just lucky." And maybe he was lucky. We like to know that a result, especially a historical result, is tied to some historical forces, and not just a fluke." 

Perrella says that political scientists will be poring over the data from this election for years, and some surprising findings may come up. It's possible that when asked, voters will say their choice was based on far more banal reasons than considered in the grandest op-eds. Things like the relative trustworthiness of each candidate, or other personality factors.

Don't believe the hype

The lack of data is why you shouldn't take claims about the state of America at face value, says Dan Gardner, Canadian journalist and co-author of the 2015 book Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction. 

You turn to the pundits, and guess what: the pundits know- Dan Gardner, co-author, Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction.

"We have to understand that we have a psychological aversion to uncertainty. When something really big happens, something that really turns our world upside down, and I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that's what Trump's victory did for a whole lot of people, we want to know. And when you go to a political scientist and the scientist says says 'well here's one hypothesis, here's another hypothesis,' you say 'I don't want to hear it, Pointdexter.' So then you turn to the pundits, and guess what: the pundits know."

Op-eds are magnified by other op-eds

Larry M. Bartels, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University and author of the book Democracy for Realists says there's a risk that the churn of op-eds and hot takes can actually reinforce ideas that turn out to be wrong. 

The 100th overblown story about the disaffection of the white working class bolsters the plausibility of the first 99.- Larry M. Bartels, Vanderbilt University

In an email to The 180, Bartels writes "Once a compelling narrative gets rolling it gets reinforced through repetition and elaboration; so the 100th overblown story about the disaffection of the white working class (or whatever the explanation de jour happens to be) bolsters the plausibility of the first 99. It probably doesn't hurt that most of the pundit class is sufficiently isolated from actual "white working class" people to feel little compunction about imagining what they are doing and why."

Learn to live without explanation

Dan Gardner says the multiple, sometimes contradictory explanations for Trump's win, and the predictions of a future forever changed, is just the normal response to something unexpected. And there's one way to remain skeptical of the opinion-writers and pundits: learn to accept uncertainty. 

Those instant confident explanations fail time and again- Dan Gardner

"We've been here before. After every major event, there's the same sort of turmoil, there's the same sort uncertainty, the same sort of need to know. If you look back at all those events and the instant reactions, those instant confident explanations fail time and again. And just as so many forecasts of Trump's victory failed, the forecasts of what this means and what we can expect to see, will fail, for the most part."