I get that bit, but given Silver's previous 50/50 and 49/50 results in 08 and 12, he clearly got something drastically wrong. As in, his model was not able to incorporate concepts like silent Trump voters, early voting results, and demographics that were supposed to help Hillary, but wound up helping Trump (women and latinos). In Silver pollster ratings, the only pollster that pretty much got most states bang on (The Trafalgar Group) was given a C rating, which speaks volumes. Nate simply didn't have the variables to pick up an assymetrical, Trump style candidate.
You literally don't know what you're talking about on this one I'm afraid. I followed the various models throughout and 538's ended up being by far the best match to reality in the end. Their methodology turned out to be sound.
They gave Trump a 30% chance - which means he would win around 1 election for every 2 Clinton wins - and he won. That's completely consistent with model. Using the same polls, some of the alternative modellers had Clinton with a 85% or even 99% chance, which turned out to be ludicrous. Nate's model looked at the fact there were 12% undecided voters (compared to 3% undecided in 2012) and introduced lots of corresponding uncertainty into their model to account for it.
In the final weeks of the election, most of 538's editorial coverage was on how Trump had a really strong chance of winning and highlighting that the rest of the media seemed to be crazily working on the basis that Clinton had it sewn up. Since the election all the other modellers have been complimenting 538 on getting it right... now you're here trying to claim they got it wrong.
No wonder you were ridiculously over confident going in to the election if you didn't think Trump had a real good chance of winning, not far behind Clinton's. 538 was saying this was going to be an extremely close election - almost everyone else said Clinton had it more or less in the bag.
And it seems to me anyone claiming with any certainty that Trump was going to win was equally as wrong as those claiming Clinton would win. It was extremely close, so anyone claiming much certainty about anything was way off.
I still don't understand why you think the odds were wrong just because the slight underdog won? That happens all the time with probabilities. It's literally the whole point of them.