NO, NATE, THE TRUMP ROMP WASN’T HARD TO CALL: The New Election Gurus. From City Journal:

Six days before the election, the statistician Nate Silver issued a warning to his 3.4 million followers on X: “Just Say No to analysis of early voting. It probably won’t help you to make better predictions. But you may fool yourself.” He received a prompt reply from a Utah woman, posting anonymously under the handle @DataRepublican.

“Nate, sit down,” she wrote. “You don’t know anything about early voting.”

She turned out to be right, at least about this election. While Silver and the rest of the punditocracy were calling the election an unpredictable tossup, @DataRepublican and her collaborators — an informal network on X of mostly anonymous and unpaid number-crunchers like her– were fearlessly forecasting a decisive Trump victory based on their computer models of early-voting data. They started calling Nevada and other battleground states two weeks before Election Day. By the campaign’s final weekend, they had correctly called six of the seven battleground states (they still weren’t sure about Michigan) as well as the national popular vote for Trump.

How did they do it? In interviews for my article in City Journal, they described their methods — and criticized the polling industry’s methods as well as the leftist biases of the media’s favorite experts. @DataRepublican described her mission: ““This is about me taking a dagger to the current state of punditry.”