Why Science Couldn’t Predict a Trump Presidency

For many people, Donald Trump’s surprise election victory was a jolt to very idea that humans are rational creatures. It tore away the comfort of believing that science has rendered our world predictable. The upset led two New York Times reporters to question whether data science could be trusted in medicine and business. A Guardian columnist declared that big data works for physics but breaks down in the realm of human behavior.

But the unexpected result wasn’t a failure of science. Yes, there were multiple, confident forecasts of win for Clinton, but those emerged from a process doesn’t qualify as science. And while social scientists weren’t equipped to see a Trump win coming, they have started to test theories of voting behavior that could shed light on why it happened.