the nomination despite strong polls in his favor ... they also arguably sapped the journalistic will to scour his record as aggressively as those of his supposedly more serious rivals". In a long retrospective, "How I Acted Like a Pundit and Screwed up on Donald Trump", published in May 2016 after Trump had become the likely nominee, Silver reviewed how he had erred in evaluating Trump's chances early in the primary campaign. Silver wrote, "The big mistake is a curious one for a website that focuses on statistics. Unlike virtually every other forecast we publish at FiveThirtyEight – including the primary and caucus projections I just mentioned – our early estimates of Trump's chances weren't based on a statistical model. Instead, they were what we [call] 'subjective odds' – which is to say, educated guesses. In other words, we were basically acting like pundits, but attaching numbers to our estimates. And we succumbed to some of the same biases that pundits often suffer, such as not changing our minds quickly enough in the face of new evidence. Without a model as a fortification, we found ourselves rambling around the countryside like all the other pundit-barbarians, randomly setting fire to things". On the Democratic side, FiveThirtyEight argued that Senator Bernie Sanders could "lose everywhere else after Iowa and New Hampshire" and that the "Democratic establishment would rush in to squash" him if he does not. Sanders went on to win 23 states in the primaries. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a progressive nonprofit media watch group, wrote in May 2016 that FiveThirtyEight "sacrificed its integrity to go after Sanders" and that they have "at times gone beyond the realm of punditry into the realm of hackery – that is, not just treating their own opinions as though they were objective data, but spinning the data so that it conforms to their opinions." FiveThirtyEights predictions for each state primary, both for the Republican and the Democratic party nominations, were based on statistical analysis, not on the analyst's opinions. The core data employed were polls, which FiveThirtyEight aggregated for each state (while also considering national polls) using essentially the same method it had employed since 2008. In the 2016 primaries, the projections also took into account endorsements. The website also kept track of the accumulation of national party convention delegates. In a comparison of prediction success published by Bloomberg News after the primary