Rationally Speaking is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry, and science education.

For more information, please visit us at NYCCEceptics.org.

Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

I'm your host, Julia Galeith, and with me is today's guest Professor Brendan Nihann.

Brendan is a political scientist at Dartmouth College, and a returning guest he was on

Rationally Speaking a few years ago now.

I invited him back on the show now,

because like many people, I've been obsessively checking Twitter in the weeks leading up to the

election and in the days following. And out of all the voices on Twitter, I've just found

Brendan to be one of the most careful and lucid commentators on what's

been happening.

So I actually reached out to Brendan right after the election to see if he could be, you know,

sub in as a last-minute guest that week.

And to his credit, he said he wanted a little more time to sort of carefully go through the

data and figure out what happened, which, you know, I respect that's very in keeping with the spirit of rationally speaking.

So, but I'm glad that you could join us.

So welcome back to the show, Brendan.

Thanks for having me.

So today we're going to be talking about teasing out the different explanations for sort of what happened, for why Trump won.

And that'll involve, like, taking a look at the polls, you know, why or whether the polls were wrong.

And just sort of more broadly, what kind of updates we should be making to our models

of how the world works and to how democracy works, et cetera, from what's just happened.

...