Political pundits and political experts usually don’t do much better than chance when forecasting political events, and usually do worse than crude statistical models.
An important caveat to this, though I can’t recall whether Silver mentions it: Tetlock (2010) reminds people that he never said experts are “as good as dart-throwing chimps.” E.g. experts do way better than chance (or a linear prediction rule) when considering the space of all physically possible hypotheses rather than when considering a pre-selected list of already-plausible answers. E.g. the layperson doesn’t even know who is up for election in Myanmar. The expert knows who the plausible candidates are, but once you narrow the list to just the plausible candidates, then it is hard for experts to out-perform a coin flip or an LPR by very much.
An important caveat to this, though I can’t recall whether Silver mentions it: Tetlock (2010) reminds people that he never said experts are “as good as dart-throwing chimps.” E.g. experts do way better than chance (or a linear prediction rule) when considering the space of all physically possible hypotheses rather than when considering a pre-selected list of already-plausible answers. E.g. the layperson doesn’t even know who is up for election in Myanmar. The expert knows who the plausible candidates are, but once you narrow the list to just the plausible candidates, then it is hard for experts to out-perform a coin flip or an LPR by very much.