Re:538 - Most of the defense boils down to the fact that Trump is an outlier, and predictive models, by their nature, never do well with those. But people want to make fun of them because their numbers didn't predict this, which is just dumb and petty since (basically) no one did.
The irony of this is that 538 DID actually predict this, somewhat. As the election day approached, they got guffawed at for raising Trump's chance of winning to 35%. HuffPo had theirs at 2% or something. So 538 DID see this coming. Their models worked. They weren't accurate because they knew there was more uncertainty, and the uncertainty covered the spread.
Also, Bernie
absolutely would have won Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. He cannot be attacked the same way Clinton can be, and his strength
is Trump's strength. He would have beaten the tar out of Trump. Sure the margins in places like Kansas would be higher for Trump in that scenario, but it's Kansas. He was winning that anyways. I would bet that Sanders would have even won Florida. Arizona. Nevada. New Hampshire. Maine. Indiana even!That's flipping two HUGE states that Trump won, and guaranteeing four huge ones that are close.