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On or around 22 March 2016, a rumor began circulating on social media that popular poll-cruncher and statistician Nate Silver had predicted that Vermont senator Bernie Sanders would sweep eight upcoming primaries and thereby snatch the Democratic presidential nomination away from Hillary Clinton. For example, one 21 March 2016 blog post maintained Silver had expressed that Bernie Sanders is likely to win all of the upcoming 8 states: That claim was suspect due to its source (various blogs) and its difference from the way Silver generally presents his analyses, which is to eschew making sweeping declarations and expressing future events as outright certainties in favor of explicating trends and probabilities. The post reproduced above linked to a 15 March 2016 post that Silver published on his FiveThirtyEight blog, published on the day of the Ohio Democratic primary (which Bernie Sanders lost by 42.7% to Hillary Clinton's 56.5%,) In that post, Silver projected that Hillary Clinton was running ahead of Sanders in Arizona's 22 March 2015 primary but pegged the subsequent seven (not eight) states as potential Sanders wins: That post from Silver didn't claim that Sanders would sweep eight states following the primaries of 15 March 2016, nor did it say that Sanders would definitively — or even probably — seize the Democratic nomination. The closest Silver came to saying anything like that was this portion of his post: Aside from straight reporting of the Democrats Abroad primary (won by Sanders with 69% of the vote) on 21 March 2016, Silver's most recent Twitter mentions of Sanders again predicted neither a multi-state sweep nor a lock on the Democratic nomination: After the 15 March 2016 FiveThirtyEight posting, Silver tweeted: We contacted Silver to determine whether he made the prediction attributed to him in any other medium or context but have not yet received a response.
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