I went to sleep in London last night making the reasonable assumption that the election would bear out the predictions of many polls. Like so many people, how wrong I was.
I’m in London for the BCI World Summit, where I delivered the opening keynote address yesterday morning. Over the afternoon and evening, conversations between sessions often turned to Trump. People wanted to know: Was Trump a gray rhino or black swan?
I define gray rhinos as highly probable, high impact threats. Trump’s candidacy and initial success started as a highly improbable black swan. But, like most black swans, it was driven by gray rhinos, as I wrote this summer: the profound discontent of people left behind by a swelling stock market and stagnant wages, by bailouts of banks but not underwater mortgage owners, by economic anxieties directed toward globalization, immigrants and minorities.
As the primaries advanced and poll numbers accumulated, his primary victory morphed from black swan to gray rhino. The writing was on the wall that he would become the Republican nominee. But it was hard to say that it was either highly probable or highly improbable that he would win the election.
As the election approached, his poll numbers fluctuated wildly. Though a few polls gave him a slim victory at times, at his lows he registered less than a 10 percent chance of winning. The 11th hour FBI announcements about a new investigation related to Hillary Clinton’s emails bumped him up, but even so the odds remained against him, though not by nearly as much.
On Election Day, the Upshot described the odds of a Trump win as similar to the odds of an NFL kicker missing a 37-yard field goal. That’s not hugely probable, but not highly improbable either, and hardly impossible. Nate Silver’s site, FiveThirtyEight, which combines and filters poll results, predicted CIinton as a 72 percent favorite on the eve of the election.
Then again, there were outlier predictions that turned out to be spot-on. An artificial intelligence tool, MoglA developed by fellow Young Global Leader Sanjiv Rai, predicted the Trump victory. So did Professor Allan J Lichtman, who has correctly predicted the popular vote in historical elections.
The New York Times had a good piece this morning on the failure of polls to predict accurately.
Thus, it’s arguable that Trump’s ultimate victory was either, or neither, a black swan or a gray rhino.
It’s safe to say, however, that predicting as usual lost the election, and a day of reckoning is here for how we choose our information sources. To clearly see what’s in front of us, we need to do better at sorting through the information around us – a “meta gray rhino” challenge.
I’ll leave thoughts on what a Trump presidency would bring to further posts, but my summer prediction about the gray rhinos that created him stands: they are here to stay, and are in urgent need of wrangling.
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- Kerala’s Landslide Grey Rhino - September 15, 2025
