US mid-term elections: All bets are off

SO IT was around this time two years ago that yours truly - together with thousands of journalists, pundits, political experts in the United States and around the world - were predicting that the then-presidential Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton would win the race for the White House.

Well, some of us qualified our forecasts by warning that "anything can happen" and recalled the few presidential elections in which the unexpected did happen. Contrary to expectations created by all the political pros in Washington, the underdog in the race ended up beating the candidate who was considered for most of the campaign to be the front-runner, like in the 1948 presidential election, when Democratic president Harry Truman stunned all the political experts by defeating the Republican candidate and New York governor, Thomas Dewey.

It is important to mention that most of my media colleagues covering the 2016 presidential campaign were making our projections based on the results of opinion polls and the pollsters who were conducting them. These included guys like the celebrated Nate Silver (who had actually guessed correctly the outcome of the 2012 presidential race), whom we venerated as a nerdy whiz-kid with access to the best information technology and who knew what he was doing.