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Notes -
https://www.natesilver.net/p/why-i-dont-buy-538s-new-election
FiveThirtyEight versus 538
Nate Silver, public statistician, has launched a broadside against the forecasting blog he originally set up, which continues to produce modelling that indicates a incredible dead heat between Biden and Trump. What gives?
What it really comes down to is how unusual this election is turning out, and how forecasting is not keeping up with reality. On paper, Biden is secure - he's an incumbent President in an America that is peaceful and prosperous. These indicators have been long championed as the surest omens of victory. But nothing lasts forever. As Silver points out, those advantages count for less and less nowadays. And they assume that the candidates are otherwise mentally competent to run an effective campaign. If Biden still retains the faculties to run the country, he's not demonstrating them.
There of course, is a limit to models. We cannot predict exactly how Biden's incapacity might affect the election, or a horse switch to Harris, because events like this have never occurred before in modern electoral history. But it's at the point where these models now interfere with normal political judgement. Biden backers use the 538 model as a palliative, even as Biden slips further in the polls. As a result they are sleepwalking into picking a candidate who himself seems to be sleepwalking.
Nate Silver's own model does give Biden a fighting chance, especially when fundamentals are emphasized over polling. But he himself admits that the model is probably useless by this point, and that polling is a better indicator of Biden's weakness. Silver also has reason to say "I told you so" - he has beaten the Biden is too old drum for years now, and gotten plenty of flak from his own team over it.
Who cares if the model is accurate? Its not supposed to be. It exists so that when Biden gets the most votes in history again, you can point to the model and call everyone asking questions an election denier.
There are a lot of people who dislike Trump. Biden’s victory is unlikely, but not implausible.
I think by this point there is not a plausible path to the presidency for Biden, or at least, not one Biden can follow without a dramatic and improbable improvement in his condition. This is not really something that models do a good job of capturing. Most polling models anticipate some kind of regression to the mean in response to short term bounces and dips in polling. But that assumes a candidate that is capable of running a normal campaign. That's Nate Silver's argument - that Biden's chances depend on the assumption that he can run a normal campaign.
I disagree, and Nate does too in the post. Even given that Biden can't run a normal campaign, polls are just wrong sometimes, and even if the polls widen a bit more it's still within polling error precedent that Biden wins.
The polls would all have to be off by 5+ points. With the electoral college Trump will win even if Biden wins the popular vote by 2% or less. It would be an unprecedented polling error, at least for American presidential elections with dozens of independent polling sources.
Unprecedented? It's July, not October. Polls in August 2016 had Clinton up by double digit margins in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and we all know how that turned out.
Yes, it would not be unprecedented for the polls to change. However, it would be unprecedented if on Election Day the polls were what they are now, yet Biden won.
Frankly, it would be unprecedented for the polls to not change to some degree. Things happen, especially with modern short attention spans/news cycles.
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