Take what happens if we lie to our model and tell it that the election is going to be held today. It spits out that Biden has a 93 percent chance of winning
That’s the relevant number then, Nate. It’s impossible to predict how things are going to change in the next three months (never mind voting starts in some key states in just one month), or if they are even going to change at all (race has overall been steady to this point, no reason to assume it will stop), so the only tangible factors to go on are what the data says now.
That doesn't make any sense. The amount of time left before the election is absolutely relevant in determining the probability that the leading candidate will win. If a football team is leading by 10 points with just 30 seconds left in the game, then obviously their probability of winning is much higher than if they're leading by 10 and it's only halftime. In the former case, the team that's behind doesn't have enough time to catch up, but in the latter case they do. So a given lead is more secure if the game is about to be over. What's so different about polling? In that case as well, the trailing candidate might still win, but only if there's enough time left in the race for the numbers to move. How is that controversial?
