538 model & poll tracker thread

[BlueSwan]

This is starting to become a bit of a joke, really. If Silver doesn't think his model is important enough to release a few months before the election, then why even release it at all.

Honestly, this should have been out for at least a month already, we have been getting plenty of polls for a long time now.

[BlueSwan]

This is starting to become a bit of a joke, really. If Silver doesn't think his model is important enough to release a few months before the election, then why even release it at all.

Honestly, this should have been out for at least a month already, we have been getting plenty of polls for a long time now.

yeah, the "it's finished but i'm in no rush" thing truly has me gobsmacked. like what?? lmao.

Maybe he's worried it's too bullish on Biden? I just can't see how a fair statistical model that accounts for many factors can give Trump over a 1/4 chance of winning, although the general public seems to think the election is more of a tossup, so he's worried for being hammered. It could also be him trying to adjust the senate forecast; senate forecasts tend to be harder to code because there are unique circumstances in every race that are hard to account for in a purely statistical manner.

I tend to think that you are on to something.

[BlueSwan]

So, do we think Silver finally puts out the model this week?

[BlueSwan]

I'm sure they mean wednesday november 4th.

[BlueSwan]

OK, I have usually been backing Silver since way back, but this time he totally lost the plot. It is very very clear to me that he did not want to release a model that had Biden at 90% of winning or something like that, so that's probably why he has been tinkering with it for sooo long. This model seems to produce radically different kind of results compared to the models of 2016 or 2012. Remember that in 2012 the model was pretty confident in Obama despite very narrow leads everywhere. Biden leads by much healthier margins than Obama in 12 and Clinton in 16. This makes no sense.

[BlueSwan]

I'm actually all for at least one model that perhaps over states Trump's chances.

The issue isn't really that it overates Trump's chances, but that the level of uncertainty is pretty high. If there was less uncertainty Trump's chances would be lower. It kind of seems to me that Nate went out of his way to make every possible adjustment to make the model look more fair

Yeah. In my mind you can't just quantify the fact that there's a pandemic or that there is some way to go before the election in any meaningful manner. The fact is that if the election was held tomorrow, Trumps chances would be a hell of a lot lower than 29%.

[BlueSwan]

I don't mind the model as much as I mind the god awful appearance of it as a whole.

I actually like the winding path of electoral votes that visualises the idea of the tipping point state, and it probably is more effective at showing where the race stands than a map where the two sides are at roughly similar land area even if they are at very different levels of electoral votes.

I like that too. They had something like that in their 2016 model I believe. But as a whole, I just find this model's look to be a little oversaturated. I'm also not a big fan of having to continuously scroll down to view different aspects of the model, I prefer tabs to take you to different pages instead (like in their 2016 one.) 

The 2016 model was better in literally every conceivable way. Most importantly, the structure of the model itself was superior. But also the UI was superior, the overall presentation was superior, and the fact that it had options for "polls-only" and "nowcast" was vastly superior. If they had those now I could just look at them and ignore Silver's Howard Hughes level insanity about measuring New York Times headlines to predict uncertainty.

Yup. Silver is a great statistician, but at BEST an average pundit. While I enjoy punditry, I put next to no weight to what pundits actually say when it comes to predicting elections. In 2016 I consistently preferred looking at the polls-only model and the now-cast to the more convoluted model.

I just don't believe that one can accurately measure the impact of "fundamentals", donations and whatever. Focus on the polls, please.

Silver should just be honest here and state that the way things are right now, Biden is the overwhelming favourite and for Trump to win he would need either a major gamechanger (of which actually stealing the election is one) or the polls would have to be pretty systematically biased towards Biden. Both of which are possible, of course, but you can't really put a number on it.