Feels rather nitpicky to me.
I dont think anyone wants to repeat the stupidity of HuffPost or others saying Clinton was a 90+ percent shoein but even with uncertainty the sort of polling error and change of fortune it would take for Trump to win the PV would be simply extraordinary.
^^^
There's no way you can feed in "9 point average lead for challenger three months out in the middle of a recession with the highest unemployment since The Great Depression" into an election model and not have the model spit out "LOL incumbent's f**ked." There's just no way around it, that's how models are.
Like, the only way you can talk about "Maybe Trump can come back" is gut/feeling stuff at this point and that's not what models do. If Trump does come back, it means everything people thought they knew about electoral politics is wrong, not that the models are wrong.
I suppose you could make a point about exogenous events. We don't know what will happen in August let alone October. We could have a cure, Biden could have a stroke, aliens could invade and the election gets cancelled, who knows.
But the point with those is that they are by their very nature unpredictable. Some amount of uncertainty should be baked in but it seems like they just want to find a statistical justification to say it should be higher because anything having 1 in 100 odds in July feels wrong.
