538 model & poll tracker thread

[ProgressiveModerate]

This seems pretty accurate, I don’t know why Atlas is so upset.

7% chance of Biden winning AR. 13% chance in MS. Let that settle in.

[wbrocks67]

This seems pretty accurate, I don’t know why Atlas is so upset.

7% chance of Biden winning AR. 13% chance in MS. Let that settle in.

+ nearly 20% chance Trump wins Colorado

[Roronoa D. Law]

This seems pretty accurate, I don’t know why Atlas is so upset.

7% chance of Biden winning AR. 13% chance in MS. Let that settle in.

+ nearly 20% chance Trump wins Colorado

Or 66% in Georgia when he been down in all the polls except Trafalgar.

[tagimaucia]

https://twitter.com/jon_m_rob/status/1293525159056486405
https://twitter.com/jon_m_rob/status/1293525620098555906

Nate is way smarter than me I'm sure, but that cube root function for the model's "uncertainty index" seems very arbitrary and not particularly connected to anything empirical?? Why not base it on actual past data of how predictive polls are x days before an election?

[Brittain33]

This seems pretty accurate, I don’t know why Atlas is so upset.

7% chance of Biden winning AR. 13% chance in MS. Let that settle in.

That’s because of the crazy uncertainty around COVID and economic collapse, right? I don’t really believe he’s right, but I can see someone saying “there’s a 13% chance that current conditions are experienced as such a break from normality that big chunks of the Republican base don’t show up.” I wouldn’t bet on it, but it’s not crazy.

[Xing]

It’s fine to account for uncertainty, and I don’t think saying Trump has a 29% chance is necessarily that bad. With that said, the biggest problem is that his models don’t account for polling errors by state. The idea that MI is quite a bit more likely to go Democratic than NV, OH is more likely to flip than GA, AZ will vote right of FL, etc. seems to be based on applying the same average pollster error to every state, whereas that is not at all the case in reality. An overall polling error that means Trump slightly overperforms his polling in general likely means he’s still underperforming his polls somewhat in CO and NV, and significantly overperforming them in IA and OH.

[Sadader]

I think Nate should really apologize to @gelliotmorris, lol.

[Devout Centrist]

We waited three months for this?

[Alben Barkley]

Wow... the model is garbage.

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.

In this article — partly as a corrective against what I see as overconfident assessments elsewhere — I’m mostly focused on the reasons why Trump’s chances are higher than they might appear.

The purpose of the model shouldn’t be to contrast with other people’s models, and you shouldn’t deliberately rig it to do so.

I’m honestly getting the sense that Nate made this both to be a contrarian and to make as conservative a model as possible as an overcorrective to 2016. In fact I think he waited so long because it took some effort to force the model to look like this. And I think it’s no coincidence the model was released with the same numbers as the final 2016 forecast.

I think Nate has jumped the shark. Lost focus on the data, too focused instead on punditry and concerns about appearances and intangibles. More worried about hedging his bets in case the unexpected happens again so he doesn’t look too wrong rather than just going by the polls and letting the chips fall where they may. Pretty sad.

In 2016, the reason Trump had a pretty decent chance in our final forecast was mostly just because the polls were fairly close (despite the media narrative to the contrary), close enough that even a modest-sized polling error in the right group of states could be enough to give Trump a victory in the Electoral College.

The uncertainty in our current 2020 forecast, conversely, stems mostly from the fact that there’s still a long way to go until the election.

But that alone shouldn’t account for the odds dropping from 93% to 71%. You admit Biden is doing better than Hillary at her peak, yet you had Hillary in a MUCH better position in your 2016 model at her peak. And the Nowcast never differed this dramatically from the other forecasts. The flawed and frankly baseless assumption that Trump is going to close the gap, when again this has been a remarkably steady race so far and there isn’t even that much time before voting starts, should not be weighed this heavily in the model. There is no guarantee of anything like another Comey letter.

[Dr Oz Lost Party!]

I understand the caution, but this seems a bit too rosy for Trump.

[Roronoa D. Law]

20% Polling
30% Voting patterns
50% BS

[WD]

So the reason Biden is at 70% is because muh race could tighten and muh Trump could come back and muh things could change and other bs like that?

Silver is a joke and an embarrassment to his profession. The Economist model is far superior.

[Penn_Quaker_Girl]

20% Polling
30% Voting patterns
50% BS

Wait...wait, I'm confused.  Is your signature a part of the post or...?

[Senator Spark]

My model is better. LOL

[GeneralMacArthur]

This is dumb.  Nate got triggered too hard by the dopey Twitter extremists who decided to attack him for giving Clinton a 70% chance when she lost.  So many aspects of this presentation seem designed to just cover his ass and make sure nobody can say the same thing again if he's "wrong" this year.  Right down to the fact that it says "Biden wins 71 out of 100" instead of "71%".  He's also obviously including a bunch of nonsense just to try to add more uncertainty so Trump has a better chance, because that's what his gut tells him and that's what he "got wrong" in 2016.

Nate needs to realize that his core audience is not idiots on Twitter.  His core audience is people who look to him to give us a realistic portrayal of the state of the race based on empirical data.  He is supposed to be the counterpoint to all the pundits on TV spouting off about unquantifiable nonsense like "enthusiasm" or "crowd sizes" or "unskewing the polls" or things like "no president has ever won/lost re-election when XYZ is true (a good economy, low approvals, etc.)"  This was illustrated perfectly in 2012 when all the Republicans were working overtime to convince themselves that Romney was actually winning in spite of the polls, and Nate's data-based model got every single state right and predicted the Obama victory pretty much exactly.  Now where do we turn for a purely data-based model?

Furthermore, Nate has really leaned hard into this idea of "uncertainty."  That was the main problem with his primary model as well.  Nate, we just want a snapshot of the race as it appears today based on the hard data available.  If Biden is leading by 20, you shouldn't say that he only has a 65% chance of winning because "anything could happen, there's so much uncertainty."  The model used to just say "if the election was held today, this is what would happen", which is actually useful.

This should realistically be the end of Nate Silver as the premier election forecaster.  His website has been totally silly ever since the ESPN buy-out, and he and his crew spend their entire lives on Twitter.  Ah, for the days when he was "the baseball guy running election simulations for the New York Times."

[Alben Barkley]

https://twitter.com/jon_m_rob/status/1293525159056486405
https://twitter.com/jon_m_rob/status/1293525620098555906

Nate is way smarter than me I'm sure, but that cube root function for the model's "uncertainty index" seems very arbitrary and not particularly connected to anything empirical?? Why not base it on actual past data of how predictive polls are x days before an election?

This seems to confirm to me that Nate is using this non-empirical conception of “national drift” to arbitrarily inflate Trump’s chances.

“The race could change!”

Yeah, but it also could not. Or change in Biden’s favor. That should be accounted for at least as much.

[Alben Barkley]

This is dumb.  Nate got triggered too hard by the dopey Twitter extremists who decided to attack him for giving Clinton a 70% chance when she lost.  So many aspects of this presentation seem designed to just cover his ass and make sure nobody can say the same thing again if he's "wrong" this year.  Right down to the fact that it says "Biden wins 71 out of 100" instead of "71%".  He's also obviously including a bunch of nonsense just to try to add more uncertainty so Trump has a better chance, because that's what his gut tells him and that's what he "got wrong" in 2016.

Nate needs to realize that his core audience is not idiots on Twitter.  His core audience is people who look to him to give us a realistic portrayal of the state of the race based on empirical data.  He is supposed to be the counterpoint to all the pundits on TV spouting off about unquantifiable nonsense like "enthusiasm" or "crowd sizes" or "unskewing the polls" or things like "no president has ever won/lost re-election when XYZ is true (a good economy, low approvals, etc.)"  This was illustrated perfectly in 2012 when all the Republicans were working overtime to convince themselves that Romney was actually winning in spite of the polls, and Nate's data-based model got every single state right and predicted the Obama victory pretty much exactly.  Now where do we turn for a purely data-based model?

Furthermore, Nate has really leaned hard into this idea of "uncertainty."  That was the main problem with his primary model as well.  Nate, we just want a snapshot of the race as it appears today based on the hard data available.  If Biden is leading by 20, you shouldn't say that he only has a 65% chance of winning because "anything could happen, there's so much uncertainty."  The model used to just say "if the election was held today, this is what would happen", which is actually useful.

This should realistically be the end of Nate Silver as the premier election forecaster.  His website has been totally silly ever since the ESPN buy-out, and he and his crew spend their entire lives on Twitter.  Ah, for the days when he was "the baseball guy running election simulations for the New York Times."

100000% agree.

I guess The Economist model which Nate attacked so hard is the best thing we’ve got now.

[ProgressiveModerate]

This is dumb.  Nate got triggered too hard by the dopey Twitter extremists who decided to attack him for giving Clinton a 70% chance when she lost.  So many aspects of this presentation seem designed to just cover his ass and make sure nobody can say the same thing again if he's "wrong" this year.  Right down to the fact that it says "Biden wins 71 out of 100" instead of "71%".  He's also obviously including a bunch of nonsense just to try to add more uncertainty so Trump has a better chance, because that's what his gut tells him and that's what he "got wrong" in 2016.

Nate needs to realize that his core audience is not idiots on Twitter.  His core audience is people who look to him to give us a realistic portrayal of the state of the race based on empirical data.  He is supposed to be the counterpoint to all the pundits on TV spouting off about unquantifiable nonsense like "enthusiasm" or "crowd sizes" or "unskewing the polls" or things like "no president has ever won/lost re-election when XYZ is true (a good economy, low approvals, etc.)"  This was illustrated perfectly in 2012 when all the Republicans were working overtime to convince themselves that Romney was actually winning in spite of the polls, and Nate's data-based model got every single state right and predicted the Obama victory pretty much exactly.  Now where do we turn for a purely data-based model?

Furthermore, Nate has really leaned hard into this idea of "uncertainty."  That was the main problem with his primary model as well.  Nate, we just want a snapshot of the race as it appears today based on the hard data available.  If Biden is leading by 20, you shouldn't say that he only has a 65% chance of winning because "anything could happen, there's so much uncertainty."  The model used to just say "if the election was held today, this is what would happen", which is actually useful.

This should realistically be the end of Nate Silver as the premier election forecaster.  His website has been totally silly ever since the ESPN buy-out, and he and his crew spend their entire lives on Twitter.  Ah, for the days when he was "the baseball guy running election simulations for the New York Times."

100000% agree.

I guess The Economist model which Nate attacked so hard is the best thing we’ve got now.

The Economists model I feel relies too heavily on polling and has too little uncertainty. I like JHK the best, but even that seems to be skewed slightly in Trump's favor.

[G_Master]

I don't know, maybe I'm overlooking something here but isn't 71% still a good chance on the face of it?

[Nyvin]

That webpage is extremely sore on the eyes....wow.

[WD]

Why does he have OH more likely to flip than GA and MS more likely to flip than KS? This is a really bad model.

[ProgressiveModerate]

I don't know, maybe I'm overlooking something here but isn't 71% still a good chance on the face of it?

On a state by state level, things make no sense, and there's way too much uncertainty

[iammucow]

As long as he reduces uncertainty as the election approaches, does it really matter? There's nothing wrong with having one model that's highly risk-adverse. It's kind of the reason to have multiple models, to offer different perspectives and consider different scenarios and factors.

[ProgressiveModerate]

As long as he reduces uncertainty as the election approaches, does it really matter? There's nothing wrong with having one model that's highly risk-adverse. It's kind of the reason to have multiple models, to offer different perspectives and consider different scenarios and factors.

I don't disagree, but 538 was always like the inoffensive model that tended to not fall into fallacies of media narratives and such. This model seems to have a lot of speculation in their model, and way too large of a MOE just out of caution. Also; how can Trump be a 2/3 favorite in a state where he's trailing Biden by 3%!? 

[wbrocks67]

Yeah, it's hard to wrap my brain around how he doesn't want the forecast to be a "nowcast" (or else it would be Biden 93%), yet he's using polls from right *NOW* to predict 3 months from now but adding in extra "uncertainty" juice?

Also, apparently the model doesn't take into account Trump's approval ratings either.