Nate Silver: "**** you, we did a good job"

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Their presidential model was fine given the data that they got.  But their House model was awful. 

I don’t know why they assumed Dems would gain seats given that the generic ballot was consistently showing somewhat lower margins for the Democrats than 2018.

Actually, I do know...they way overvalue incumbency, which is almost worthless now in an era of hyperpolarization and almost no split-ticket voting.  This was true of their 2018 model and it seemed like they never learned their lesson.

[Statilius the Epicurean]

Their presidential model was fine given the data that they got.  But their House model was awful. 

I don’t know why they assumed Dems would gain seats given that the generic ballot was consistently showing somewhat lower margins for the Democrats than 2018.

Probably because district-level polling was even better for Democrats than national and state.

Actually, I do know...they way overvalue incumbency, which is almost worthless now in an era of hyperpolarization and almost no split-ticket voting.  This was true of their 2018 model and it seemed like they never learned their lesson.

Republicans literally retained the Senate on the strength of GOP incumbents. Collins outran Trump by like 15 points.

[SN2903]

Silver is an absolute joke

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Honestly he was in fact mostly right presidential election wise. Not only is Biden going to win he's going to win by a decent EV margin.

If someone went into a coma on election night and woke up this morning, they'd tell you that Biden did fairly well and is on track for a solid victory, although downfalls Ds aren't. We just don't see it that way because of a traumatic election night and very slow and gradual shift to Biden.

[Orwell]

This happens in baseball analytics, where Nate started out, allot too. ‘The thing you said had a 30% chance of happening happened, where’s your math now nerd?’

Baseball (much like politics) is followed by some of the most extreme reactionaries known to man.

[Buzz]

He should be unemployed.

[StateBoiler]

What a joke. WI, the likely tipping point state, was off by ~8 points

This. If you guys are looking at this as binary or pass/fail, "Biden" or "Trump", to use a Nate Silver talking point, you don't understand math. A Washington Post/ABC poll had Biden winning Wisconsin 57-40. Even though Biden wins the state, that is horrifically unbelievably wrong. They looked at Wisconsin and thought it was going to be what Rhode Island ended up being. Just consider the total number of voters that are changing their vote between Biden 57-40 in Wisconsin to Biden 49.5-48.8. Size of electorate is 3.3 million.

Nationally, for Change Research that said 55/45, that's even worse. We're talking a swing of about 12 million total voters to what the end result was, or 6 million people they thought were voting for Biden instead voted for Trump.

[DabbingSanta]

Nate Silver is like a meteorologist. Always wrong but still employed.

[ملكة كرينجيتوك]

Nate Silver is like a meteorologist. Always wrong but still employed.

In all fairness to them, day-to-day weather is a hell of a lot harder to predict than long-term climate averages.

[TiltsAreUnderrated]

Much of it isn't Silver's fault but this feels like an admission that 538's efforts were and are likely to remain futile. "We did a good job [despite the results]," is an admission that they have lost predictive power for reasons beyond their control.

538 can't run a heavily poll-based model with such dire polls and expect to win. They will have to reinvent the way they make forecasts.

[emailking]

Absolutely he did. Many said he was "wrong" when he said Trump would lose in 2016, despite giving him a 30% chance to win. By that logic, since Biden won, he was absolutely correct to give him a 90% chance to win.

The snake states that were wrong had >30% chance of going the other way but it doesn't matter. If you judge based on the result, as many did last time, then he called the election exactly correct!

[Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P!]

I think Silver did an okay job adjusting his expectations once the real data was in, but his "model" is pretty much just a polling aggregator and as we've seen there's more to a prediction than polling.

The early vote data out of Florida was far more favourable to Republicans than the polls said it should have been but Nate continued to insist it had a 66% chance of going Biden right up to election night. If you're going to claim to model the election then you should be able to consider factors besides the polls, especially when you're fresh off an election where the polls were totally wrong.

[ChiefFireWaterMike]

What an idiot. I had a lot of respect for him when I first got interested in 2018.

[Skill and Chance]

On one hand, it looks like he is only going to miss 2 states.  On the other hand, the predicted state margins atrociously overestimated Biden.

[StateBoiler]

On one hand, it looks like he is only going to miss 2 states.  On the other hand, the predicted state margins atrociously overestimated Biden.

Looking at who won states versus the predicted numbers is literally treating polling like it's pass/fail when it's not.

[Person Man]

Nobody got this election right.

[Roll Roons]

Nobody got this election right.

King Sabato? (Aside from NC. And he screwed up on a bunch of House and Senate races)

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

FL, TX, OH and IA aren't battlegrounds anylonger. Polls always overy sample D's in FL and TX

[pbrower2a]

Pollsters are very good at assessing the results of advertising campaigns on likely voting when those appear before the last days of the election. They are incompetent at predicting the effect of late-campaign ads such as one that I assume was directed at the economically-ravaged Midwest, to this effect:

(female voiceover):

Let's look at the Democrats.

Biden will raise our taxes. We can't afford that.

Donald Trump will support the police. We need that.

Biden and the Radical Left will take away Trump tax cuts. My husband is out of work, and his employer will need those tax cuts.

Well, that's easy. I'm voting Republican.

Fear, fear, fear -- but it works. Appeal to visceral fears and lusts, and you can get lots of people to buy suspect ideas and products. You must vote for Trump and Republicans even if you hate them because such is your only hope.

One in Florida tried to link Joe Biden to Commie regimes in Cuba and Venezuela. The most virulent, anti-rational opponents of Communism stand for its cruelest, most rapacious, and most despotic exponents of capitalism.

Donald Trump has exposed himself as a sadistic, arrogant, dishonest elitist (on economics if not on his vulgar tastes in thought and images). Horrible people have won elections, as any American must recognize. Scam artists have waxed rich, at least temporarily. Bad medicines and bad machinery have reached the public. People stick with abusive spouses. People still drink hard liquor and smoke cigarettes.

It's up to us from hereon to decide to reject the awful. If we are to accept the dreadful to stave off the horrific (better Franco than Hitler, or better Brezhnev than Pol Pot) then we must be sure that that the horrific is a real menace.  

[Motorcity]

(Sigh)

Can we stop with the idea that the polls were a dumpster fire? Its looking like 538 predicted 48 out of 50 states. That's not bad. Florida and North Carolina were universally considered toss ups anyway.

The polls were golden in 2018. Its not the polls fault, you just can't poll Trump. He has a very motivated base yet they refuse to spend 15 minutes on the phone for a poll

[Bumaye]

Pretty sure his "snake" came out accurately, which is pretty impressive given how inaccurate the polls he was working from turned out to be.

Florida?

Looking at the RCP Average right now, Florida was more accurate then Wisconsin.

BTW you know that the Trump Camp will Start a GOP-civil war soon? If they lose it the GOP will lose a lot of Trump hardliners and if Trump wins then it’s all over anyway.

[NYSforKennedy2024]

He knows his industry will take a hard hit after this and is trying to salvage it.

[Person Man]

Nobody got this election right.

King Sabato? (Aside from NC. And he screwed up on a bunch of House and Senate races)

Hell. Who knows. NC has a better chance of flipping than anything else now.

[HisGrace]

Trafalgar was junk guys, did you not see their final map? They had Trump winning all kinds of states he is not going to win. Them getting Florida right on the broken clock principle does not make them a good pollster. IDK why they're getting a pass for being wrong on AZ, Georgia, Michigan, Penn exc while other polls are getting killed for just getting Florida wrong.

[Meclazine for Israel]

My weather girl never gets the weather right, and she does a better job than Nate Silver.