https://www.natesilver.net/p/the-presidential-election-isnt-a
As our model launches, either Biden or Trump could easily win — but the odds are in the ex-president’s favor.
Trump does still lead in our national average — however narrowly. But the bigger problem for Biden though is that elections in the United States aren’t determined by the popular vote.
That's a problem for all of us. If the president were elected by popular vote, Trump would never have been president.
Neither would George W. Bush. Republicans have won the popular vote only once in the last 32 years, and that was Bush as the incumbent in 2004 - which wouldn't have happened had Gore been the incumbent.
This is a center-left country, with an election system that gives extreme right-wingers oversized influence.
The left is larger than the right, here. How does that make it not a center-left country? We're sure as hell not a right-wing country, and much of our government is an accident of antiquated and stupid systems, not a true reflection of the people.
The election system distorts the vote quite dramatically in the US, that's true.
However, depending on where you're from left has quite a different meaning from what Americans mean when they say left. E.g. the Democrats don't want to dismantle capitalism or expropriate real estate companies (the city of Berlin seriously looked into this option). Center left has a similar shift in meaning in other countries.
Those that think they are on the left is larger. When they support politicians viewed around the world as right wing, they too are right wing
Presumably in much the same way that toddlers can't win a high school scholar bowl. Just because one side or type of idea is a clear winner doesn't mean it's not a fair system.
I just put together a model, and it predicts a 77% chance of the Hamburgler winning in 2024.
Go vote. That's the only thing that matters.
In 2022, Dem strategist Simon Rosenberg flatly asserted that there would be no "red wave" and the Dems would overperform expectations.
Nate Silver said the only way Rosenberg could come to that conclusion was that he'd been ingesting "hopium."
Rosenberg was right. Silver was wrong (though he'll die before admitting it).
Then Rosenberg started The Hopium Chronicles, which I suggest you read
Party strategists always say their party is going to do well. It’s part of their job. I don’t think this is particularly meaningful, unless you think there’s some particular methodology he has access to that’s better than Silver’s.
This is a perfectly succinct, textbook example of Outcome Bias.
Betting $1 with a 1 in 3 chance to win $2 is objectively a bad idea; the odds are against you. It doesn't stop being a bad idea if you win the $2 after 1 bet.
Nothing like one person being right and another being wrong in bringing the amateur philosophers out.
Tell me you don't understand directionally or literal numbers without telling me....
Lol no that’s not how any of this works. If I flip a coin and correctly pick the outcome in 2024 will you start paying me to forecast elections?
In one single election, yes. It means nothing, especially when you understand that his job is not to generate an accurate prediction, it’s to energize core supporters into donating to the campaign.
By the way, you can make the same argument in reverse—Trump always overperforms his polling right? If that prediction is accurate then Biden is absolutely going to get trounced. Now I don’t necessarily think this is correct, but it’s a slightly more sophisticated version of the fallacy you are falling prey to here.
Young people don't answer polling calls, and I'm personally expecting the highest under 30 vote turnout ever. No one can predict where this will go.
I agree that polling has been off the last several cycles because it skews older and with that in mind I am asking out of sincere interest - what leads you to expect record turnout in the under-30 demographic?
Nate's predictions turned to crap in 2018 and never came back. Polls don't work anymore and Nate is handicapping trash.
He's always been a fake. Claims to be "just calling balls and strikes" but actually has a center-right agenda. He had a good parlay in 2008 and people have been treating him like a sorcerer ever since.
Nathaniel Read Silver (born January 13, 1978) is an American statistician, writer, and poker player who analyzes baseball, basketball, and elections
Baseball, basketball, and elections. Sure.
Got a text the other day to demand my support for Biden by completing a poll via some suspicious shortened link. Might’ve been legit, more likely a phishing attempt. The wording of it just made me think of the “Trade offer” meme.
Didn’t respond. If this is how pollsters operate they’re gonna be out of business within a decade (should be already) or just continue to get skewed results from braindead fools who click on suspicious links and also vote for blatantly unfit, deranged and dangerous candidates.
I've gotten two texts from two different numbers claiming I'm not registered to vote. Which is weird, because I voted in a primary a couple months back. So I checked my state's voter registration and I'm still there, still getting a mail-in ballot like I asked.
I did a bit of forensics on the links but they just redirect to a GCE instance that returns a 500 error, and the domain registration is anonymized so I can't get any info there. But I'm worried a lot of people are clicking a link that might take them off the voting rolls.
Exactly so. They were always more performative than predictive (remember all those things polls got wrong? No? Funny, that), but in 2024 they’re absolutely reaching and pretending like everything's normal. Trust them, bro.
They get very accurate polling numbers from the "Dumb enough to click on unsolicited sketchy links" demographic.
Same models from 2008-2020, at this point in the cycle, it had Hillary winning, and Biden winning, both by a decent margin.
I think it depends what the campaigns do with this information. Coast, or fight harder?
Vote vote vote. (Just once though).
I am legitimately scared for my safety with the upcoming election. I'm trans and if Trump tries to take my HRT away I will end my life. It would be the final straw so to speak. I will not be forced to live a lie.
2016 was dire, but Nate Silver is often wrong. Polling as it is done today is unreliable at best, and outright lies at worst.
Vote locally, build support networks and hopefully we can weather whatever comes.
could try and get diy hrt from reputable tested vendors. if dark web marketplaces can use the mail to ship real illegal drugs, surely some estradiol will be fine.
Who exactly is included when you say theirs? Reactionary language regardless of target, scope or ideology is rarely productive.
I think there is a lot this fails to capture because certain things are unprecedented. Michigan's GOP is in utter disarray and it isn't the only one. And overturning Roe v Wade has energized the left and disillusioned whatever center remains.
Now these facts are baked into the polling already, so obviously that's a big concern, but I believe this means polling is too far right across the board. I think who makes up likely voters has shifted. RvW drew in younger voters and I think now that they are engaged they will remain so.
Time will tell. I've seen far less Trump support this year than I did in 2020, which yeah is anecdotal, but I think it's an indicator. Of course, even if I'm correct, Michigan isn't going to carry the election alone, and it looks like the rest of the rust belt is further to the right.
Half credit for not giving Hillary the 97% chance everyone else and their dog did. But that’s it.
Remember, Nate Silver predicted that Hillary Clinton would win in 2016, and when Trump won instead, it was chalked up to the fact that it really was a random chance.
Don't panic about this. Keep quiet and keep doing the work to get Trump thrown out. And charge your mental health bills to the Democrats, for putting up an old man up for election in 2020, one who's even older than Trump, in the first place.
I don't remember him predicting that she would win. His model (https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/) gave her a 71% chance of winning. 71% is a long way from 100%, and the result of that election definitely fit within the model.
That said, you are absolutely correct... we need to keep shining a light on the realities of each of these candidates, because in the light of day Biden is a much better choice than Trump.
Yeah, his model gave her less of a chance than most others and their podcast constantly, over and over, warned people that this means Trump wins three elections if you run it ten times. People who wrote 538 off because it didn't call the election for Trump are some of the dumbest mouthbreathers you'll run into.
Which would make it a more extreme position than his position in this election, so the point stands.
I agree... I was simply clarifying that Nate Silver did NOT predict that Hillary would win (nor is he predicting that Trump will win this election), which is a common misunderstanding about probability. For these types of models to be meaningful to the public, there needs to be literacy on what is meant by the percentages given. Really, I'm just reinforcing rodneylives' point from another angle!
Iirc, didn’t he give Trump a much higher chance of winning than other outlets, even though it was still a small chance compared to Hillary?
Yeah well there was also that nice October surprise. Prediction models don't work well with stuff like that.
And yet, that is what those models claim to do. If the possibility of late-breaking events is not included in the model then the model is flawed.
Then nothing matters because the bombshell pictures proving child sexual assault could always drop. An October surprise is called that for a reason. It's something out of left field that could not have been predicted, prepared for, or recovered from. To say prediction models must allow for that means you never get anything other than a 50/50 prediction and everything is useless. We should all just stay home and let life come at us. After all, we could get hit by a toilet from space at any moment.
Silver's model will only actually matter once voting starts. Until then he may as well be a poll aggregator. Which, if the polls are flawed, then his aggregation and model will be flawed.
It's all statistics. It means that if we ran the 2024 election millions of times in his model, Trump would win more than Biden. But we will only get one shot, so the number is kind of useless.
I was watching the Mets game this weekend on ESPN, and they were ahead of the Cubs by a few runs. ESPN has a tracker that estimates "Win Probability" and their model gave the Mets a 75% chance to win. But have you seen the Mets this year? They've blown a bunch of games late. Every Mets fan watching knew that their bullpen wasn't good enough to merit that rating.
The Mets did end up winning that game. (Thanks, Grimace.) But that doesn't change the fact that no matter what math is behind their win prediction model, it just doesn't feel right to apply statistics like that to one-off events.
Don't worry, little Yankee fan. It's not your fault you ran headfirst into the Grimace Effect. Now come closer -- I need to bottle up some of those tears for comfort when the wheels fall off the wagon after the ASG, as is tradition.
That's all the media can do nowadays. It's a bunch of journalism graduates twiddling their fingers while cranking out endless "Read the Tea Leaves!" type articles. Everything nowadays is "survey says this", "polls say that", "model says this", "odds predict this or that". It's literally everywhere from sports to politics to the stock market, it requires zero thought or in-depth analysis, and it's both a response to and a cause of the decline in mainstream and investigative journalism. It's team-based tribalism through and through.
I predict people will get sick of that shit. Especially when they start branding it as AI-driven.
Edit: with the exception of that football-predicting octopus. He’s cool.
Oh absolutely, and that AI part is already happening with local news outlets and some national sports outlets.
Well if we could only fix the voting system..
Republican voters are wildly over represented.
ITT: People not understanding probabilistic forecasts.
Nate Silvers models are not perfect, but pretty close. You can do retro analysis on them to see. If someone with a 5% chance to win actually does win, that doesn't mean the model was wrong... That just needs to actually happen only 5% of the time.
Getting elections"wrong" as people are talking about here shows they don't really know how these models work. If you haven't looked at the retrospective analysis on these results, then you are likely unqualified to declare that they are useless or wrong.
Is that a 65% chance of a Trump electoral college or popular vote victory? I think last time it predicted that Hillary would win the popular vote. Then she did.
It was not a prediction of victory... it was a 71% chance of winning the electoral college. Said another way, they gave her a 29% chance of losing.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/
