2016 Election Polling

You remember incorrectly.https://www.vox.com/2016/11/3/13147678/nate-silver-fivethirt...

The "polls" did not predict the electoral college, they ask people how they are going to vote and how likely the are to vote i.e. the popular vote. Other predictions are a seperate step done afterwards using the polls as input, generally not by polling companies. And at least one such prediction by 538 had it as a 1/3 chance of Trump winning, which considering how narrow the eventual gap was, is a pretty darn accurate prediction.A couple of other people did say 99%, but they we

In this case the candidates were very close. Fivethirtyeight's estimate had Hillary at 48.5% of the vote and Trump at 44.9% (and the rest on other canditates), only 3.6% apart.[1]Usually, when things aren't quite so close, polls are a more useful gauge since they're more likely to be correct about who'll win as the gap widens.[1] https://projects.fivethirtyeight

"It's a foregone conclusion".. ?? Because of Nate Silver's statistical analysis of polls? The polls which themselves are flawed. The "statistics" are based on nothing but polls, all with margins of errors and varied methodology. A sample of 1000 people can hardly predict an entire state, because there are many factors that influence turnout that aren't captured in polls. Being the subject of a poll is generally a passive activity -- they come to you, while going to vote is an active activity. "L

Nate Silver was merely wrong, as compared to everyone else, who were spectacularly wrong. I'm not sure how that counts as a ringing endorsement.These polls also never factor in things like "social acceptability of admitting that one voted for an unpopular candidate" or "groupthink among media organizations which aligns to their side of the isle." The entire polling fiasco should be interpreted as the limitations of quantitative data, as opposed to qualitative data.

The President is not elected by popular vote, and I should hope that the polling probabilities take that into account.312 to 226 (58%/42%) was the final electoral college count. Do you know what the Polymarket odds for the race were at 11:30pm on November 4th, the day before election day? 59.8% Trump, 40.2% Harris. Yes, actually, seriously, go look them up, they didn't just correctly predict the winner, the odds themselves were within an incredibly accurate margin for the actual ele

Highly disagree that it was "useless":1. First, when many pundits were basically saying there was no chance that Trump would win, Silver was particularly highlighting not just that it was in the realm of possibility, but would not even be very surprising if Trump won (e.g. I think Nate does a good job with his "same probability of a team down by 3 points at the beginning of the 4th quarter coming back to win" to clarify to a lay person that this isn't unusual).2. W

Incorrectly forecasting an election result (where polls ended up having substantial errors) is hardly "fake" news.

I don't think he has a specific "model" for his "predictions". Reading his recent article, he uses statistics and weights informations gathered by polls to determine the probability of each candidate winning per state. You can't really be "wrong" in that sense, but the actual result can vary due to statistical sampling error, polling error, or bias in the polls.Source: fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/03/nov-2-for-romney-to-win-state-polls-must-be-statistically-biased

Your argument doesn't hold water at all. Today's blurb in the forecast page - "First, the forecast is now totally polls-based; that is, any advantage our forecast gave Trump for the economy or for being an incumbent is no longer factored in. Second, the uncertainty around how much the polls will change between today and Election Day is also no longer an issue." - that means Nate Silver is explicitly saying his forecast is always trying to predict what is going to happen on No