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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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