538 Model Megathread

[IceSpear]

Are we really going to pretend that Johnson will get more than 2-3% of the vote at best for this entire cycle?

[IceSpear]

This is why it was pointless to start this before the conventions. Why bother showing these massive swings we all knew were coming?

[IceSpear]

I enjoyed this description of what each of the forecasts are 'thinking' right now.

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The now cast sounds a lot like the Atlas Forum!

Glad to say I sounded like Polls-plus though.

[IceSpear]

Didn't Nate think Rhode Island could be a battleground state based off a single shoddy Emerson poll? lol

It's funny how despite how "complex and advanced" his model is that it can fall prey to the most obvious screw up in the book: taking a single poll seriously when there's no corroboration. Doubly so if the poll is from a shoddy firm. Triply so if the poll is completely out of line with what you'd expect.

[IceSpear]

Didn't Nate think Rhode Island could be a battleground state based off a single shoddy Emerson poll? lol

It's funny how despite how "complex and advanced" his model is that it can fall prey to the most obvious screw up in the book: taking a single poll seriously when there's no corroboration. Doubly so if the poll is from a shoddy firm. Triply so if the poll is completely out of line with what you'd expect.

It's all about probability. If you have a small number of polls, it is true that they, likely, get too much weight. More polls improves the accuracy of the model. As people discussed above, even a state like Alaska, which does have some polls, gives a larger chance of an upset because we can't "know" what's going to happen as well as we might in Georgia, even if Georgia, in all likelihood should be closer than Alaska (or anyway should be to the left of Alaska), because Alaska has more uncertainty, there is statistically a greater chance it could swing in an election about this close...similarly based on a tight race and a close poll, there was a decent chance RI could have been a surprising result. It makes sense to me, anyway.

And it should be noted one national poll won't swing the numbers that much... there needs to be corroboration as this could be an outlier, an odd moment in time, on the edge of the margin of error, etc... not to mention as Trump's chances drop, it is harder for the raw % change to be as great (moving from 22% to 20% is a pretty large move while going from 48% to 46% is a pretty small move).

There's a pretty big difference though between a "small number of polls" and a single shoddy poll. I could see placing some weight on the former, but not the latter.

[IceSpear]

He never thought Rhode Island was a swing state. That one poll showing Clinton up by only 3 (with no other polls showing otherwise) did cause Trump to have over a 10 percent chance of winning Rhode Island for a while, which while seemingly ridiculous given past results there, is probably about right given a lack of any other evidence.

That same pollster, Emerson, now has Clinton up by 20 in their latest poll, thereby "fixing" the Rhode Island odds.

It was 25% on the now-cast. lmao. That's completely embarrassing.

[IceSpear]

^ You do realize stuff like that is based on the past relationship between poll results (including apparent outlier polls) and actual results?  He's not just making it up.  You can have a serious conversation about how to handle uncertainty, and how to weight new data vs. fundamental data, but it's kind of lame to criticize a counterintuitive model outcome without providing any real criticism of the underlying assumptions or methodology.

This reminds me of the people who argued "Nate wasn't wrong about Michigan...Sanders winning was just the 0.01% event actually occuring!" In other words, Nate and his model can never be wrong under any circumstances. How convenient.

As for the methodology, you don't need a Ph.D. in statistics or political science to realize that giving Donald Trump a 25% chance of winning the state of Rhode Island is absurd. Common sense certainly prevailed over all those complex models that showed a Romney landslide.

[IceSpear]

He never thought Rhode Island was a swing state. That one poll showing Clinton up by only 3 (with no other polls showing otherwise) did cause Trump to have over a 10 percent chance of winning Rhode Island for a while, which while seemingly ridiculous given past results there, is probably about right given a lack of any other evidence.

That same pollster, Emerson, now has Clinton up by 20 in their latest poll, thereby "fixing" the Rhode Island odds.

It was 25% on the now-cast. lmao. That's completely embarrassing.

Well I'm glad you know better than everyone else that Trump wouldn't have had a 25% chance to win Rhode Island at that exact moment (which is the variable the Now-Cast "predicts").

Any person with a brain cell knew/knows that, but thanks for being glad for me anyway.

Hillary Clinton had a 70% chance of winning Alabama on August 21st, 2016 at 8:03 AM. Prove me wrong.

[IceSpear]

Nothing to see here. The email news will have no impact whatsoever. The Baghdad Bobs told me so.

[IceSpear]

Very glad the discredited fraud's model now has Trump winning NV.

[IceSpear]

Nate is an awful spot here. If Hillary wins, he'll look bad because he was so bullish on Trump relative to the other forecasters. But even if Trump wins he'll get no credit, since he still has Hillary as a (very) modest favorite.

Hopefully Tuesday will spell the end of the discredited fraud's career.

[IceSpear]

Nate "Discredited Fraud" Silver herding to the consensus the day before the election? Sad!