Are Elections Random?

justinmeiners.github.io

3 pointsjopolous2 comments

A great article from a friend of mine that brought up thoughts on responsible use of statistics and public perception of statistical models vs qualitative analysis.

I've really appreciated the wording in fivethirtyeight's election forecasting, with an emphasis on the frequentist interpretation of "Biden has an x/100 shot of winning", since I think it's the easiest to formalize in a way that the average US citizen without a mathematical background would understand.

This is not exactly my area of expertise, but seems the author should read

Dawid, A. Philip. "The well-calibrated Bayesian." Journal of the American Statistical Association 77.379 (1982): 605-610.

which explains how you should interpret randomness in forecasting non-repeatable events. I don't know if 538 uses Bayesian modeling though. I think Andrew Gelman had written about this once, and as I just checked he just wrote another post on election forecast [1].

[1]: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/07/31/thinking-a...

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