How is being slightly less wrong than everyone else "having a great track record"? Serious question. Because I find it hard to take any of them seriously after the debacle that was 2016.
It simply wouldn't have been possible for the models to be more accurate with the data they had. As they say, bad data in, bad data out.
That's why this time around the pollsters made sure to be more thorough in their polling.
"This time is different."
I've heard that enough times to be highly skeptical. I'm also deeply skeptical of the notion that polling is even remotely correlated to actual results. Cultural and historical trends play a drastically higher role and are almost always left out.
But it has been strongly correlated to the results in basically all elections so far in all democracies on the planet. Taking 2016 as an example there has been a very strong correlation between polling and the results. The national polling averages were only 3 points off from the actual result. If that's not correlated I don't know what is.
As for fear of doxing: plenty of people openly supported and voted for George Wallace (a noted white Supremacist) back in the day, and even Roy Moore (accused pedophile) just 2 years ago. Proud Boys members openly pose for the cameras even as they espouse racist views, and QAnon members brag about being part of QAnon.
The purported shy Trump voter? Doesn't exist. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-supporters-arent-...
Not every Trump voter is a "Proud Boy" or noted white supremacist, maybe even some of your friends are who "just aren't interested in politics" because they know that if they were honest with you, you would flip out. Some understand that this attitude about yard signs is actually representative of an entire worldview, and opposing that might actually be the lesser of two evils.
Essentially I think that those narratives about one side "shutting down" the other side are not true for either party. In my opinion they are mainly the result of filter bubbles where you are constantly presented to all the outrageous things that the other side is doing (the above mentioned article is clearly an example) while actually people remain largely civil and are not tied to their political identity in such an extreme way.
It's also likely this works in both directions - if you support Biden, I bet you don't have a yard sign for it if you live in Mississippi.
By construction, the effect is strongest the more you're not in the majority, which also means your unspoken support is more likely to not matter on the actual outcomes of the election.
If anything, Trump supporters have been extremely vocal about who they were supporting, to the extent that they frequently violate social norms and try to takeover events and gatherings to make their political affiliations known, like this week with Among Us.
Newsflash, they aren't, so your hypothesis must be they're too shy to admit their Trump support to a machine?
Everybody is just fighting the last war where Trump suddenly won for a couple of reasons. So, the Dems are scared they are missing something, and the Reps are going "Haha, who cares about modelling".
Will, the forecasts be perfect? Nope. But is the margin rather large, but not unsurmountable? Yes it is. Are the mistakes from last time repaired? Yes, they take care of uneducated whites. Is there evidence Trump has found a new source of voter support? I haven't seen it.
There is a 0.750.750.75*0.75 or a 31% chance of no rain at all
Personally I would have put it about 60-40 Hillary-Trump.
From my point of view, this is only because said people considered Trump winning so extremely unlikely that 538 getting it sort of right appears exceptional. In reality, they were still quite wrong, just slightly less so. Ergo I don't see much value in their model.
I'm seeing the same exact thing today with Biden at a 90% chance of winning.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/
If I had a laptop that only worked 1/4th of the time, rather than 1/20th of the time, would that make it a reliable laptop? I don't think so.
For example: anyone paying attention to the Rust Belt ±1980-2016 would have dramatically upped Trump's chances in Pennsylvania and Michigan. FiveThirtyEight had Hillary with 70%+ chance of winning both, which to me, shows a deep ignorance of actual cultural factors.
There was a very decent chance that Clinton could have won in 2016 (if any factor had gone slightly better for her), and if that had happened, nobody would be saying this now. This is literal hindsight bias.
My view is simple: the media completely, totally got 2016 wrong, mostly for sociological reasons. The people making the predictions simply had a huge blind spot. Brexit is another similar situation. The fact that Hillary almost won or Brexit almost didn't happen isn't really the point, because both things were never expected to be even remotely that close. Had the predictions been "Pennsylvania will be close", it would be relevant, but those weren't the predictions.
Also, it doesnt make sense to look at a single prediction to evaluate a model.
Out of all the predictions they have made (did you look at individual state predictions?), how many were correct (and how confident were they?) - how many were wrong (and how close to 50% were they?).
That is how you evaluate a model (aka cross entropy)
It's unfortunate we can't just run the election again a few times, and actually find the rate at which Trump is elected given the polls.
And it's not empty signalling if 538 assigned Trump a higher chance of winning; they were pretty much the only ones saying he has a chance. That is why people think the models are useful.
How else would one predict the outcome of a die roll, specifically?