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> What value does something like fivethirtyeight add to our democracy, if any?

One possible use of polls and election models is for helping people who want to donate to candidates determine which races are closest and where their money is most likely to have an impact.

> Here’s an idea: everyone go vote for whoever you think the best candidate is regardless of what a stack of polls say.

Because the US does not have ranked choice voting in most elections, polls are useful to determine which candidates are viable. If your preferred candidate is only polling at 5%, they are pretty unlikely to win, so you might want to vote instead for whichever of the leading candidates you find most agreeable.

Apart from what others have said, I think it also good to have independent polls to shine light on fraudulent elections. For example, see what happened in Belarus recently where public polling is banned.

Well, I’m not particularly affected by this (I live in a state that hasn’t been considered purple for at least a decade and probably shouldn’t have been for the decade prior), but... most election systems have some form of strategic voting behavior—either built in (all manner of ranked voting), or based on understanding of the system and being underserved by it. In the US, that could look like leftish people in VA seeing that the state is reasonably safe to do its part to oust trump, and people of the same lean in NC not seeing the same level of safety. Or rightish people in Georgia feeling less safe bucking the Rs, and so on.

In this system, there are two ways to democratically influence politics by voting:

1. Vote your preferred candidate

2. Withhold your vote from the party more closely aligned with your views, in hopes of helping shift its coalition priorities

If you fall into the second category, accurate forecasting makes a strategic difference.

It's worth pointing out that the other thing 538 does besides political polling is analyzing the performance of sports teams. Americans are just drawn to the horse race. (See also: American Idol, which also involves voting.)

>Here’s an idea: everyone go vote for whoever you think the best candidate is regardless of what a stack of polls say.

On the one hand, I think I get your sentiment. On the other, I mean, we are all just solitary individuals floating through this life. Almost all of our important decisions are make at least in part (or more in some cases) dependent on the thoughts and actions of others. That's natural, right? You do otherwise in your life?

If the above is true, it makes total sense why one out of 7 billion plus people would want to understand the choices of others before making theirs.

> what is the point of it?

Great question, and I share some of your concern, though I can imagine some positive framings in addition to what you wrote. For example, to use an analogy, what’s the point of trying to predict the weather, or trying to predict the stock market? There are lots of reasons including planning ahead for likely outcomes, the ability to protect against losses, and last but not least making money.

I can also imagine that the desire to talk about the potential outcomes is valuable as a social activity, and doesn’t necessarily need to meet a standard of influencing the vote, or adding to our democracy.

> My concern is that these things are distracting and may actually dissuade some people from voting because they think they “don’t have to.”

Of course if your concern is founded, this can go both ways... if the polls show the candidate you favor starting to lose, it could be a call to vote.

If polls are distracting and dissuade voters, then unfortunately election results might do exactly the same or worse. When a state has been solidly red or blue and not purple for 50 years in a row, people do (perhaps rightly so) jump to conclusions about the outcome in advance.

One question we could ask is whether, if voting were made mandatory, would election predictions go away? I’d speculate no.

Diving deep into baseball statistics has actually changed how the game is played. I understand your sentiment overall, I don't agree with your sentiment because there are valid use cases for predictive analysis in polotics, but regardless G whether I agree or disagree about political polling - using baseball analytics as an example is not appropriate.

The point is that people want to know what's going to happen before it happens. If I believed a Democrat was sure to win, I would want to allocate my stock portfolio different than if a Republican were to win.

Also, you can make money betting on the outcome itself. If the odds you get are underpriced relative to an accurate forecast, that's a great bet to take.

Furthermore, these forecasts influence where politicians put their focus. Let's say you're Hillary in '16 and you think Wisconsin is yours despite the forecast showing a narrow lead, maybe you should reconsider.

There's nothing scientific about any of this trash. It's a weird conflation of the degree of the incompetence of pollsters and the degree to which opinions can be changed within a span of time. And it's completely unfalsifiable. When Trump wins, the true believers will say "We gave him a 9.684% chance of winning! It's only your ignorance that makes you think we were wrong" and they go back to poring over their race tables.

It's an orgy of false precision.

edit: the entire debate is based on the weird assumption that if a prediction about a particular state is wrong, then pollsters must have systematically gotten middle-class Hispanic women over 40 wrong, therefore the odds of other states will change. It's all based in the reification of particular categories that are axiomatically significant for their profession.

> And it's completely unfalsifiable. When Trump wins, the true believers will say "We gave him a 9.684% chance of winning! It's only your ignorance that makes you think we were wrong" and they go back to poring over their race tables.

> It's an orgy of false precision.

The false precision is pretty obviously coming from you, not the FiveThirtyEight pages that never show more than two (or rarely three) significant figures, and emphasize in every other way they can that the numbers are approximate and uncertain. Have you seen the width of the 80% confidence intervals on their graphs?

As for falsification: all of their predictions are for testable outcomes. We'll always know soon enough who actually wins an election, and which states they won, and by what margin, and who turned out to vote. That's all public record. The only part of the post-hoc analysis that is non-trivial is figuring out how a candidate fared with specific demographic groups. It's imperfect, but between exit polling and precinct-level demographic information and election results, it certainly is possible to detect large pre-election polling errors resulting from inaccurate demographic weighting.

> When Trump wins

So, wait, you're offended by the election modellers making a prediction, and yet you yourself are making a prediction? What's yours based on? Time machine?