> I believe Nate Silver is answering a subtly different question with his election forecasts. Each data point that Silver produces is answering the question: if the election were to happen today, what is the probability of each candidate winning?

As others have pointed out, this is definitely not what Nate's model was doing. In fact, he did have a version of the model that did exactly this, the so called "Now-Cast" and as expected it was even more volatile than the real model:

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/...