FiveThirtyEight 2022 Election Forecast
projects.fivethirtyeight.com
projects.fivethirtyeight.com
And the same 538 concurred with 87% chance of a Clinton win.
And the very same 538 that claimed a “Comey Effect” that purportedly botched their deep analytical effort, posthumously.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-a-clinton-landslid...
> Trump is a significant underdog — he has a 13 percent chance of winning the election according to our polls-only model and a 23 percent chance according to polls-plus. But those probabilities aren’t that small. For comparison, you have a 17 percent chance of losing a “game” of Russian roulette.
A) Their more advanced model gave Trump a 23% chance, the 13% chance you mention is their simpler model.
B) Things with a 23%, 13%, and 7% chance happen all the time
C) You often have a better understanding of events after they happen relative to before.
If you want to show a predictor is unreliable, you need to look at a bunch of their predictions and see how they perform in aggregate. While also considering how correlated the results are (and, if applicable, predicted to be)
As far as I have read of their blogs, they’re par for the course.
I mean it’s not like them attaining “The Founders” status (excuse me, Isaac Asimov), not even closed.
Their seems to be a systemetic bias for them to be underconfident. That is to say, when they a result is likly (>50%) to happen, they underestimate how likely. Conversly, when they think an event is less likely (<50%), they overestimate its chances. Still, more likely events tended to occur more often than less likely events.
Correcting for this systematic error would mean they should have given Clinton an even higher chance.
Yes, and the publish datasets of all their work to let others analyze them too. They're the most accurate of all the major sites.
Here's their github site [1]. It contains tons of datasets, past performance, analysis tools, everything you want to actually check if your claims are true or false, and most importantly, how accurate 538 has been over time.
Now try to do that analysis on, say, Fox News :)
Good luck.
What exactly were they supposed to do? Ignore polls that show him behind and divine somehow that he was actually going to win based off of nothing?
Note: This isn't me saying I support or don't support Trump.
When your state is a single dude standing in a field filled with cows, getting the popular vote doesn't say much.
1. https://beef2live.com/story-cattle-inventory-vs-human-popula...
Your comment implies that the needs of these states is somehow less important in the governance of our nation.
Getting rid of the electoral college system in favor of popular vote isn't enough. A couple states drive the productive, agricultural, intellectual and economic engines of our country. In a meritocracy, these states would dictate federal policy. Instead they're subject to the capricious whims of deadbeats. Another way to put it: who really needs who?
Some players are MJ or Kobe or Lebron, some sit on the bench. That's life.
Here's a map showing where all the votes were cast:
https://engaging-data.com/county-electoral-map-land-vs-popul...
1. More Americans live in suburbs than in urban areas, so they actually represent a larger share of the popular vote.
2. The electoral does not actually bias small states that significantly. California’s share of the popular vote was 11.0% in 2020, while it cast 10.2% of EVs.
3. The electoral college primarily biases large, tipping point states. Biden won California by a 63-34 landslide, while trump won Florida 51-48. In both cases, each candidate gets 100% of the electoral votes rather than a proportional amount.
4. Finally, the electoral college biases low turnout states vs high turnout ones, as EC votes are based on population and senators not actual votes themselves. In 2016 for example, Texas cast fewer votes than Florida, even though it is the second biggest state by population, and it got to cast 7 move EC votes.
As an aside, it’s always telling that when this debate comes up, people will always say that “California and New York will decide the election”, referencing the largest and fourth largest states, while leaving out Texas and Florida, the second and third largest…
2. As my comment outlines, the electoral college actually does very little to protect minority interests.
3. Further, it has almost never actually worked as the founders intended. They didn’t predict the existence of political parties and expected the electoral college to actually involved real debates and voting within the body itself, not as it works today where they are essentially decided before they attend. The founders intended for the EC to be a filtering step among a multitude of candidates before the final election was decided by the house, voting as state level blocs.
What you’re arguing is post hoc rationalization that doesn’t even fit the facts on the ground.
Does NASCAR bestow awards based on how much fuel you used?
Does Wimbledon award prize money for how fast you smack a tennis ball?
Using an irrelevant metric to claim a make-believe victory is simply childish and emotional.
Presidential candidates win elections based on the electoral college votes, themselves decided by the popular vote outcome in each state. In 2016, Trump won more states, thusly more EC votes. Therefore he became president and Hillary was sent back to the over-priced lecture circuit.
Any other metric you use to decide who won is simply self-delusion.
Only a minority of people did.
What’s wild about 2016 is that people seem to have bought into the narrative that because it was such an upset of the mainstream media’s expectations, that somehow that translated into an actual landslide.
Trump didn’t win the popular vote, and his actual margin in the decisive states was razor thin as well.
Did he have more passionate fans than Hilary? Clearly. But a passion vote counts the exact same amount as a “lesser of two evils” vote. See: 2020.
It's the whole reason startups go for natural marketing. Users that naturally come upon and love your product will proselyte it more and better than anyone else.
The entire media apparatus with only a few notable exceptions worked tirelessly to undermine Trump at every opportunity and suppress negative stories about Biden. There was almost no media coverage of Biden’s obvious mental decline, lack of energy to campaign, low rally turnout, his son’s incriminating laptop, blatantly racist comments made by Biden both during his decades serving as a Senator and even during the campaign (such as the infamous “you ain’t black” comment on Charlamagne tha God’s show.
What the media, both the social and traditional varieties, did to Trump is disgusting and goes way beyond bias. It was a targeted campaign with the goal of undermining and removing him from office from the moment he won the election. Propping up and protecting Biden was a means to an end.
I and a lot of other people strongly disagreed with both his policies and his character, which were on plain display constantly and unfiltered on Twitter.
How'd that work out in 2020?
By 2020, no one was underestimating Trump anymore, and it was clear people cared enough to vote him out for real. The energy at his rallies was no longer there. His subreddit, where the massive following was making strong waves during 2016 elections, was gone. Hillary not running anymore helped as well.
And that's just the most obvious things.
In 2020, obviously senile and charisma-void, candidate Joe Biden surprisingly manifested ~81 (Edit: actually 8) million more votes than the 'second-coming of Christ' Barack Obama before him, while speaking to low double-digit audiences at his rally stops. Really makes you think.
Edit: in 2020 Biden received 81,284,000 votes , Trump 74,221,000 votes, while in 2008 Obama got 69,498,516 votes
Thanks to the user remarking on the error. It's the kind of mistake that happens when you rewrite a comment ten times.
If my interpretation is correct, then I think you're missing the big factor that conservatives and registered Republicans actively campaigned for Biden. They didn't just reject Trump, they explicitly said they were voting Biden, Campaigned for him, asked their fellow GOP members to vote Biden over Trump.
At the end of the day, you had Democrats + Independents + Conservatives voting Biden. That coalition didn't exist during Obama's time. In fact, the people who most likely voted for Romney were the people who were now voting for Biden
I have absolutely no idea how this could be good science.
Especially given the outcome of 2020.
They say explicitly how this works: they run simulations and count winners. That means among their simulations is very likely to be an instance that is similar to the real outcome.
So what? If you only make enough enough predictions then some of those will turn out predict the future correctly. It is how "The Simpsons did it first" meme came into being.
If we have a coin and we say "It's 50% chance it lands heads" and it lands tails, were we wrong?
If we have a 20-sided die and we say "It has a 5% chance of landing on 20" and it lands on 20, were we wrong?
If the coin is subsequently flipped and comes up Tails, it doesn't mean your analysis was wrong.
On the other hand, 538's simulation was based on probabilities of winning each state, and as I think most will agree, before and after the election, the most important states were Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. On election day, 538 gave the following probabilities:
Wisconsin 83.5% Clinton [1]
Pennsylvania 77.0% Clinton [2]
Michigan 78.9% Clinton [3]
I think Nate really screwed the pooch here. The vast bulk of his effort should have been spent on these states. If that is in fact the case, then I retract my criticism.
[1] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/... [2] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/... [3] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/...