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Comment by greesil | Hacker News Reader

Well there goes any somewhat reliable election forecasting for the US

I don’t think reliable forecasting is gone. Nate Silver does not bring any new data to the table. However, he does have good models to translate a whole bunch of raw, often contradictory, data into something more representative of reality.

That being said, it’s not going anywhere. He will either self publish or join another firm. He might rejoin NYTimes for example.

That's heartening. Mainstream media election coverage is infuriating. Nate is the antidote for me.

https://election.princeton.edu/

Princeton had Clinton at a >99% chance in their 2016 election forecast.

Yeah, they used the obviously bad model that each state's results are independent rolls of the dice.

Which, flawed models can still be useful, but I seem to recall them being pretty arrogant about their prediction in 2016 too, before the fact.

The very idea of election forecasting is harmful to democracy and should be shunned wherever it appears.

If it's not being done in public, it's absolutely being done in private. Do you believe democratizing that data is a bad thing?

Yes, it’s quite possible that “democratizing” election forecasts is bad. A public forecast may influence the likelihood of voting while a private forecast would not.

I don’t think this is the case at all. The whole purpose of private forecasting is to judge how your efforts are doing with the electorate, and adjust your strategy, poll/assess again, rinse and repeat.

They don’t just forecast and shrug at the results.

Not having public forecasting influences voting.

Either way votes are going to be influenced.

The benefit of democratizing those forecasts is to reduce surprises / rigged election accusations.

this is an interesting take. why do you say that?

It’s pretty easy: if someone is projected to win, voters who were planning to vote for that person might stay home to avoid “wasting their time” since they’re going to win anyway. Then that person doesn’t win because the voters didn’t show up.

Or conversely, people don’t go out and vote for their candidate because their candidate is projected to lose.

People are going to make their own electoral decisions on their own terms, whether you, or I or anyone else agrees with them or how they came about their decisions. That’s about as democratic as it gets. Forecasts can inform those decisions, but they don’t decide them.

EDIT: I have no love for iOS’s tendency to capitalize “democratic” or “republican” against my wishes.

Which is remarkably stupid considering election day is voting for dozens or more positions.

It's really not there's a lot of places where publishing polls is illegal. Public opinion is easily influenced by perception of public opinion. That's basically all of style, design and fashion, and polls can always be crafted to get the results you want or outright lie.

Also what actual benefit does it serve to poll before elections if not to influence the outcome.

I think maybe internal polling could be ok. But is it? Should politicians have their positions and push them, why should they change or hide their views in response to polling. We should be able to vote on unfiltered versions of politicians not people who are malleable to whatever will let them win.

I thought the whole idea of a democracy is to carry out the will of the people through the politicians they vote into power. In that case, politicians following polls is the most ideal way. It's not like the people a large number of politicians they can vote into specific offices; almost always it's a choice between a small number of politicians.

While I readily admit to feeling like my comment could be seen as sealioning, but could you post some links and/or search terms I could use to try to research why one might hold an opinion like this?

I don't know whether to agree or disagree with this; I'm new enough to not have come across this particular opinion before (that I've noticed).

It's simple: Election forecasting is often used as a form of voter manipulation, if not outright suppression.

People should vote for the candidate that they want to win, not the candidate that the tv says has a better chance of winning.

Isn’t the 538 approach of rigorous modeling a lot less likely to be manipulation than than the often vibes-based approach it replaced? Their predictions are based on actual polling, so they won’t take a candidate with real support and propaganda the support away with their forecasts.

What purpose does predicting the outcome of an election serve in a democracy?

People want predictions for various reasons, but in general, predictions are good for making plans and preparing for the future. Elections are just one of many examples of an outcome you might want to predict, alongside crop yields, population growth, product sales, etc.

I don’t have any deep thoughts about how these predictions serve democracy, but if people are interested in that line of inquiry, they should go ahead and pursue it.

This only works where there is a candidate you want to win, who possibly can win. For example, where I vote in the UK, there are only two choices: Conservative or Liberal Democrat. Which you vote for has more to do with which of those you dislike least and not which is preferable (which would, frankly, be a golden retriever in a rosette, who would be more effective than either party).

> who possibly can win

huh, who told you that, the people forecasting the election?

No, a basic understand of history.

The last time someone that was not a member of the Conservative party, Liberal Democrat party, or one of the direct predecessors of these parties was 1857. If you count the Whigs as a predecessor of the Liberal party, that goes back to 1830, which is the earliest election listed on Wikipedia.

It is safe to say that Bath will not be represented by someone who is not a member of one of those two parties any time soon, regardless of what forecasts may or may not say.

Making stuff up.

Free speech, but not if it's consequential.

Would this opinion still hold in places where voting is mandatory (or more precisely, not voting is penalized)? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_voting

An attempt at a steelman argument is that it has the potential to influence the outcome by shifting voter attitudes. If we consider the 2016 election, since most predictions were leaning so heavily towards Hillary Clinton that might've caused her supporters to be less likely to go out and vote, thinking that she's already likely to win so there's no need for them to participate. If the messaging had been that the election is going to be extremely close and every single vote matters then you might've gotten improved voter participation. At least this is one variation of argument which I've encountered, but I'm not sure if there's strong empirical research to back up the claim.

After the lesson of 2016, messaging about election participation for 2020 was much more active which lead to the highest voter turnout of the century.

Edit: Upon further reflection, I'm actually not fully convinced of this line of thinking. Or at least I think it's not a fully accurate representation. We can also consider the other perspective in 2016, if Donald Trump supporters had thought the election was hopeless because of polling, they probably wouldn't have bothered to go vote. Although my understanding is that Republicans are already inherently less trusting of these kinds of systems, which might provide a plausible explanation for why they weren't as negatively affected.

Generally it is something like "Candidate X is winning already, they don't need my vote to help so I'll save myself some and skip the voting process" or "Candidate Y is winning, there's no way my vote will change that, I won't even bother."

Same argument for early reporting of early voting (early voting itself I got no problem with, but keep the ongoing tally quiet imo).

The best case for maximum participation is when voters truly believe their vote may matter. We see this recently with nearly 49/51 splits in many elections over the last few years/decades. Some see this as polarization (and I often agree), but it can also be seen as a result of increased participation. Whether increased participation in democracy is ideal or not, well... "a republic [...] if you can keep it." [1]

1: https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/creating-the-united-states/conv...

Ironically, FiveThirtyEight actually reviewed the literature on the effects of polling blackouts and concluded that the evidence was complicated and mixed. (See https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/does-knowing-whom-other....)

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