Hacker News Reader

Comment by eigenspace | Hacker News Reader

You didn't listen to what the pollsters were saying.

What they said was that they could not predict the outcome, and were giving basically 50/50 odds of either candidate winning, which is essentially just another way of saying "I have no idea".

Just because their odds were 50/50 though, does not mean the outcome would be close. The pollsters were all warning that the swing states would likely be strongly correlated, so if a candidate performed strongly in one swing state, they'd probably perform strongly in all of them.

View on HN

I guess the US has it's own version of 'Shy Tories' where right-leaning voters aren't inclined to share their views (truthfully or otherwise) with polls.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shy_Tory_factor

I think it has less to do with shyness and more the fact that almost nobody speaks to pollsters on either side of the isle. Most polling is done by phone call. When was the last time you answered a call from an unknown number?

They do adjust for this when doing the polls. The Shy Tory factor was relevant in 2016, though.

I don't think Republican voters are shy.

It's just incredibly hard to build a representative sample of the population.

It absolutely does. You can generally count on anyone who describes themselves as "Centrist" or "Apolitical" (doubly so if you're on a dating site) to be more to the right.

It used to be "Libertarian" which for a subset was "I'm a Republican who likes to smoke weed".

the5avage is asking why the polls 'failed', that is, could not predict the result despite the clarity of the outcome. Being unable to compute an answer is the same thing as failing for pollsters.

I disagree. There's a big difference between saying "kamala will win, it's certain", and "we don't know".

That's true, lacking confidence is less of a failure than confidently getting it wrong. But they weren't actually saying "we don't know". They were predicting a split election. Do pollsters even have a way to report that they lack enough confidence to give a prediction? I rarely see CIs on reported poll results so presumably they'd have to just refuse to publish any prediction at all, which clearly, they weren't doing.

Nate Silver has recently written about the clear problems in polling, and in particular the herd-like way they were reporting implausible numbers:

https://www.natesilver.net/p/theres-more-herding-in-swing-st...

What sources are you thinking of? Everywhere I looked, I saw "the polls are very close, the result probably won't be so close but we don't know which way it will go". I don't recall seeing anyone outright predicting a very tight result (beyond "here's what happens if there's a tie" articles -- background info rather than prediction).

I dont belive that claim is actually true?

the most likely result predicted by 538 was 312 for trump [0]

the issue with the model was the 2nd most likely result was 319 for harris.

they thought the odds of a recount being decisive was around 10%.

That hardly seems evidence of "predicting a split election". which prediction are you thinking of?

[0] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2024-election-forecast/

538 is not longer run by Nate Silver, he runs the silver bulletin on substack now.

Apologies if you thought I meant this. I was using them as a reference for what people modeling the election from polls were predicting!

I don't know what Nate Silver was predicting. Was he predicting a near-split election or the situation where "someone is decently likely to win decisively, but we don't know who"?

Fair enough. Nate Silver was predicting a toss up, but was upfront that the model uses many simulations. Since the GP mentioned Nate Silver, I mistakenly took your comment about 538 as disagreeing with that since Silver did used to run 538.

Silver's predictions were extremely close to 538's. He predicted a toss up (50-50% chance of Harris or Trump winning the presidency), but many of his simulations were not particularly close.

>They were predicting a split election.

Who was? A 50% chance to win does not imply that the vote count will be close.

Also: statistical uncertainty is a feature not a bug. A lot of the idea behind statistics is the ability to quantify the certainty of the point estimate. As another commenter put it: a statistically sound "idk" is a better result than a confidently incorrect estimate, from a statistical standpoint.

That's an amazing analysis on systematic bias!

The data he has to back up his "too close results to be true random polls" is fantastic.

That's fundamental to this election mode. Most swing states were within the predicted range, they just happen to all be correlated (which is expected) and swung in the same direction having a huge effect on the electoral college.

First, the words predict and forecast are not interchangeable. Polls do not predict outcomes, they merely forecast them. Since predictions are purely subjective, saying they 'failed' is inappropriate. You can disagree with a subjective prediction, but you can't really say they failed. Forecasting relies on historic data to extrapolate. That same data basically said "its a 50/50 coin toss" so the polls did not, in fact, fail. You just thought they failed because the precise poll value was not 50/50, but rather 49.xx/51.xx which does not account for statistical variances.

The pollsters were predicting a close election. That was universally the message. It was unambiguous. I'm sorry if you somehow missed that but that's what it was.

They were predicting 50% odds of each candidate winning swing states, but with the results for the swing states being correlated with each other. This isn't the same as a close election, it just means the result can't be predicted confidently. It's also worth noting that each individual state and the popular vote were within error margins on the result.

The last poll for Iowa, from the highest rated pollster for Nate Silver, had Harris +3 and Trump won Iowa +13.

The polls were better but still consistently underestimated Trumps support by a lot. Basically, the weighting they do for the polls now basically just guarantees that they converge on the results of the last election.

FWIW Nate Silver also said don't trust any polls this year, and his gut was with Trump.

Indeed, 538’s model showed ~50 out of 100 wins for either side, when running simulations. But that doesn’t mean that they were predicting a 50/50 split, a significant number of simulation results showed a large vote margin for one side, it was just equally likely which side it would be.

Although I don’t actually think it was equally likely like that, we are missing something to make all this analysis actually informative rather than a “all I know is that I don’t know anything”. We had mountains of evidence indicating that it was totally unclear, so frustrating. Perhaps that’s how the probabilities actually were, but somehow guts pointed to Trump much more regardless of personal bias, and in hindsight it feels rather obvious. Confirmation bias I guess, I still want trust all the expert analysis.

> The pollsters were all warning that the swing states would likely be strongly correlated, so if a candidate performed strongly in one swing state, they'd probably perform strongly in all of them.

Source?

Would it be fair to say that Zuck had some idea (and for some time)? Otherwise he’d have no reason to write the letter about interference.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com