538 almost never got the polls wrong, they simply reported the results the pollsters got. But you probably meant something else was wrong, and not their reporting of the polls. Like, maybe, the poll-based predictions that the polls supported.
But their poll-based predictions of individual results across all of the individual elections they predicted tended to be reasonably accurate in the Silver era, in that results predicted as, say, 70% chances were actually correct about 70% of the time, etc. In the post-Silver Morris period, I haven't seen any after-the-fact analysis, but the universe is a lot smaller, so you'd also expect the actual results on that limited universe to be less accurate in representing the long-term accuracy of the modelling approach.
The main problem, though, is that people want predictions to have probability 1 or 0, and don't deal well with things in between.
You may be thinking of Nate Silver's Silver Bulletin [1]. He took the original 538 model with him when he left. The model 538 runs now is something they made up afterwards.
Of course, this isn't a linear game where scores are alternating, so my line of thought isn't completely fair.
I can't find any way to read this other than that you think that Kamala was guaranteed to win, and are still angry that someone told you otherwise?
What you have to do is simulate all the states and DC and run a monte carlo simulation and you will always get an equivocal answer if you do that.
Which is why any model worth its salt only uses national polls to predict state results. (State polls are more meaningful. But the headlines they generate aren't as nationally clickable.)
There aren’t that may states. You don’t need partisan polling in Vermont and Wyoming, for example.
> you have to infer state-level results based on something other than state-level polls
Yes. As I said. That is what you use national polls. “But the electoral college” isn’t a valid argument against election models. The reality is paucity of granular data and complexity of predicting swing states.