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Reality: someone wins.
Internet: "How did 538 mess this up so badly?"
(Something which got worse after Harris was picked, although every polling aggregator went barmy - there's suspicions that a lot of polling agencies aggressively normalized their data to avoid being seen as biased, leading to an almost 50/50 split.)
It's just that this particular criticism (that they got it "wrong") doesn't seem very well founded.
They chose to pretend Biden's mental decline wasn't happening because that was the Democrat party line at the time. How can you trust predictions from someone who is willing to manipulate his results to prop up his political party?
The issue the models had in that period was pretty well documented: the models rated fundamentals (like economic indicators) more highly relative to polls when the election was farther in the future. Those were the same economic indicators that famously do not capture the pain average Americans have felt since COVID, and that politicians across the spectrum have tried to use to deny that pain when they are in power.
You can argue that this issue was well known at the time, and that a better group of analysts might have taken action to mitigate it. I'd argue that myself. It turns out that it's kind of hard, but that's a terrible excuse not to try. That is different than deliberately manipulating results for political ends, though. It's unclear what political ends those would even be -- who exactly benefits from an "unclear winner" forecast in that situation?
You must _hate_ it when you need <= 4 and you roll a 5...