Harris tops Trump for first time in Nate Silver’s election forecast
Harris tops Trump for first time in Nate Silver’s election forecast
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He predicted a Hillary blowout in 2016 and was one of the many reasons why people on the left underestimated Trump. I don't want to hear this man's name again.
Did he? My recollection is that he gave her a 70% chance of winning, which is not at all the same as predicting that she will win.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/
Yup. 70% Clinton, 30% Trump. With points where it was about 50-50. They even had a 1 in 10 shot of Clinton winning the popular vote and Trump winning the election, which was higher than their chances of a Clinton blowout (6%).
And at the time he went out of his way to emphasize that, when something has a roughly 1/3 chance of occurring, not only is it possible, but you actually expect it to happen in 1 of 3 times. His prediction was the main reason that I was not feeling comfortable about Hillary just winning.
I think Nate made a good point about people not understanding polls. 70% chance to win means Hillary would have won 70/100 elections, not win by 70-30. But many read 70% as some kind of guarantee.
Days before the 2016 election, 538 (which Nate Silver founded and was leading at the time) ran an article titled "Trump Is Just A Normal Polling Error Behind Clinton". Nate Silver and 538 did some of the best forecasting of that election. Don't conflate him with others' screwups.
There was a massive voter suppression campaign in 2016. Specifically there were roll purges in many of the swing states. Trump's team has inserted MAGA cultists at all levels in Georgia. They're trying to do the same throughout the rest of the swing states.
That's not how his model has ever worked.
I think the messaging around polling in general is lost on most of the population and lots of people confuse the chance of winning with a prediction of the voting outcomes. This article is approximately 8 years old now and aged like milk, but comparing the odds Trump had of losing a game of russian roulette is very apt. With the benefit of hindsight, more emphasis should have been put into driving comparison home. I think that every poll should include this metric instead of trump's chance of winning.
The 2016 election in a nutshell