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Who is this guy and how serious should we take this information? This is by far the highest number I've seen for Trump so far.
He's quite a well known pollster. Up until recently he was responsible for Five Thirty Eight, but it got sold and he left.
He got the 2016 election wrong (71 Hilary, 28 trump) He got the 2020 election right (89 Biden, 10 Trump)
Right and wrong are the incorrect terms here, but you get what I mean.
He didn’t get it wrong. He said the Clinton Trump election was a tight horse race, and Trump had one side of a four sided die.
The state by state data wasn’t far off.
Problem is, people don’t understand statistics.
If someone said Trump had over a 50% probability of winning in 2016, would that be wrong?
In statistical modeling you don’t really have right or wrong. You have a level of confidence in a model, a level of confidence in your data, and a statistical probability that an event will occur.
So if my model says RFK has a 98% probability of winning, then it is no more right or wrong than Silver's model?
If so, then probability would be useless. But it isn't useless. Probability is useful because it can make predictions that can be tested against reality.
In 2016, Silver's model predicted that Clinton would win. Which was wrong. He knew his model was wrong, because he adjusted his model after 2016. Why change something that is working properly?
You're conflating things.
Your model itself can be wrong, absolutely.
But for the person above to say Silver got something wrong because a lower probability event happened is a little silly. It'd be like flipping a coin heads side up twice in a row and saying you've disproved statistics because heads twice in a row should only happen 1/4 times.
Yes. But you'd have to run the test repeatedly and see if the outcome, i.e. Clinton winning, happens as often as the model predicts.
But we only get to run an election once. And there is no guarantee that the most likely outcome will happen on the first try.
Just for other people reading this thread, the following comments are an excellent case study in how an individual (the above poster) can be so confidently mistaken, even when other posters try to patiently correct them.
May we all be more respectful of our own ignorance.
He works for Peter Theil now, so I take everything he says with a huge grain of salt.
He's just a guy analizing the polls. The source is Fox News. He mentions in the article that tomorrow's debate could make that poll not matter.
Should you trust Nate or polls? They're fun but... Who is answering these polls? Who wants to answer them before even October?
So yeah take it seriously that a poll found that a lot of support for Trump exists. But it's just a moment of time for whoever they polled. Tomorrow's response will be a much better indication of any momentum.
It just seems strange because I don't think that many people are on the fence. Perhaps I'm crazy, but I feel most people know exactly who they're voting for already. Makes me wonder how valid this cross-section was that was used as the sample set. If it accurately represents the US, including undecided voters, then... 😮
The cross-section of people you know are more politically off the fence than the entire nation. Those that aren't online at all are also more undecided and less likely to interact with you.
I listen to those news things that interview people on the street and I'm amazed at how many are uninformed and can go either way.
There's a Trump undercount in polling: Trump voters don't trust "MSM" and therefore don't answer calls from pollsters, or are embarrassed to admit they will vote for him.
Same goes for asking random people on the street.
There's also an undercount of young people who don't answer the phone.
Pollsters are compensating for that undercount of unlikely voters. 2016 they were low, 2020 still low but pretty close. They will have scaled it up to be more accurate this go around.
Except there's a few snags there. In between the 2020 election and now, there was an insurrection, Roe v. Wade was overturned, Trump was convicted of crimes and indicted for many more. These are things that a statistical process can't really account for when putting weight on how likely a respondant is to actually vote.
Trump lost in 2020. Do all of these events incentivize more people will turn out for him this time than in the last election? Or will less people turn out for him?
Every time something unprecedented happens it negatively impacts the ability for a scientific statistical process to predict the outcome. Science can't predict things there's no model for, and how do you can't have a model for something you haven't seen before. And a hell of a lot of unprecedented shit has happened. Maybe next time a convicted felon that tried to overthrow democracy runs in an election there can be accurate polling, but it's not going to be the case in this election.
There really is no way to know what will happen on election day. So there's else to do other than maximum effort until election day.
The issue isn't really people on the fence for Trump or Harris but mainly with generating turnout. After Biden's poor debate performance, people didn't change their mind and decide to vote for Trump, they became apathetic and maybe wouldn't show up to vote.
Harris doesn't need to persuade people to abandon Trump, she needs to get people excited to show up to vote.
I have shamed my family
He's not polling, he is aggregating all of the polls into a prediction model. Either way it is just a snapshot in time.
The key to doing statistics well is to make sure you aren't changing the results with any bias. This means enough samples, a good selection of samples, and weighing the outcome correctly. Even honest polling in pre-election is hard to get right, and because of that it's easy to make things lean towards results if you want to get certain results, or or getting paid to get those results.
There's only one poll that matters, and that poll should include as large of a sample as possible, and be counted correctly. Even though some will try to prevent that from happening.
Their models have been really accurate for the last several election cycles. They’re part of fivethirtyeight.com
No, Nate is not part of 538 anymore. He now works for a crypto betting website partly owned by Peter Thiel.
I'll let you decide how neutral that makes him.
Peter Thiel, the same guy who sold Republicans on JD the couch fucker Vance
Nate is not with 538 anymore. Disney didn’t renew his contract. However, he got to keep the model that he developed and publishes it for his newsletter subscribers. 538 had to rebuild their model from scratch this year with G Elliot Morris.
Now Nate hosts the podcast Risky Business with Maria Konnikova. The psychologist who became a professional poker player while researching a book. It’s pretty good.
It's a chance of winning, not a poll, so 64% is high but not insane. Silver is serious and it's a decent model. Knowing the model there's a pretty good chance this is a high point for Trump but it's not like he's pulling this out of nowhere, he has had similar models every election cycle since like 2008.
If it's overstaying Trump it's because his model is interpreting the data incorrectly because of the weirdness of this election cycle. I personally think that is likely the case here.
Who is Nate Silver? Really?
Hey man there is a mountain of people who don't know things and are scared to ask. learning is always a good thing
XKCD 1053
Social media isn't a search engine. If an article is referring to someone by name in the title, they almost certainly have a Wikipedia page the questioner could read rather than requesting random strangers on a message board provide answers for them (in the form of multiple answers of varying bias and accuracy).
Wanting to learn isn't the problem, it's not spending the tiniest bit of personal effort before requesting service from other people.
Or he could have a conversation on a conversation forum.
Yeah. I think we take our easy navigation for granted sometimes. Like... I can get most information pretty quickly and not have a lot of trouble discerning what I need to do to get that information.
But not everyone is as "natural" at surfing. Maybe they have trouble putting things in perspective, they don't know how to use a tool like Wikipedia, or even - maybe they just don't like researching.
I'm so glad we have people that are great at keeping up with everything. But we have to remember that presenting and teaching information accurately and helpfully is a skill that we need desperately.
This quote sums it up:
𝘾𝙝𝙖𝙨𝙚
@chsrdn
In the future we won't elect presidents. We'll have a primary, then Nate Silver will go into a spice trance and pick the winner.
3:41 AM · 7 nov 2012
That used to be true, but in recent years he has gotten a lot more conservative, so I personally take his predictions with a huge grain of salt.
This isn't a poll. That's why the number is so high. His model is also automatically depressing Harris' numbers because of the convention right now. (It did the same thing to Trump after his convention)
Nate has been upfront in his newsletters about the factor dropping off the model after today, but then it's also the debate. Things are likely to be far more clear going into the weekend because we'll have post debate polling being published and no more convention adjustments.
He's renowned for being wrong for several previous elections
All prediction models only give you odds, not flawless accuracy. He has been closer in every election than most everyone else in the prediction market.