Same as 2016
Whenever 538 does something that's not politics or American sports it's actually embarrassing to read. I remember them trying to calculate the best formula 1 driver of all time using "statistics" and it was one of the worst things I've ever read.
Not really. Statistics are more related to the real world than tarot, which isn't at all
Tarot is one individual human, with all our senses and empathy, reading the expressions and cues of another human. It's more reliable than pollling like 538 haha, and I even 'believe in' statistics etc
Con men doing cold readings are more reliable than data scientists.
First genuine galaxy brain take I've seen on this site.
First genuine insult someones given a take of mine on this site! :red-fist:
All polling 'science' boils down to how a group of libs/chuds feel on any give day haha it's not great, and it's not terrible. I've taken a university-level statistics course I so do understand at least the basics. It's fair to question the validity of opinion polling without just globally condemning "data scientists" imo haha.
Maybe you underestimate the power of cold reads! They're a pretty powerful thing, especially between two people who are being open with one another. Think less 'magic/crazy people I disagree with' and more 'counselor/therapist/psychiatrist getting a strong enough sense of who a person is in ~15 minutes to be able to help them'.
It’s fair to question the validity of opinion polling without just globally condemning “data scientists” imo haha.
Without anything more substantive than 'lol haha chuds imo haha' and liberal use of scare quotes...
This shitposting comment chain that began with "FiveThirtyEight is tarot for straight men" now demands academic rigour!
You haven't said anything substantive beyond 'con men doing cold readings'. I think we both agree that stats are valuable, just trying to point out that that particular mode of communication can be valuable. Have a good one!
This shitposting comment chain that began with “FiveThirtyEight is tarot for straight men” now demands academic rigour!
"Just a prank bro!"
Because I can maintain a sense of identity without basing it on making childish hot takes
Imagine how much more like you I would be if I felt the need to prove myself to someone like you
2016: "lol Trump's obviously a fuckin' idiot, he'll never win."
2020: "lol Trump's obviously a fuckin' idiot, he'll never win."
I don't think 30% = "He'll never win". It's probably more like "He'll win 30% of the time".
Yep, 538 gave him a 30pct chance in 2016 too, and as much as a dope Nate and Co are at interpreting their numbers, I think they were accurate then, and might be now (though there are more factors at play in 2020.
THEY THINK FLORIDA WILL GO BLUE
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH
Edit: Yes, I know Trump won by a slim margin in 2016.
But look, I live here and I can tell you that even in the more urban areas there are still tons of enthusiastic boomer voters with signs for Trump while there's barely any notice of Biden.
Considering this website used blue Florida for all but one of it's maps I'd say their overall odds are quite off.
For every progressive voter from Miami we lose, we'll pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Tampa and Orlando.
Trump beat Clinton 49% to 47.8% in Florida. That does not seem like an insurmountable amount
Not saying Biden would win but not like it's Alabama
Weird that people think Florida and Ohio are permanently red states because of one single election.
Not just one election. Florida went pretty solidly red during the 2018 midterm. They elected a republican governor and senator while the rest of the country was flipping the house for the democrats. That was just a couple months after a hurricane flattened a bunch of towns and Trump failed to respond.
In 2018, during their wave year, Democrats picked up 2 house seats, but lost the popular vote by a wide margin. They also lost the governor's race and Senate race by slim margins. I wouldn't write off Florida entirely, since the statewide races were very close, but the midterms were a bad omen for 2020.
Well that's all I am saying. People are acting like Florida is fucking Alabama or something. It has gone blue many, many times in the past. Including only two presidential elections ago.
I also don't buy that gubernatorial elections are in any way a useful predictor for presidential elections.
The beautiful thing about this is since the candidate who ran for governor was further left than usual for Florida Democrats, whether Biden wins or loses Florida the Democratic Party there will have an excuse to make a turn to the right.
Trump just barely won the state in 2016, Obama won it twice and it's being completely fucked by COVID which doesn't bode well for the GOP. I don't get why it's such a stretch?
Right, I understand the reasoning why people think it will go red, I just don't understand why people think it will take a miracle to go blue. Even if Trump wins it again it won't be by much.
I'm going to say it now: 538 has no idea wtf is going on (due to the whole coronavirus situation) so they just did the same prediction as 2016 so no matter what happens they'll look good
Not really. Statistics are more related to the real world than astrology, which isn’t at all
At least astrology occasionally tells you to get your shit together
Personally, I think US Presidential elections should be determined via Tarot readings. It would at least be more consistent than some of the Democratic Party's caucus rules.
Statistics are, but Nate's punditry -- often backed by flawed statistics -- really isn't. He's just contributing to the horse race spectacle, usually without offering any useful insights. It also doesn't help that, in doing so, he also (somewhat) influences the outcome according to his own personal biases. I'm sure there were plenty of Hillary voters out there who stayed home in 2016 because Trump "only" had a 30% chance of winning -- Matt talked on the pod about the same sort of phenomenon with Biden voters in Iowa back in February -- and that wound up being one of the proverbial thousand cuts that was enough to swing the election in a few districts.
it literally does not matter how much of a margin biden wins by trump is going to spend the next 3 months shedding as much doubt as possible on the legitimacy of the election process and then continue being the centerpiece of the republican party by tweeting about biden being a communist who fixed the polls with the help of his colored antifa spies every day for the rest of eternity because he drank whatever potion is keeping Kissenger alive, this country is a joke yellowstone needs to erupt ASAP
Unfortunately, the US Geological Survey has already determined that a supereruption from Yellowstone will likely never happen again, and smaller eruptions may very well not happen for several tens of thousands of years. (The most recent eruption was 70,000 years ago.)
shedding as much doubt as possible on the legitimacy of the election process
You know what they say about broken clocks.
It also literally doesn't matter because even if everything goes according to plan Trump gets to continue being president for 80 days. Now he's a loser with nothing to lose. Just give the launch codes to the highest bidder, why not?
That doesn't sound right, Biden's been leading Hillary's lead in aggregate polling. I guess there must've been significant changes to their model?
Significant changes plus I wager that COVID is just a huge wrench in how turnout might go, along with the fact that the states where trump could win, he might only squeak by, or take by large numbers.
Big increase in uncertainty because who the hell knows how COVID will affect voter turnout. Though the model does say if the election were held tomorrow Biden's chances would be 93%.
Yes, it was complete bullshit before now it's complete bullshit but in 2020
I read that these predictions did not take into account rona, gerrymandering, voter supression nor complications with mail in ballots sooooo....
Edit: Thank you everyone for pointing out that gerrymandering does not apply to a presidential race, I am but a humble peasant from Soviet Canuckistan and did not realise this about your fine, world class democracy, sorry
I've built a model to predict the outcome of the presidential election, and the neat bit is, it doesn't take into account any of the major factors that will determine the outcome of the presidential election.
These sort of predictions take into account gerrymandering*. They also normally take into account voter participation rate, which includes voter suppression but politely weasels its way around mentioning it. Adjusting for voter participation rate is where most of the differing models, gut instincts, and spin enter the model - that part's legitimately hard and the people trying to deal with it are inherently biased. Do you use the historic rate even though there's pretty clear evidence for increasing voter suppression? How do you model that increase?
*Also lol @ the idea that the national election isn't gerrymandered. The state borders heavily favor conservative candidates, and neglecting to change that is the same as doing it intentionally in the first place.
I mean yeah it's a prediction based on polling, it can't possible take those important factors into account
Hmm good point. Sorry I'm not American so I don't fully comprehend the nuances of your world class democracy lol
It doesn't matter for the office of president, voter suppression is a much larger deal. Cities are generally strongholds for blue candidates so you'll see the local elections board comprised of old white men from the cities' suburbs place only a token amount of polling places in the city. Voting lines stretch for miles every presidential election and it's not uncommon for people to have to wait 8+ hours to vote.
That is so utterly fucked up. I've only ever had to wait longer than 20 min in one election and that was a municipal election that had way more turnout than they expected. JFC
Entire states vote for President. Districts in those states change every 10 years so those can be gerrymandered for positions in Congress. States overall stay the same so there is no gerrymandering for president.
I don’t think so, since results are per-state you would need to gerrymander the state borders... 👀
Edit: I was talking about the presidential race, it still matters for house races and state legislatures
Not that my vote matters either way cause I live in California, but if the outcome of this election is at all affected by my shitty rng in videogames, then 30% basically guarantees a Trump win.
Big brain moment, maybe if I vote for Trump, that will actually increase his odds of losing.
A not vote for Trump is a not vote for Biden too. It's all the same anyways.
if all the Bernie supporters in CA and other solid blue states would just vote Green we could get 5% on the national level and really force the Democrats to go left
and before you say that's a fantasy Howie Hawkins already did it with Cuomo, check out this article
https://twitter.com/HowieHawkins/status/1282754868038504449
MLK's nonviolence won because the alternative was Malcolm X
We need a Malcolm X, either a serious Green party or the People's Party would do it
Well, they said a vote for 3rd party is a vote for Trump, so just vote Green or PSL, and you can still retain your dignity
Nate has awful political takes due to galaxy pundit brain, but does know statistics, and people dunking on him get confused between the two.
Yeah Nate has god awful politics and political instincts, but his statistical predictions are generally good. He was one of the few to give Trump more than 2% chance of winning in 2016 and was the only person that came close to predicting Bernie's downfall in the primaries. I just think this election is impossible to predict due to covid and the chaos that it brings.
They recently did an article on the "shy Trump voter" and concluded they don't really exist, even in 2016. Not in large enough numbers anyway, and it made sense to me, given that Trump overperformed polling in red states and underperformed his polling in blue ones, which is the opposite from what you'd expect if the shy voters did exist. They said the swing state polling errors in 2016 were largely due to failing to adjust for education, which many polls now do.
Not unlike the "Bernie-to-Trump voter" myth that Hillary stans love to parrot. The phenomenon was nowhere near as widespread as the Blue MAGA crowd would lead you to believe, and it was mostly confined to open primary states where those voters weren't Democratic loyalists to begin with.
I agree that polls should be getting better not worse, but 2016 did have a lot more undecided voters, especially compared to an election like 2012 where everyone basically had their mind made up already. On August 12th, 2016 the polls had Hillary beating Trump 45% to 38%, so 17% of voters were undecided or voting third party. Even on election night the number was still 12%. Compare that to this year where there's less than 9% third party/undecided voters at the moment.
Trump won largely because he got all the Gary Johnson defects at the very last second, there's no similar big block of voters to count on this year in the same way.
what is his statistical knowledge worth when it doubles as a get out of jail free card when his statistical knowledge fails?
I thought they stopped doing predictions cus they kept getting owned by reality?
They gave Trump a 30% chance of winning when the NYT said 2%. I fail to see how 538 got owned
Edit: Trump had a 10% chance of winning before the Comey letter. I think things changed a lot in the last week and other pollsters were slow to factor that in
I meant more recently than 2016, they've largely been getting less correct in their predictions.
Second to that, comparing them to NYT is probably unfair cus the NYT is more often incorrect than correct.
What other publication or group gave Trump more than a 2 or 3% chance of winning. I said NYT but basically every other predication was the same
Yeah 30% is basically a one in three chance of winning, that's fucking huge in statistics actually.
I hate seeing people give them partial credit for being less wrong in 2016. It's their job to predict it, and they predicted wrong. "But they were 20% less wrong than other sites!" So what? I don't want to subscribe to the notion that their predictions work because they're less wrong but still wrong.
How is 30% odds incorrect though? You can still die playing Russian Roulette despite the odds being low
It's incorrect because they didn't get it right. No one is saying 30% can't happen, but we're saying why are you putting value into the predictors if they consistently make predictors that turn out wrong.
If a weatherman says the chance of rain is 30%, and it rains, his forecast is not necessarily incorrect. You need repeated trials to confirm accuracy.
If 10/10 times he predicts a 30% chance of rain it rains, then yeah, he's a bad forecaster.
If 3/10 times he predicts 30% chance of rain it rains, then he's pretty accurate
Then if we're talking about an event that will only happen in these circumstances one time, what exactly is the value of these types of predictions? They could have given Trump a 1% chance of winning and still said "well that's not impossible". That's not incorrect, but it sure sounds a lot like ass-covering and it makes you wonder why we even listen to this
It's valuable because it's interesting. Might help you plan for future events. I might take an umbrella if there is a 30% chance of rain but not if there is a 1% chance
Keep in mind, it's not just a prediction of the overall result, they are also forecasting each state, D.C., and the popular vote, so it's more like an ensemble of 52 predictions, so you can also judge the accuracy of each of those forecasts as well.
Giving 30% odds to an event that happens is not incorrect though. It's not getting it wrong
I don't really get this logic. If he had given Trump a 49.9% chance of winning would he have still been wrong?
I mean, not really, but you're essentially saying "If he said it was 50-50 instead of likely Hillary would he have been wrong?" Well, no, but he didn't say that.
We can't even say they were wrong. Things with a 30 percent chance of happening happen all the time.
How often? I can't say.
No shit, Einstein. My minor was in stats.
Just because some dork with glasses can work an excel spreadsheet doesn't make him a good statistician not does it mean that his models are correct.
Have they done statistical analyses on how meaningful a statistical prediction is this far out from the election?
The model says if the election were held tomorrow Biden's chances would be 93%.
Then hopefully your model will take that information into account.
lol they have a 5% chance of Biden winning 400+ electoral votes. Their brains must be fried.
I've seen polls with it very close, but Trump will likely win it. However, Trump losing Texas would be a very funny outcome.
https://leantossup.ca/us-presidency/ I get all my polling shit from these people and the Polling USA twitter acount.
538s graphics are highkey nice with it, pretty impressive looking, regardless of Nate Silver's potential brain damage.
Usually I agree with you, but what's the deal with this clippy-like character? The brainworms are sneaking into the graphics department, in the form of Fivey Fuckwad, the pundit fox.
