ITT: People not understanding probabilistic forecasts.

Nate Silvers models are not perfect, but pretty close. You can do retro analysis on them to see. If someone with a 5% chance to win actually does win, that doesn't mean the model was wrong... That just needs to actually happen only 5% of the time.

Getting elections"wrong" as people are talking about here shows they don't really know how these models work. If you haven't looked at the retrospective analysis on these results, then you are likely unqualified to declare that they are useless or wrong.

Remember, Nate Silver predicted that Hillary Clinton would win in 2016, and when Trump won instead, it was chalked up to the fact that it really was a random chance.

Don't panic about this. Keep quiet and keep doing the work to get Trump thrown out. And charge your mental health bills to the Democrats, for putting up an old man up for election in 2020, one who's even older than Trump, in the first place.

Is that a 65% chance of a Trump electoral college or popular vote victory? I think last time it predicted that Hillary would win the popular vote. Then she did.

Trump does still lead in our national average — however narrowly. But the bigger problem for Biden though is that elections in the United States aren’t determined by the popular vote.

That's a problem for all of us. If the president were elected by popular vote, Trump would never have been president.

In 2022, Dem strategist Simon Rosenberg flatly asserted that there would be no "red wave" and the Dems would overperform expectations.

Nate Silver said the only way Rosenberg could come to that conclusion was that he'd been ingesting "hopium."

Rosenberg was right. Silver was wrong (though he'll die before admitting it).

Then Rosenberg started The Hopium Chronicles, which I suggest you read

I just put together a model, and it predicts a 77% chance of the Hamburgler winning in 2024.

Go vote. That's the only thing that matters.

Well if we could only fix the voting system..

Republican voters are wildly over represented.

Young people don't answer polling calls, and I'm personally expecting the highest under 30 vote turnout ever. No one can predict where this will go.

Nate's predictions turned to crap in 2018 and never came back. Polls don't work anymore and Nate is handicapping trash.

Got a text the other day to demand my support for Biden by completing a poll via some suspicious shortened link. Might’ve been legit, more likely a phishing attempt. The wording of it just made me think of the “Trade offer” meme.

Didn’t respond. If this is how pollsters operate they’re gonna be out of business within a decade (should be already) or just continue to get skewed results from braindead fools who click on suspicious links and also vote for blatantly unfit, deranged and dangerous candidates.

Nate Silver has gotten weird in the past few years.

I am legitimately scared for my safety with the upcoming election. I'm trans and if Trump tries to take my HRT away I will end my life. It would be the final straw so to speak. I will not be forced to live a lie.

Same models from 2008-2020, at this point in the cycle, it had Hillary winning, and Biden winning, both by a decent margin.

I think it depends what the campaigns do with this information. Coast, or fight harder?

Vote vote vote. (Just once though).

Nate Silver hasn't been correct since 2008, and I think that was the only time.

I think there is a lot this fails to capture because certain things are unprecedented. Michigan's GOP is in utter disarray and it isn't the only one. And overturning Roe v Wade has energized the left and disillusioned whatever center remains.

Now these facts are baked into the polling already, so obviously that's a big concern, but I believe this means polling is too far right across the board. I think who makes up likely voters has shifted. RvW drew in younger voters and I think now that they are engaged they will remain so.

Time will tell. I've seen far less Trump support this year than I did in 2020, which yeah is anecdotal, but I think it's an indicator. Of course, even if I'm correct, Michigan isn't going to carry the election alone, and it looks like the rest of the rust belt is further to the right.

Silver's model will only actually matter once voting starts. Until then he may as well be a poll aggregator. Which, if the polls are flawed, then his aggregation and model will be flawed.

Well that's terrible for everyone.