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Notes -
https://www.natesilver.net/p/why-i-dont-buy-538s-new-election
FiveThirtyEight versus 538
Nate Silver, public statistician, has launched a broadside against the forecasting blog he originally set up, which continues to produce modelling that indicates a incredible dead heat between Biden and Trump. What gives?
What it really comes down to is how unusual this election is turning out, and how forecasting is not keeping up with reality. On paper, Biden is secure - he's an incumbent President in an America that is peaceful and prosperous. These indicators have been long championed as the surest omens of victory. But nothing lasts forever. As Silver points out, those advantages count for less and less nowadays. And they assume that the candidates are otherwise mentally competent to run an effective campaign. If Biden still retains the faculties to run the country, he's not demonstrating them.
There of course, is a limit to models. We cannot predict exactly how Biden's incapacity might affect the election, or a horse switch to Harris, because events like this have never occurred before in modern electoral history. But it's at the point where these models now interfere with normal political judgement. Biden backers use the 538 model as a palliative, even as Biden slips further in the polls. As a result they are sleepwalking into picking a candidate who himself seems to be sleepwalking.
Nate Silver's own model does give Biden a fighting chance, especially when fundamentals are emphasized over polling. But he himself admits that the model is probably useless by this point, and that polling is a better indicator of Biden's weakness. Silver also has reason to say "I told you so" - he has beaten the Biden is too old drum for years now, and gotten plenty of flak from his own team over it.
As usual, The Purpose Of A System Is What It Does.
Thinking the purpose of 538 is to forecast elections is like thinking the purpose of slot machines is to give out prizes.
538 exists to sell ads, and to sell ads you need engagement. Tell people (in this case Blue Tribe midwits) that their team is going to win, with sufficient math numbers to bypass their critical thinking abilities into Believe the Science territories, and they'll peck away like starving chickens. Every refresh is a little dopamine hit for them. Their brain might want the truth, but their brain stem wants to feel good.
This isn't an indictment of the Blue Tribe or 538. If 538 decided to tell the truth as it is, the Blue Tribe midwits would migrate to 537.99999, a new site that gives them their fix, and 538 would go broke. Us mottizens want the truth, but we're all also using adblockers, so the algorithm routes around us. We're not the ones paying three figures for slave labor Chinesium vegan shoes.
The internet is a horror show - clickbait, rage bait, gold Trump coins, donate NOW to EMPATHIZE with WOMEN OF COLOR, influencers REACT to THIS clickbait YOU WON'T BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENS NEXT! The stupid are too poor to be worth exploiting, the smart are cost too much to exploit, but everyone in the middle is pulling the handle on their handheld slot machine as fast as their thumbs can move..
That's fundamentally what the algorithmic internet is - an omnipresent distributed casino metastasizing into the brain stem of every midwit, sucking out every dollar of surplus value from anyone that's conscientious and agreeable enough to produce anything above their survival needs.
It's amazing watching the real time decline of an heuristic catchphrase.
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Now there's a statement I really wouldn't lean too hard on. My guess would be that most mottezins also want to feel good, we're just a bit kinkier about how we get our kicks.
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I mean, Nate silver left 538 with the criticism that under ABC’s leadership, it was focused on telling liberals what they wanted to hear, and not on accurately forecasting. It’s not surprising that he repeats this criticism.
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Nate Silver continues to be a consistently good actor in the public sphere and deserves a ton of credit for being willing to buck audience capture in favor of saying what he truly thinks. When he's gotten things wrong (underestimating Trump in his original primary due to priors, for example), he's owned that and spoken publicly about why he thinks he made that mistake. When something is probabilistic and doesn't fall on the favored side, he continues to argue in favor of probabilistic thinking and tries to get people to understand calibration. He's smart, honest, and works hard to try to make sense of available data. I don't really have much else to add to it, just want once again tip the chapeau to Silver for fighting the good fight.
I for one, welcome our gay nerd overlords
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Agreed. I always found it weird that so many people's major criticism of him is that he once gave a probability of ~30% to something that did in fact happen.
Sid Meir observed that people simply cannot process probabilities.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=MtzCLd93SyU&t=1168
"We found that there is this point, and it's kinda around 3 to 1, 4 to 1, where people do expect to pretty much win everytime"
30% doesn't mean about 1 in 3. It means impossible. He had to manipulate how the numbers played out in the background so that it fit with people's sense of what probabilities mean, rather than actual probabilities playing themselves out.
So far the only luck i've ever had explaining it to people is to say "most pollsters thought it was impossible. Silver said it was unlikely but about the same chance as hitting a baseball. and people do hit baseballs"
For some reason the baseball analogy is the only thing that seems to crack the innumeracy.
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Who cares if the model is accurate? Its not supposed to be. It exists so that when Biden gets the most votes in history again, you can point to the model and call everyone asking questions an election denier.
This is pure seething contempt for your tribal enemy without any evidence or even argumentation. You know better.
That was the argument. I can add 6 paragraphs largely repeating myself if it helps. I've had to resort to ChatGPT to please you guys before, I can do it again. Although I think I still have my copy of Dilbert's Desktop Games which had a bloviator. That aught to be good enough.
Yes, and it didn't work, and we told you what we'd do if you did. The problem is not that we don't understand the argument you are making. The problem is that casting loogies at your enemies is not the kind of argumentation this place is for, and you've been around way too long and been modded way too often to pretend to be befuzzled and outraged when the "don't post low-effort boo-lines" rule gets applied.
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A lot of people. For one, everyone who is outside the organization and thinks it is accurate, and depends on it as a guide to truth. For another, those in the organization who visualize themselves as trying to predict, which, there are undoubtedly some.
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There are a lot of people who dislike Trump. Biden’s victory is unlikely, but not implausible.
A path to victory? Possible. A path to the most votes ever in history again?
Well, like I said. I'd have questions.
Population keeps increasing. It would not be at all surprising if the election winner got the most votes in history.
With a TFR of 1.786, our population of citizens is not increasing. On the other hand...
Like I said... questions.
I encourage you to state your thesis more clearly.
The number of US citizens has been steadily increasing. I doubt I need to find a citation for that. US fertility is below replacement, but net positive (legal) immigration combined with long lifespans and a demographic bulge have led to the total citizen population increasing.
If turnout remains constant, then, we would expect every election to set a new record for votes cast for a presidential candidate.
(I'm aware that turnout does not remain constant, but 2020 was a high-turnout election and I expect 2024 to be as well.)
You linked a graph indicating that illegal immigration has spiked, which may well be true, but illegal immigrants by definition can't vote and don't factor into the figure we're discussing. You might argue large-scale illegal voting, but if so that seems like it would require its own evidence, not merely the existence of a significant illegal population.
In general what I'd like to ask you to do is to not bother darkly hinting at shadowy conspiracies, but rather state your questions clearly and unambiguously. The Motte isn't going to kick you out for having weird or unpopular takes. Nor do you have to be certain of something to say, "Here's what I suspect to be the case".
But repeating 'questions'? What's the point of that?
Say what they are. Be clear. Be right or be wrong, I don't care, but be clear.
Illegals can’t legally vote. That doesn’t mean they don’t vote. If you design a system that doesn’t validate legal status, then you will get illegals voting— especially if one party is adamantly for them and the other adamantly against them.
No, but it waggles its eyebrows suggestively and says “check for fake votes!”
There was a great deal of hunting for such fraud in contested and uncontested states. How many illegal votes did they find?
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Non-citizen voting is a crime that would be easy to catch if it was happening on a large scale, that Republican governors and secretaries of state have the tools and an incentive to catch, and which nevertheless you don't see large numbers of people getting caught for.
There have been a few serious attempts to investigate non-citizen voting, and they generally catch a low-double figure number of illegal votes per state.
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I suppose you'd have to look up the TFR from 18 years ago.
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Legal immigration and naturalization are also things that happen.
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I think by this point there is not a plausible path to the presidency for Biden, or at least, not one Biden can follow without a dramatic and improbable improvement in his condition. This is not really something that models do a good job of capturing. Most polling models anticipate some kind of regression to the mean in response to short term bounces and dips in polling. But that assumes a candidate that is capable of running a normal campaign. That's Nate Silver's argument - that Biden's chances depend on the assumption that he can run a normal campaign.
I disagree, and Nate does too in the post. Even given that Biden can't run a normal campaign, polls are just wrong sometimes, and even if the polls widen a bit more it's still within polling error precedent that Biden wins.
The polls would all have to be off by 5+ points. With the electoral college Trump will win even if Biden wins the popular vote by 2% or less. It would be an unprecedented polling error, at least for American presidential elections with dozens of independent polling sources.
Unprecedented? It's July, not October. Polls in August 2016 had Clinton up by double digit margins in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and we all know how that turned out.
Yes, it would not be unprecedented for the polls to change. However, it would be unprecedented if on Election Day the polls were what they are now, yet Biden won.
Frankly, it would be unprecedented for the polls to not change to some degree. Things happen, especially with modern short attention spans/news cycles.
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Would you accept an even odds bet that the polls are going to “widen with Biden”?
Can you elaborate?
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Are you talking about the fundamentals-based models or the polls-based models? They give very different results.
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The election is over unless the Dems figure out how to nominate Michelle Obama. She might have a punchers chance but I think she would lose but make it interesting.
IMO Michelle Obama is particularly popular because she has never presented herself as a particularly partisan figure. That serves really well in the role of FLOTUS, but I think the luster would quickly be lost once voters disagree with her on issues. Also I think a nontrivial subset of American voters really hate the idea of political dynasties.
Maybe she is, but is she actually popular outside of Democrats who already hero-worship the Obamas? It doesn't seem to me to be a crossover popularity that would bring in another cohort that isn't already on the "likely voter" table.
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I think if they ran one of the moderate governors like Shapiro or Beshear they would clean up. A lot of people viscerally hate Trump and a competent, clean cut white guy who can win over a swing state and doesn’t have any woke baggage would really flip the tables on the GOP imo.
When was the last time the dems even ran a guy like that? Kerry in 04 is the last one that kind of fits the bill. Put somebody like that against Trump and it’s over.
Of course this is assuming the Dems do the smart thing instead of trying to throw Kamala up there (Political seppuku)?
I have to admit that I haven't really followed either, but has either delivered on the promise to be a moderate in the way that a Governor like Larry Hogan did? Biden in 2020 was able to sell the illusion of moderation largely because he had huge name ID from being VP, no recent record (since he hadn't done anything meaningful in 12 years), and the special circumstances of the covid campaign that let him run a sort of blank slate campaign with few rallies/appearances. As the infamous Maury Povich meme would say, "That was a lie." And a big reason Joe isn't +10 on Trump despite being old and declining is because it was a lie. If the Joe we were sold in 2020 actually was governing, inflation would never have spiked as hard as it did, there wouldn't be naked activists in White House photo ops, we'd only have one super embarrassing female Supreme Court Justice, there wouldn't be an embarrassing collapsed bridge in the Mediterranean intended to supply terrorists with stuff, etc etc.
So are Shapiro and Beshear really moderates? Have they let through 20+ week abortion bans? Have they let fracking happen when they had the chance to stop it? Have they stopped people trying to trans the kids?
The problem with running a "moderate" no one knows about is you have to establish their moderate bona fides. And usually this ends up being a lie. Sure, sometimes a real moderate like Romney or McCain gets the nomination, but they lose that luster pretty quickly when the Eye of Sauron is on them. And I have a suspicion that for relatively unknown Democrat governors, there will be little in actual evidence of being moderate.
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So... Manchin?
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I wouldn't count Kerry. Gore probably.
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I think there's still space for plenty of candidates to have a chance.
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Michelle would have maybe a 30-40% chance, Newsom would be similar, Kamala and Biden are likely at around 20-25%. To boost the chance over 50% would require resetting the narrative, there are only two viable candidates in that case (Clooney and Oprah) and neither wants to run.
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