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naraburns  nihil supernum  10d ago (text post)   26744 thread views

U.S. Election (Day?) 2024 Megathread

With apologies to our many friends and posters outside the United States... it's time for another one of these! Culture war thread rules apply, and you are permitted to openly advocate for or against an issue or candidate on the ballot (if you clearly identify which ballot, and can do so without knocking down any strawmen along the way). "Small-scale" questions and answers are also permitted if you refrain from shitposting or being otherwise insulting to others here. Please keep the spirit of the law--this is a discussion forum!--carefully in mind.

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Silver did have a fun exchange with Alan Lichtman who predicted a Harris win due to his "Keys of the Presidency" heuristic. Lichtman one of those "correctly predicted the results of last X elections" guys. Silver pointed out that by his own Keys, it predicted a Trump win - and Alan responded something hilariously memeable like "Nate Silver doesn't know how to turn the keys"

So i dunno. I thought it was funny at least

Lichtman actually screwed the pooch as early as 2016, the year he got famous.. Before 2016, his model was supposed to predict the winner of popular vote (and the books had been carefully been written to indicate this); in 2016 he had predicted a Trump victory, and during that year Trump did indeed win, but he didn't win the popular vote, which Lichtman's model (according to his own words he had stuck by for several elections) was supposed to predict. However, he was only too happy to accept the fame for this "correct" incorrect prediction and make himself into an election guru. Wikipedia confirms it:

The system correctly predicted the popular vote winner in every election from 1984 to 2012. [23] Lichtman garnered attention for his call of a Donald Trump victory in 2016; some critics say the prediction was wrong because Trump lost the popular vote, but Lichtman said he had switched to predicting who would become president and was correct.[7] In the media he was widely credited with a correct 2016 prediction.

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