As someone who was super interested in the 538-style of election coverage in 2008, I've kind of fallen "out of love" so to speak with election models and forecasting in general. I'm not really convinced about what it adds to the conversation around elections. We can all look at various polls and get an assessment of who is generally ahead. Weighted polling aggregators and forecasting models just collect all these polls and spit out some data. It's easy to hand wave and think some new information is being revealed, but ultimately it is just a "garbage in garbage out" situation - you are entering polls as input, some hand waving is going on, and you get some forecast as a result.

I think part of my cynicism comes in the wake of the 2016 election, in which the forecast rightfully counted some scenarios in which either candidate could win, upon which conclusion of the model was basically "the result fits in with the forecast, because either candidate could have won according to the model" - in which case I personally concluded, if no matter what the result, we can always just say "the candidate who won could always have won given the forecast" - what are we really adding to the conversation here? We can simply look at polls and understand who is generally ahead, and not be any better or worse off.

• alisonatwork

  today at 3:18 AM

  538 in its final form was not about predicting election outcomes, it was about the business and science of polling, and contrasting factual data with the way people perceived related issues. It was an interesting outlet that helped illuminate the data side of political science, and at its best also provided some insight into the disconnect between how the general public thinks about a topic versus what is actually happening.

  Disney killing 538 is broadly a loss for political journalism in the US, imo, because most other American media is more interested in sensationalism and hyping imaginary culture war issues, i.e. exacerbating exactly the disconnect with reality that 538 was trying to combat with its more evidence-based reporting. From my perspective the only place still doing this kind of work outside of niche, single-topic outlets like SCOTUSblog is ProPublica, and even they don't tend to be as politics-centric as 538 was. So I definitely will miss the site, and the pod. I don't have the stomach for most other American media.

• wasabi991011

  today at 3:46 AM

  Respectfully, I disagree on both points.

  > We can all look at various polls and get an assessment of who is generally ahead.

  I probably could, but there's a lot of polls to look through and I don't really want to spend the time. Much rather have someone else do it for me.

  > if no matter what the result, we can always just say "the candidate who won could always have won given the forecast" - what are we really adding to the conversation here?

  Isn't this hypothesis testing? If you have a weighted coin and a guess as to which side is heavier and by how much, you're going to need multiple flips to see if you are right. And it doesn't even really make sense to talk about how right/wrong you are about a single flip, only on the aggregate.

  It's possible someone has already compiled FiveThirtyEight's results to get some aggregate accuracy, I haven't checked. If they have and he's wrong on average and that's what you are referencing, my apologies.

• tqi

  today at 3:53 AM

  I know the folks at 538 meant well, but I think the ultimate impact of their work was to accelerate the politics as entertainment, team sports-ification of elections, to our nations detriment.

• sdwr

  today at 2:59 AM

  I kinda get your point - statistics suck the air out of the room. If regular people are talking about swing state poll margins of error instead of the actual issues, something's gone wrong.

  538 democrasized the numbers that were the domain of political whizzes. I don't know if that's a good thing.

  • maigret

    today at 8:36 AM

    Well swing states are the issues, aren’t they? I’m happy to live in a place where it isn’t a small fraction of individuals deciding the fate of the country.

  • wslack

    today at 3:41 AM

    I think aggregators are useful to tell us what actually moved voters in a campaign - the swings are visible even if baseline error is not.

    • bee_rider

      today at 4:39 AM

      Eh, this seems to just promote armchair quarterbacking. What moved voters is an issue for the campaigns to track. We should listen to what the campaigns say about what we care about.

• Gimpei

  today at 4:42 AM

  I disagree. Before 538 people were still offering lots of election predictions and it was much much worse, because it was based entirely on hunches and vibes. Silvers rates the pollsters and provides confidence intervals far better than a simple average of polls does. I’d much rather read his forecasts than any number of bloviating opeds.

• JumpCrisscross

  today at 6:58 AM

  Would note that Silver owned the election model 538 ran on. When he left, he took it with him. The recent election forecasts 538 put out were not Nate Silver’s. (In my opinion, his were more accurate. More importantly, his commentary was more informative on the model’s shortcomings and insights.)

• nozzlegear

  today at 3:14 AM

  I largely agree with your points. Election modelers and forecasters really don't add much to the conversation after 2016, despite their attempts and even purported success at correcting their models and mistakes. The only election forecasting model that I take seriously these days is my own vibes based forecasting.

  I have enjoyed the meta-drama around forecasting and modeling that pops up every election season though. It's hard to beat "[Nate Silver] doesn't have the faintest idea how to turn the keys," or "I ran 80,000 simulations."

  ¹ https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/he-doesnt-have-the-faintest-i...

  ² https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-ran-80000-simulations

• mgfist

  today at 3:17 AM

  But that's because elections these days are incredibly close. It's like being upset that the best statistical answer to "who will win a coin toss" is "well it's 50/50".

  • genewitch

    today at 3:58 AM

    Are you sure about that?

    89% of counties turned red. Looking at 1.5% total difference is missing the forest for the trees. Trump got all swing states.

    To quote: "this is absolutely a mandate."

    https://youtu.be/zG3n2IeaTPA

    edit: facts cannot be insolent. The youtube link is a guest on the view named Stephen something, from this week, saying the words that i typed into the comment box. Not clicking it is doing yourself a disservice; as it is "source cited."

    Don't get mad at me for relaying this information.

    • roenxi

      today at 4:15 AM

      Sure. And what was the probability of something like that happening? About a coin flip.

      It is an election using First-Past-the-Post counting. A 50:50 probability doesn't mean the final count will be close, it (usually, anyway) means there is evens odds which side is about to win decisively. The county results are expected to correlate, as are the swing states in all likelihood.

      • genewitch

        today at 5:11 AM

        the probability of 89% of blue counties (in 2020) switching to red counties is a 50-50 chance? can you show your work?

        • roenxi

          today at 5:24 AM

          https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2024-election-forecast/

          You'll note that the distribution mode for a Trump win was 312 electoral votes; which is what he got. They do a good forecast - it suggests there was a 50-50 chance Trump wins, and if he wins the most likely outcome is ... exactly what happened.

          If it was a Harris win the best bet is she would have gotten 319 electoral votes with high correlation in the swing states too.

    • aaronbrethorst

      today at 4:16 AM

      Counties don't vote and Trump's popular vote "mandate" is smaller than Clinton's popular vote win in 2016.

      Here's a fun stat: literally 40 states have a population that is less than the population of Los Angeles county alone. Why doesn't Los Angeles itself have 80 senators?

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidentia...

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidentia...

      Setting aside 2000 and 2016 (EC winners lost the popular vote), you'd have to go back to 1968 and Nixon's squeaker of an election over Humphrey to find a closer popular vote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presiden...

      • skissane

        today at 5:49 AM

        > Here's a fun stat: literally 40 states have a population that is less than the population of Los Angeles county alone. Why doesn't Los Angeles itself have 80 senators?

        Because in a federal system it is often considered important to provide the less populous states with some protection against the more populous states always getting their way. The US Constitution does this by balancing representation based on population (the House) with equal representation of each state (the Senate).

        The US is not the only federal constitution to do this - the Australian constitution has the same design (indeed, copied off the American model), except having 6 states instead of 50, Australia went with 12 senators per a state instead of only 2 - hence Tasmania (population 571,200) gets 12 senators, and so does New South Wales (population 8.153 million).

        Things don’t have to be this way - instead of a federation one could have a unitary system. But in the case of both countries, protecting the power of the smaller states was considered important at the time of the constitution’s drafting - and the smaller states likely would not have agreed to it otherwise

        Where it is different, is Australia doesn’t have the same “red state” vs “blue state” dynamic the US does. In Australia, while some states lean more one way than the other, they essentially all are “swing states”

        • aaronbrethorst

          today at 7:13 AM

          "in a federal system it is often considered important"

          by whom?

          Definitely not James Madison who only grudgingly accepted this framework in Federalist No 62: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed62.asp

          • skissane

            today at 7:46 AM

            > by whom?

            Well, both by the majority of the drafters of the US Constitution, and the majority of the drafters of the Australian Constitution.

            And the authors of the German Constitution – the German upper house, the Bundesrat, represents the German states (Länder), and although (unlike the Australian and US Senates) it does give more populous states a greater number of seats, the number of seats is still out of proportion to population: in Bremen there are 223,830 people per a seat, compared to 2,977,586 people per a seat in North Rhine-Westphalia.

            And the authors of the Swiss Constitution – the Swiss upper house (Council of States) gives two seats each to twenty of the country's cantons, and one seat each to the other six (which six are traditionally referred to as "half-cantons")

            And I'm sure I could dig up more examples – globally, the majority of federations have an upper house which provides, either equal representation to each state/province, or if not equal, then at least representation that deviates significantly from proportionality to population.

            > Definitely not James Madison who only grudgingly accepted this framework in Federalist No 62

            I'm not sure if Madison should be interpreted as "only grudgingly" accepting this framework – but even if that's true (Madison was very much an advocate of centralized power and supporter the interests of the big states over that of the smaller states), many of the other delegates at the 1787 Constitutional Convention viewed it more positively, even as a necessity – the majority of delegates agreed to the Constitution containing this provision, and it is unlikely such a majority would have if it had been ommitted.

            • kelnos

              today at 9:44 AM

              > the German upper house, the Bundesrat, represents the German states (Länder), and although (unlike the Australian and US Senates) it does give more populous states a greater number of seats, the number of seats is still out of proportion to population: in Bremen there are 223,830 people per a seat, compared to 2,977,586 people per a seat in North Rhine-Westphalia.

              To be fair, though, in the US, the House also has unfortunate proportional-representation anomalies, too, because the total number of Representatives has not changed in over a century. See Wyoming vs. California for an illustrative example.

      • JumpCrisscross

        today at 6:55 AM

        > why doesn't Los Angeles itself have 80 senators?

        The electoral college internally balances the power of a population against the difficulty of holding land. Look at New York State, where NYC mostly holds court. If it were a country you’d see rebellion. Because while the city outnumbers the country, it’s culturally more similar to itself than the country, and that in practice leaves lots of people disenfranchised.

        (Personally, I think the President should be popularly elected. But the Senate should continue resembling our geography.)

      • genewitch

        today at 5:10 AM

        Out of curiosity, do you recall seeing a "county map" of the blue votes in the 2020 election?

        • kemayo

          today at 5:17 AM

          Why would we have? It's pointless. As the GP said, land doesn't vote.

          The more interesting map is the one where you weight the display by population, since it gives a much more accurate representation of how the USA is divided: https://engaging-data.com/pages/scripts/d3Electoral/countyel...

          The tool on that website is actually pretty informative to play with if you want to quickly see how adjusting the map style can change the perception. https://engaging-data.com/county-electoral-map-land-vs-popul...

        • danorama

          today at 5:19 AM

          I don’t personally recall, but it’s kind of a silly idea to break down presidential votes by county anyway. At least counting states matters legally in elections. And counting people matters as a way to judge desires and sentiments.

          Counting by counties combines the unrepresentativeness of the Electoral College with the legal irrelevance of the popular vote.

        • seanmcdirmid

          today at 5:53 AM

          If you include Alaska, which is a huge state (I hear bigger than Texas), land starts voting very blue due to Alaskan native influence. They don’t have counties though, just boroughs (Alaska still goes red even if it’s land goes blue due to population distribution).

        • aaronbrethorst

          today at 7:08 AM

          Did you know that there are about 2,160 counties across these 40 states that collectively have a smaller population than Los Angeles county? Who cares about a "county map"?

    • kemayo

      today at 5:37 AM

      I don't think someone can claim a "mandate" based on not even having won 50% of the vote. You need to at least be able to say that over half of the voters wanted you to win in order to use language like that.

      That 1.5% is the only thing that mattered for "mandate" purposes. Trump won, but on a razor's edge, and that should give him some pause. (It won't.)

    • nobody9999

      today at 4:17 AM

      >https://youtu.be/zG3n2IeaTPA

      >note: not clicking that because you disagree with me is really doing yourself a disservice.

      I won't click the link because I'm here for discussion with the users of this site, not some random video you thought was interesting/useful.

      Why do you find it interesting/useful? What arguments are made? How do those arguments comport with your beliefs?

      Let's have a discussion. So tell me what you think, don't link to some rando on youtube.

      • bee_rider

        today at 4:41 AM

        Also it is a video. Asking literate people to go watch a video is disrespectful of their time.

        • genewitch

          today at 5:06 AM

          It is a video of a guest on the view saying the words that i typed. It was "citing a source."

      • genewitch

        today at 5:05 AM

        lol TIL "The View" is "some rando on youtube"

        And to answer your question, the video is a guest on the view who i don't know, saying the exact numbers i quoted. I was quoting the person on the view, which aired yesterday or something.

        what's interesting, is instead of discussing what i said prior to the link, you chose to instead try and make me feel bad for linking a video.

        Keep it classy, HN.

        • leourbina

          today at 6:50 AM

          Anyone can say anything on YouTube. I think you’re confusing confirmation bias with “citing your sources”.

        • nobody9999

          today at 7:35 AM

          >what's interesting, is instead of discussing what i said prior to the link, you chose to instead try and make me feel bad for linking a video.

          Others had already rebutted your assertion at least as well as I could, so I didn't feel the need to repeat what had already been offered.

          However, given your initial rationale:

          >>note: not clicking that because you disagree with me is really doing yourself a disservice.

          was a poorly constructed straw man. Which I noted. It wasn't that I was rejecting you, I was clarifying that I (and likely many others) come to HN to discuss matters of interest to us.

          If I wanted to watch videos, I'd go to youtube and the like. I came to HN instead.

          I'd point out that you didn't make clear that you were "citing your sources" with the video link.

          Now that I know the source ("Stephen Somebody or other" who managed to get himself booked on some low-information blab fest to make his important pronouncement), my initial response, "[s]o tell me what you think, don't link to some rando on youtube," was spot on.

          All that said, linking to video sources is absolutely reasonable. In fact, I've referenced stuff from videos several times.

          But each time, I made sure to explain the context of the video, the text of the quote and, most importantly, who was being quoted.

          As I did here:

          https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30762760

• bnralt

  today at 4:39 AM

  Like the Rationalist's "Bayesian priors," the election models were a remnant of the "big data" hype from a decade and a half ago. This article is a decent overview for anyone who forgot about it[1]. Like with many hype cycles, there was something actually important underneath the surface (useful statistical modeling), but then people with a poor understanding of the limitations ran wild thinking it could do things far beyond its capabilities (in this case, the degree to which one could use statistics to predict the future).

  Industry gave up on the more extreme claims fairly quickly because it wasn't able to produce. But it lingered on in other places where there was less direct feedback or it was telling people what they wanted it to hear.

  To add to this, it became obvious that many of the leaders in this "field" were people who believed they had an expertise that was far beyond their actual capabilities. Nate Silver ended up accusing much of the polling industry of fraud recently, because he wasn't able to do basic statistical math[2].

  [1] https://slate.com/technology/2017/10/what-happened-to-big-da... [2] https://x.com/JustinWolfers/status/1853302476406993315

• CalRobert

  today at 4:03 AM

  I find it useful in the general way that having corroborating sources for election data is useful. If the election is reasonably close to models, exit polls, etc. then it is more likely to have been run fairly.

• smt88

  today at 2:50 AM

  The purpose of statistical coverage of elections is to tell campaigns what their strengths and weaknesses are and to entertain the rest of us.

  Since we don't run campaigns, the only value is entertainment. But that's not a negligible value for a lot of people.

  • ks2048

    today at 3:02 AM

    I agree it's mainly entertainment, but it also affects a lot of people "involved" in campaigns who aren't "running" them - mainly people donating their money or time.

• mikepurvis

  today at 4:34 AM

  As a resident of Kitchener ON, I'm privileged to live in one of just two Canadian ridings represented by the Green Party— I worked on Mike Morrice's first campaign in 2019, and I remember being frustrated trying to talk to voters on doorsteps and having to explain over and over that the purported "polls" on 338 (Canadian knockoff 538) showing us at 3-4% support in the riding were based on projecting forward previous results and adjusting slightly for national polling trends.

  Sure enough, we ended up coming in at a whopping 26% in 2019, and in 2021 won the seat with 33%. Certainly the win was in part because the incumbent was embroiled in a last minute scandal, but I truly believe the polling aggregators have a huge suppressing effect on breakout candidates— without that effect it's possible we could have taken the earlier election too.

  Now that seat is "safely" Green, it's been twice affirmed with huge wins for a separate Green candidate at the provincial level:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitchener_Centre_(federal_elec...

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitchener_Centre_(provincial_e...

  I expect this year's federal election will deliver another 40-50% result for Morrice, as he's very popular locally, but there's 338 again showing a big upswing for the Liberals in Kitchener Centre, when almost certainly there is no such thing, it's all just hallucinated from national polling:

  https://338canada.com/35048e.htm

• Uehreka

  today at 3:11 AM

  I find the modeling super useful, many conventional media outlets still don’t properly communicate probabilities to their audience. For instance, I vividly remember the following exchange between Nate and some news anchor in during one of the 2016 conventions:

  Anchor: So Nate, you say Trump has a 25% chance of winning, can you tell us exactly what that means?

  Nate: Sure. So imagine I flipped two quarters, and they both came up heads. In that scenario, Trump wins.

  Anchor: (shocked) Wait but that’s… that’s a thing that actually happens! You’re saying Trump has an actual chance of winning?

  Nate: Well I’d rather be Hillary than Trump right now, but yes, people shouldn’t be that surprised if Trump wins, his chances aren’t insignificant.

  I remember people in October still saying that Nate had to be wrong, that there was just no way Trump could win. There was even a growing market for what I would now call “cope forecasts” that “unskewed” the results to show that, really, Hillary had a 99% chance of winning, just like you knew she did (all of these people looked extremely foolish after the election was over).

  I also feel like good models provide valuable pushback against media narratives that try to characterize the “closeness” of a race. In 2016, people wanted to hear that Trump had no chance of winning, but Nate/538 correctly pushed back that the race was actually pretty close and both candidates had a good chance. And he did the opposite in 2012: Pundits wanted to cast Obama and Romney as being neck-and-neck (which makes for a more exciting story) and Nate had the stats to push back that actually the race was not very close at all. If Romney had won in 2012, Nate would’ve had to eat crow, but Romney didn’t win.

  Nate and 538 also do senate races, which are super valuable if you’re figuring out which candidates to donate money to. Often there are Democratic candidates in totally doomed races against Republicans I really don’t like, and the data helps me look at those situations and go “yeah I hate Lindsey Graham, but his challenger has no chance, I’m going to donate to the milquetoast Nevada senator whose race is on a knife’s edge instead”.

  I could probably just look up polls, but the way Nate/538 process the polls into results with error bars and probabilities makes it a lot easier to reason about.

  • bnralt

    today at 4:53 AM

    I see this argument a lot, but it's contradictory. You're simultaneously arguing that people don't understand statistics because they're treating a 25% chance as no chance to win, but then you're doing the same by saying that the other predictions, in the 15% to 2% range[1] are "cope forecasts" that people who followed them "looked extremely foolish" (the only major 99% forecast was PEC, but Wang said that's because the model broke down and the actual forecast was around 5% [1]).

    25%, 15%, 5%, even 2% chances happen with a decent amount of frequency. I don't understand how people can say that people don't understand probability because they think a 25% chance won't happen, but then turn around and treat a 15% chance the very same way.

    [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/upshot/presidential... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20171120175008/https://election....

  • MostlyStable

    today at 3:59 AM

    I agree with basically this whole comment, but the sad/ironic/whatever part of it is though even though Nate Silver was doing the thing you are describing ("actually, Trump has a real shot of winning"), afterwards he got constantly dinged (either by people incorrectly conflating him with the 99% models, or by people who just didn't actual listen to him) for "getting it wrong" because he "only" gave trump a 30ish % chance of winning.

    I still come across it every once in a while and it probably has the highest ratio of level of infuriating-ness to low-value of the stakes of the opinion of just about any political opinion I can think of.

• fitsumbelay

  today at 2:40 AM

  agreed on all points

• tbrownaw

  today at 2:59 AM

  But how else will you know the correct emotional tone to use when complaining / gloating about the upcoming election with friends? Or know how seriously to take various prepper activities like stocking up on Twinkies in case the wrong team wins?

I started listening to the 538 Politics podcast a lifetime ago when they did The Gerrymandering Project. The deep intertwining of history, intentions, and statistics made the narrative compelling. I learned so much about how our democracy worked that I would never have known otherwise.

So, I kept listening and kept learning. It was sometimes difficult, not because of their storytelling skills, but because the news was hard to consume. But the cold numbers helped me manage my emotions with clarity and not disengage.

There's something wonderful about journalism backed by data. The line between news and editorial has long been blurred beyond visibility. 538 was a rare example of a place where smart people could express strong opinions but always had to show the work behind their conclusions.

I'll miss 538. They were an amazing team.

• kemayo

  today at 5:11 AM

  Yeah, they've been on my podcast subscription list for at least 5 years now, and I'll miss having them around.

  I had growing conflicted feelings about the site's overall impact on media, sadly. It felt like, although it was good that they existed as a dedicated organization, they contributed to (or were a symptom of) the overall media landscape's slide into politics coverage as mostly coverage of the horse-race. Sometimes I want to hear what the Scottish teens think a news story means... but more often I want something deeply reported about policy.

• alisonatwork

  today at 3:31 AM

  I will miss them too. I saw that Galen is already considering starting his own politics pod, but I fear that by immediately jumping into the Substack black hole it will just end up spiraling into the usual engagement-driven slide to the right: https://www.gdpolitics.com/p/my-thoughts-on-the-end-of-fivet...

  Imo part of what made 538 work post-blogosphere heyday was exactly that it had backing from legacy media and the funding to continue sharing information with the public without a paywall. As soon as sites go behind a paywall they become a personification of the "media elite" stereotype, where only rich people have the privilege of being informed. But how otherwise to fund not just a cheerful host but a team of data scientists, editors etc in this day and age? Seems like the only interested billionaires do it with strings attached.

I really enjoyed 538 in its heyday, and am glad to see Nate carry on with some of the work. I know he can be a polarizing in some circles, but keeping the data angle visible helps smooth some of the rougher edges of following politics sometimes.

• rconti

  today at 2:48 AM

  I really enjoy Nate's podcast with Maria Konnikova - I read her book The Biggest Bluff a few years back and really enjoyed it, and them podcasting together is great. (Despite my feelings about never wanting to hear Malcolm Gladwell's voice ever again, as he's omnipresent in Pushkin podcast network ads, which seem to be the worst of the entire podcasting ecosystem).

  I never really followed the "Nate Silver" controversy after 2016, but it basically seems to boil down to a bunch of liberals being mad because they felt lied to for no apparent reason.

  • nozzlegear

    today at 3:22 AM

    > I never really followed the "Nate Silver" controversy after 2016, but it basically seems to boil down to a bunch of liberals being mad because they felt lied to for no apparent reason.

    FWIW I don't think he's controversial because of the 2016 polling miss, most people who follow 538 understand what 538 does and that it wasn't his "fault." He's controversial because he posts scalding hot takes on Twitter and then goes to the mat to defend them. He also has a penchant for getting into Twitter beefs with other big names in his industry.

    • magicalist

      today at 3:55 AM

      Yes. And "the world would be better if more people were reasonable like me, now here's my hot take...", and using angry responses to demonstrate how reasonable he is in contrast. He ran out of content and resorted to ragebait, like most internet pundits.

      • dragonwriter

        today at 4:14 AM

        > He ran out of content and resorted to ragebait

        I think, actually, he needed to sell content and resorted to ragebait for attention; the transition happened when he and Disney parted ways, and he stopped being a creator sponsored by a media corporation and started being an independent content seller.

• mmahemoff

  today at 2:23 AM

  I learned more from the reaction to Nate and 538’s forecasts than 538 itself. It helped me appreciate how journalists misunderstand and distort basic probability. If a model predicts A, B, and C as having 34%, 33%, and 33% likelihood respectively, the typical report is “538 predicts ‘A’ will win!” and they got it totally wrong when B or C is the victor. Interpretations of 538 were further fuelled by whatever political bias a pundit was coming from.

  In a world where Kevin Rose can reboot Digg, Nate has every chance of acquiring and reviving 538. Good luck to Nate.

FiveThirtyEight was interesting in its time, but in the past few years I felt it ironically became exactly what it was initially trying to oppose: a site full of opinion-based punditry. All their "538 chats" were basically the same as talking heads on TV. Okay, the 538 talking heads maybe paid more attention to data, but the good part of 538 was the intent to cut to the chase, dispense with all the puffery that ordinary news sources shove at you, and just let the data speak for itself. In recent years they moved away from that and became less distinguishable from the opinion section of a mainstream news source.

it must be a wild experience to have a megacorp buy out your brain child, burn it to ashes and throw it away, and chase after the next shiny thing to slap ads on...

• prawn

  today at 3:36 AM

  Nate: "I wasn’t technically laid off — but my existing contract was set to expire in June 2023, and there was profound mutual disinterest in negotiating a new deal."

• Hamuko

  today at 5:50 AM

  Seems like just the natural samsara of the news world. Small outlets are acquired by larger ones, eventually dismantled, staff moving onto build new ones and starting the cycle anew.

This is an absolute loss. 538 is amazing because it forced people to confront the cold hard data about polls surrounding politics and if you didn't like it, figure out what they did wrong or deal with it.

I'll never forget being called racist because I showed someone a 538 poll that said the presidential election was at best a toss-up to someone who was sure Kamala Harris would sweep the swing states.

Glad to hear they will revive the NBA part. Was using the model extensively. It was very informative.

> Last night, as President Trump delivered his State of the Union address, the Wall Street Journal reported that ABC News would lay off the remaining staff at 538 as part of broader cuts within corporate parent Disney.

Did Trump's policies cause the layoffs, or does Nate just happen to mention Trump's address? (forgive my ignorance - feels odd to mention the address if it had nothing to do with the layoffs, but I'm not aware of any obvious connection)

• stackskipton

  today at 4:04 AM

  No, I think Nate was pointing out while everyone was distracted by Trump State of the Union, 538 was cut so few people would notice.

I already miss the approval charts over time. Where the best place to see those, now?

• bbatha

  today at 5:29 AM

  In this article Nate said his version would be up in a week or so.

• relaxing

  today at 3:45 AM

  Pew Research.

  • dragonwriter

    today at 5:36 AM

    Pew, Gallup, and other pollsters each have charts based on their own individual poll series; 538s were a wide ranging aggregate of pretty much all the public polls which reduced the impact of noise.

[flagged]

• iuyhtgbd

  today at 1:35 AM

  What does that mean?

  • jordemort

    today at 1:40 AM

    I'm guessing the first word is either "get" or "eat"

    • iuyhtgbd

      today at 1:49 AM

      I don't know if I'm just dense but I continue to have no idea what the implication is.

      • adpirz

        today at 1:52 AM

        both "get" and "eat" would be followed by an expletive.

        op doesn't like nate.

        • iuyhtgbd

          today at 1:55 AM

          For sure. Thanks for explaining, I think you're right.

          Whenever I hear him interviewed (or read his books) I come away with the impression Silverman is a bit up his own rear but I don't see what's objectionable about writing recommendations for people you've worked with. That's pretty normal.

      • SkyMarshal

        today at 1:51 AM

        You're not alone. Can't be that important though.

  • MrMcCall

    today at 3:09 AM

    A "half Jewish" (his words) man supporting the party of neonazis is difficult for me to digest.

    The last time I wept was watching the 20th part of the BBC's "The World at War", entitled "Genocide". Seeing a dumptruck full of human beings deposited into an excavated pit like so many sacks of potatoes is difficult for me to ignore or forget.

    Unlike Nate, evidently.

    Jewish folks have been an incredible, integral, extraordinary part of my life's strange journey.

    Folks who countenance oppression so long as they're not the ones being oppressed are vile, vile creatures.

    Love for the human race and respect for history dictate that their perfidy not be ignored. The negative potentials of powerful human groups are often nothing less than horrific. Being awake to those negative potentials is the most important lesson of the many recurring arcs of history.

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• bcoates

  today at 1:50 AM

  Innumerates keep self identifying, even 8+ years later. Please learn anything the Fremdschämen is getting painful.

• decimalenough

  today at 1:43 AM

  538's final forecast was Kamala 50%, Trump 49%.

  https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2024-election-forecast/

  • MrMcCall

    today at 2:07 AM

    "There's lies, damned lies, and statistics." --Unknown

  • snickerbockers

    today at 1:47 AM

    Nobody who thinks they can pin a probability on an event that only gets sampled once should ever be taken seriously.

    • NeutralCrane

      today at 2:04 AM

      Each race is only sampled once. But he runs the same methodology on hundreds of races. If the candidates he gives an X% chance to win go on to win approximately X% of the time, the methodology is reliable.

      • magicalist

        today at 3:58 AM

        Not if the methodology is different per race, which it is. No other office is elected like the president is.

    • Enginerrrd

      today at 2:45 AM

      Have you ever heard of a brier score?

      Or bayes theorem, and bayseian inference?

      You might change your mind if you investigate those topics.

    • iuyhtgbd

      today at 1:53 AM

      This is such tired debate that comes up whenever 538 is mentioned in discussion. Polls sample an election's outcome many times throughout the campaign. Statistics works. You can't know the future but you can predict it with error bars. 51/49 or 70/30 should tell you there's a very real chance of a Trump victory.

      People get bent out of shape about 538 but it's usually because they're misinterpreting the prediction, not that the prediction is meaningless.

      • today at 2:00 AM

    • bcoates

      today at 1:52 AM

      And yet, the silver report final modal outcome was exactly the actual result.

• koolba

  today at 1:43 AM

  You mean polls like this that put Clinton 15% ahead? https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/blogs/wisconsin-voter/20...

  I think there’s a stronger argument that those polls were intended to suppress Trump voters into thinking they were not the majority (when in fact they were).

  • lurk2

    today at 2:26 AM

    Clinton won the popular vote by about 3 million votes in 2016.

    • mvdtnz

      today at 2:59 AM

      Are American elections decided on the popular vote?

      • lurk2

        today at 6:57 AM

        Not presidential elections, no.

      • intermerda

        today at 3:22 AM

        Nearly all of them, yes.

      • today at 5:20 AM

  • FireBeyond

    today at 1:58 AM

    I think there's also a huge misunderstanding of statistics in the US.

    More than one person I've spoken to believed that when sites said things like "Hilary has a 70% chance of winning" that that was the same as getting 70% of the vote, i.e. a landslide.

    I've had literal arguments with people who can't/won't understand the difference between an average and a median even when presented with 5th grade level phrasing examples.

  • enjo

    today at 2:05 AM

    >I think there’s a stronger argument that those polls were intended to suppress Trump voters into thinking they were not the majority (when in fact they were).

    Show your work. What evidence do you have to support that argument?

  • cdblades

    today at 2:09 AM

    Are you saying that Trump won the popular vote in 2016?

    • koolba

      today at 3:05 AM

      He won the popular vote in 2016 in States like Wisconsin that for months said he was 10-15% behind in the polls. It’s my interpretation that those polls were wrong but the majority of the media didn’t care. They just wanted to push a narrative that supporting Trump was a fringe minority in those States, rather than the true majority that it was.

      • pitpatagain

        today at 3:46 AM

        This is not an accurate description of the magnitude of polling error in 2016 in WI, which was the state with the most significant polling error that year by a very large margin, see Table 2 "2016 final polling average versus actual results": https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/polling-error-in-2...

        The final difference from polling in WI was 7%, other states had smaller polling errors. The fact is that 2016 was simply an extremely tight race in many states and difficult to forecast even with completely normal polling error bars.

Nate, no. FiveThirtyEight is being shut down because its election model is wrong.