03/06/2025
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.
03/06/2025
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.
03/06/2025
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.
03/06/2025
The trick here is that if the election is close enough that you'd actually want/need multiple pollsters aggregated, the aggregators will indicate high uncertainty. If it's enough of a blowout for the aggregators to indicate low uncertainty, then the individual polls are going to be showing a large gap.
An aggregator saying "foo has a 65% chance of winning" may seem like it's providing more information than a single historically reliable poll (say Reuters/Ipsos) stating "foo is up by 2 points but there's a 3 point margin of error" - but isn't it just an illusion? High quality pollsters very seldom deviate very much.
And even if you grant that the aggregator is closer to being "right" than any single pollster, is that difference actually meaningful enough to impact any real world behaviors? Would you do anything differently with a 50% chance of victory versus a 70% chance?
I've honestly come to think of them as entertainment, with no real value.
03/06/2025
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.
03/06/2025
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.
03/06/2025
Well swing states are the issues, arenât they? Iâm happy to live in a place where it isnât a small fraction of individuals deciding the fate of the country.
03/06/2025
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.
03/06/2025
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.
03/06/2025
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
03/06/2025
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. Iâd much rather read his forecasts than any number of bloviating opeds.
03/06/2025
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".
03/06/2025
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."
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.
03/06/2025
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.
03/06/2025
the probability of 89% of blue counties (in 2020) switching to red counties is a 50-50 chance? can you show your work?
03/06/2025
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.
03/06/2025
you still didn't watch the video i linked^, and you did not answer my actual question: 89% of counties turning red compared to the 2020 election is a 50-50 chance? Can you show your work?
^ The person in the video explains why thinking it is 50-50 chance is detrimental to the liberal cause.
03/06/2025
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...
03/06/2025
> 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 youâd see rebellion. Because while the city outnumbers the country, itâs 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.)
03/07/2025
Even if you buy into the whole notion of "representing geography", the problem is that state boundaries ceased to be representative of any meaningful kind of political distinction a long time ago, as evidenced by the massive red/blue splits in many states. It's not just NY - you can see the same thing in other large states, e.g. in WA where the split is geographical within state boundaries - west of the Cascades is very blue, east is very red. Nor is it unique to blue states - TX has the same exact issue with blue counties having a lot of population that is effectively not represented at all.
Unless and until this is fixed, there's no meaningful "geographic representation" in the Senate, so it's strictly a negative.
03/06/2025
> 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 donât 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 constitutionâs drafting - and the smaller states likely would not have agreed to it otherwise
Where it is different, is Australia doesnât have the same âred stateâ vs âblue stateâ dynamic the US does. In Australia, while some states lean more one way than the other, they essentially all are âswing statesâ
03/06/2025
"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
03/06/2025
> 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 â the German upper house, the Bundesrat, represents the German states (LĂ€nder), 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 â 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 â 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 â 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 â 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.
03/06/2025
> the German upper house, the Bundesrat, represents the German states (LĂ€nder), 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.
03/06/2025
I've heard this my entire life, too. However, having lived more places than just California, I see California as having undue influence on the entire country. Prop 65 warnings pop up on things outside of California. I've even seen stuff labeled as CARB outside of California. These are trivial examples, but both of those things are California legalities. If Louisiana had undue influence on the US, more packaging would have French language as well as English; just as a trivial example.
Something that affects someone living in Los Angeles County may not affect someone in any of the other "2xxx" counties that have less population. For instance, i have a well for water. I don't worry about water shortages in California when i run my well. My water usage doesn't affect Los Angeles at all. And not even in the "butterfly" way because the jetstream goes the other way. This, again, is a trivial example.
Policing in L.A. is different than policing in LA. roadworks are different. Disaster preparedness is different. Fire risks are different. Taxation is different. Health needs are different.
What this boils down to: Californians, and specifically the valley and L.A. County residents, have a loud enough voice to push this agenda, but only when someone they don't like wins. California was happy to put a republican actor in office when the republican actor was "from California."
03/06/2025
I think prop 65 warnings are about the worst example of undue political influence. Companies do this outside the state on a completely voluntary basis.
Their adoption in other states completely bypasses the national legislature due to the real world economic power of the Califonia market. They dictate external behavior by regulating their internal market.
What part of this is undue? States and individuals should have the ability to exercise power through self regulation, essentially threating to take their ball and go home.
Where I find more fault with California and Californians is when they interfere directly with external state politics. The classic example of this would rich Californians dumping money into political campaigns and ballot initiatives in other states, influencing their 'internal* politics.
03/06/2025
The joke in California is that everything both causes and cures cancer. Because of all the hippies, and the generally massive concentration of people. If someone accidentally dumps a ton(2000lbs) of lead in podunk, nebraska, it might affect 10 people. it might affect 100. That same ton of lead on Sepulveda Blvd in the basin would affect millions. So i get prop 65, i get "CARB" - in california you want small engine exhaust to guarantee no sparks, because California is a tinderbox. I gave those two examples to show that i understand that things can have nuance and be good for the general public.
Uh, i am unsure if i used "affect" correctly. Substitute "effect" if i used it wrong.
03/07/2025
California is larger than many countries, and more productive than many countries as well (at least as far as GDP goes). Of course it should have a proportionally large influence on the rest of the country; it's not "undue".
03/07/2025
I think a valid question is why is California so big...
There's North Carolina and South Carolina, North Dakota and South Dakota, Virginia and West Virginia â why not North California and South California?
03/09/2025
Pretty much all state boundaries are historical artifacts at this point. We could ask the same question about Texas, or even NY for that matter.
But when it comes to changing the boundaries, you need the state legislature and Congress acting in agreement. And state boundaries are inherently a partisan political matter at this point because every new state is going to be either "red" or "blue", and this then means the corresponding adjustments to Senate representation (and House too, actually, it's just less pronounced) as well as EC. If, say, Republicans drafted a bill to split red rural areas off CA into its own state, as often proposed, what sane Democrat would ever support it knowing that it means +2 Republican senators in Congress? For the same reason, we aren't going to see statehood for Puerto Rico or DC anytime soon. The only way it could possibly work out is if states are carved out in pairs - e.g. separate deep red areas from CA, but at the same time also do the same for deep blue areas of Texas. But deep blue areas also tend to be the ones that bring in the most taxes, so Texas Republicans might balk at that on economic grounds...
Truth is, our system is too broken to recover. Too many deadlocks. It was possible in the past, when fewer issues were quite so partisan, but of course back then the need for it was also much less obvious. But now, I think it's just going to deteriorate until the dysfunction on federal level gets so bad that the country literally cannot proceed without a major constitutional reform. At which point it'll likely break apart because we won't be able to agree on the new constitution.
03/09/2025
> If, say, Republicans drafted a bill to split red rural areas off CA into its own state, as often proposed, what sane Democrat would ever support it knowing that it means +2 Republican senators in Congress?
> The only way it could possibly work out is if states are carved out in pairs - e.g. separate deep red areas from CA, but at the same time also do the same for deep blue areas of Texas. But deep blue areas also tend to be the ones that bring in the most taxes, so Texas Republicans might balk at that on economic grounds...
Couldn't they find some way of splitting CA into 3 states, two "blue" and one "red", such that you'd get two new Democratic Senators and two new Republican Senators, which would cancel each other out?
> For the same reason, we aren't going to see statehood for Puerto Rico or DC anytime soon.
Puerto Rico isn't a solid lock for the Democrats. PR's new Governor, Jenniffer GonzĂĄlez-ColĂłn, is a Republican, and prior to becoming the Governor, she was PR's non-voting delegate to Congress. Of course, it would be a gamble for the GOP, but not one they'd be guaranteed to lose. Especially if you consider Trump has made significant inroads with Hispanic voters over the last two elections, and the GOP might do even better if they were to pick a Hispanic candidate.
DC, I agree it is unlikely Republicans would agree to it.
But, admission of a new state only needs a simple majority of Congress â in a Democratic trifecta, like Biden had 2021â2023, or Obama had in 2009â2011 â that DC or PR statehood didn't happen then was ultimately due to decisions made by the Democrats, not by the Republicans â if the Democrats had been totally committed to it, it would have happened over Republican objections â but obviously they weren't.
A Democratic trifecta could easily happen again â e.g. Trump II turns out to be really unpopular, and Democrats have a big win in 2028 â but will Democrats do anything more about PR/DC statehood in 2029â2031 than they did in 2009â2011 or 2021â2023? I doubt.
03/06/2025
> 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.
This is not unique to the US either. Section 24 of the Australian constitution guarantees each "Original State" [0] a minimum of five seats in the House of Representatives. On a population basis, Tasmania should only have 3 seats, but due to this clause they have 5 instead. This means Tasmania gets one seat per 114,240 electors, compared to one per 179,021 for NSW. This means Tasmania's seats-per-population in the House is 1.576 times that of NSW.
This is actually more disproportionate than the US House â Wyoming gets 1 Representative for 587,618 people, California gets 1 per 758,269 people â hence Wyoming's seats-per-population is only 1.290 times that of California. (Australian politicians have significantly fewer voters electing them, but that's almost inevitable with a population over 13 times smaller than the US â although consider Ireland, who have 174 seats in their lower house, but only 5.308 million people, meaning each TD only represents 30,000 people â that would be like Australia's House having 888 members, or the US House having over 11,000; if the US House had Australian-sized districts, it would have around 2000 members)
One difference is the size of the US House is at the discretion of Congress, so by increasing the size of the House, they could reduce the disproportionality. That is not possible in Australia without a constitutional amendment [1] since the Australian constitution requires the House to be "as nearly as practicable" twice the size of the Senate. Since the Senate has six states with 12 senators each, for 72 senators (plus 4 territory senators, but the High Court has ruled they don't count for this purpose), the House must be "as nearly as practicable" twice 72, which is 144 members. Currently the House has 151 members â but the 5 territory representatives don't count for this calculation, which brings us down to 146, which is "as nearly as practicable" to the required 144. The phrase "as nearly as practicable" lacks a precise definition, but it would seem any deviation big enough to significantly impact proportionality is likely to be ruled unconstitutional, while the small deviations (a handful of seats) that have thus far gone unchallenged are unlikely to make much of a difference to it. One method which wouldn't require a constitutional amendment would be to significantly increase the number of states, by splitting the existing six states into multiple parts, which in turn could significantly increase the size of the Senate and hence the House â but that is even less likely than a constitutional amendment is.
[0] an "Original State" means a state at the time of the Australian constitution's enactment. Australia currently has six states, all of which are Original States â like the US, the Australian constitution has a procedure to admit new states, but unlike the US, that procedure has thus far never been used
[1] the procedure for amending the Australian constitution is very different from that of the US â a national referendum, with both a majority nationwide, and a state-wide majority in a majority of states. What it has in common with the US constitution, is being very difficult to amend in practice â because most attempts to change the Australian constitution end up failing to pass the referendum
03/06/2025
Out of curiosity, do you recall seeing a "county map" of the blue votes in the 2020 election?
03/06/2025
I donât personally recall, but itâs 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.
03/06/2025
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...
03/06/2025
Not sure why I can't reply to the sibling comment...
anyway, the reason for the east/west divide in population density is that the west is dry. See maps at climate.gov (https://www.climate.gov/news-features/featured-images/new-ma...). By convention people refer to this line as being at the "100th meridian" but the 98th may be more accurate.
03/06/2025
Bit of a tangent, but I've always wondered why the United States has a very clear dividing line between the populated east and relatively empty west. It's really visible in the first map you shared. Is there a historical reason behind that line? Or some geographical boundary?
03/06/2025
It is a function of both geography and history, both based on water. The line you are seeing in the east is the rain shadow of the Rocky mountains.
Moving east from California, you have the great basin desert, followed by the Rocky Mountains, and then the relatively dry great plains.
Population follows precipitation.
https://gisgeography.com/us-precipitation-map/
https://www.thoughtco.com/geography-shapes-us-regional-weath...
03/06/2025
My understanding, as an american, is that the Federal government "owns" most of the land west of either the Mississippi River or the Sabine. Or used to "own" it. So getting land for personal/business use in that geographic region is harder than eastward. I don't know the term of art, but it's like the Federal Government - via the BLM, USDA, USFS, or whatever - has right of first refusal for all land sales.
I know that my understanding can be wrong, but this is what i've heard and perusing some maps bears out at least some validity.
03/06/2025
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 donât have counties though, just boroughs (Alaska still goes red even if itâs land goes blue due to population distribution).
03/06/2025
Louisiana doesn't have counties, either. I live in Louisiana, and when i said "counties" i included the parishes in my state, and any other geographically distinct entity of the same legal merit.
there are 3300 counties in the US. People live in all of those counties.
03/06/2025
There are only a few boroughs in Alaska but some of them are larger than Texas.
03/06/2025
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"?
03/06/2025
people who don't live in Los Angeles might be curious why their neighbors suddenly switched to voting red.
why is everyone assuming that i'm not intelligent enough to know that "land doesn't vote"? The county voting maps are a proxy.
03/06/2025
Because theyâre a meaningless proxy?
03/06/2025
it tells you that your neighbors voted for trump, and we might ask why. It isn't meaningless, if you live in a historically "blue" county and it went red, why did it go red?
I understand that counties can have various sub-regions and cultures and all of that, but not every county does. there's 3300 counties, and people live in all of them. Knowing that your neighbors voted for Trump might incline introspection.
at least that's what i hoped i could point out. Apparently shoot the messenger!
03/06/2025
>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.
03/06/2025
Also it is a video. Asking literate people to go watch a video is disrespectful of their time.
03/06/2025
It is a video of a guest on the view saying the words that i typed. It was "citing a source."
03/06/2025
The View is just a chit-chat show anyway, so a source that proves that somebody said something on it doesnât prove anything compelling.
Anyway, my computer canât play YouTube (ad blocking issues).
The underlying thing that is annoying people, I think, is that this is (as far as I can tell based on what youâve written) a factual mathematical issue. That sort of thing is easily conveyed via text and equations. Why would anybody want to watch a video of somebody explaining math?
03/06/2025
> The View is just a chit-chat show anyway, so a source that proves that somebody said something on it doesnât prove anything compelling.
This is a fallacy. I repeated numbers, that person was also repeating numbers, however, they're on a national news program and no one has given any reason that the numbers stated were wrong. It does not matter who says something, you have to weigh it on the merits of the statements.
It isn't a "factual mathematical issue" it's a sociological issue, and it's bearing out in this comment thread - burying one's head in the sand because "Los Angeles is bigger and has more people" or "land doesn't vote" or "so what, it wasn't a majority" is missing the forest for the trees. Something about the platform did not work for our neighbors. A platform that worked in 2008, 2012, (2016 if you reckon the pundits are correct), and 2020 - it ceased working in 2024; and merely "doing the same thing" going forward won't work.
I think the unspoken part is this: "If the left just pushes on as it has been, the midterms and 2028 aren't going to be '1.5%' margins"
People often assume i am part of the opposition party.
03/06/2025
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.
03/06/2025
Anyone can say anything on YouTube. I think youâre confusing confirmation bias with âciting your sourcesâ.
03/06/2025
you didn't watch it either, huh? Nice.
also what bias? I didn't make the stats up. Statements of fact cannot be insolent. If you disagree with the facts, then let's talk about that, and look for more data. However, what has happened in this thread is thinking i have an agenda, other than i think people need to hear what they were talking about - in that clip
The mentality that "it was real close to 50-50 and trump didn't get a majority of the vote and therefore we can keep on doing what we're doing" is what the video clip was talking to. It didn't work, and the tactics need to change if anyone wants to see change.
I don't care that people want to argue with me personally. But it's not doing themselves any favors, as it pertains to getting people elected they want to see in office.
03/06/2025
>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
03/06/2025
Okay. have it your way.
The thought that the vote was "real close to 50-50" and "trump didn't get a majority of the vote" and "therefore we just need to do what we're doing and it'll work out OK in 2028 and the midterms" is what the video clip i linked was talking to.
Specifically, nearly every reply to my comment, other than yours, argued that "the number of counties that switched" is irrelevant, as if that happened by accident, as if your neighbors apparently changing from blue to red for the 2024 election isn't a bellwether of something else. Trump still got a plurality of votes. Asking "why" is something that needs to be done.
Nearly every comment assumed something about me, because i quoted a statistic. I knew, because i have been on internet forums for over a quarter century, that no matter how i phrased my comment, i was going to get downvoted and argued with.
03/06/2025
>The thought that the vote was "real close to 50-50" and "trump didn't get a majority of the vote"
Yes. Both of those things are true. Other folks correctly mentioned that.
>and "therefore we just need to do what we're doing and it'll work out OK in 2028 and the midterms" is what the video clip i linked was talking to.
Who said that? Not me. Not anyone else on this thread.
Rather, various folks rebutted[0][5][6] your assertion (whether you're quoting some rando or not) that "there absolutely is a mandate." Which is a ridiculous statement, as the current incumbent only received 1.5% more votes than his opponent. That's not a mandate, that's a squeaker.
What would constitute a mandate? Contrast the results with the 1972, 1984 or 1996 elections, which actually conveyed a mandate. Go ahead and compare the results of those elections (definitely mandate elections) with the 2024 presidential election where[4]:
Trump won the Electoral College with 312 electoral votes,
while Harris received 226...
Trump won the national popular vote with a plurality of
49.8%.
1984: "Reagan won re-election in a landslide victory, carrying 525 electoral votes, 49 states, and 58.8% of the popular vote. Mondale won 13 electoral votes: 10 from his home state of Minnesota, which he won by a narrow margin of 0.18% (3,761 votes), and 3 from the District of Columbia, which has always voted overwhelmingly for the Democratic candidate."[2]
1996: "Clinton defeated Dole by a wide margin, winning 379 electors to Dole's 159 and taking 49.2% of the national popular vote to Dole's 40.7%."[3]
As you can see, 1.5% is a tiny margin compared with real mandate elections. So your youtube/The View rando is flat wrong about a mandate for Trump.
Which says nothing at all about future elections or election strategies for the Democratic Party. You're trying to put words in the mouths of others. Please stop.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43276767
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1972_United_States_presidentia...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_United_States_presidentia...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_United_States_presidentia...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidentia...
[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43276365
[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43276669
Edit: Completed my comment. Apologies for any confusion after inadvertently posting an incomplete comment. Clarified prose too.
03/06/2025
again, i was quoting THE VIEW, which is a left leaning news and entertainment program. Arguing with me about whether or not there is a mandate is silly, as, in my first comment, put those words in quotation marks which means i was directly quoting someone - and then i linked the video i grabbed the quote from.
How many minutes did you spend writing all of this to me? The video i linked is less than 5 minutes long and it answers "rebuttals" you or anyone else has said.
you stop. :-)
03/06/2025
You completely miss the point.
I'm going to assume that you're operating in good faith and really don't understand (is English your native language?) not just being deliberately obtuse.
And more's the pity.
03/06/2025
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.)
03/06/2025
Well, the great thing is we have betting markets for this now. Given your confidence, I'm assuming you made a lot of money betting on Trump?
03/06/2025
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."
Âč https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/he-doesnt-have-the-faintest-i...
ÂČ https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-ran-80000-simulations
03/06/2025
03/06/2025
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 Silverâs. (In my opinion, his were more accurate. More importantly, his commentary was more informative on the modelâs shortcomings and insights.)
03/06/2025
>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?
When the "upset" candidate wins, it will have been statistically likely. Yes. What they're adding are error bars in the collective consciousness.
Ironically enough, the hype pop of 538 was actually driven by people misinterpreting the stats and using them to feel vindicated in their support of Obama. The comedown was finding out that 25% is still 1-in-4 odds.
538 should be killing the horse race coverage by doing the most sober version of it. But horse race is big business. Therefore: boo 538, booooooo, they're harshing the vibe of my favorite reality show.
03/06/2025
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.
03/06/2025
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.
03/06/2025
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.
03/06/2025
As a resident of Kitchener ON, I'm privileged to live in one of just two Canadian ridings represented by the Green Partyâ 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 candidatesâ 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
03/06/2025
I find the modeling super useful, many conventional media outlets still donât 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 thatâs⊠thatâs a thing that actually happens! Youâre saying Trump has an actual chance of winning?
Nate: Well Iâd rather be Hillary than Trump right now, but yes, people shouldnât be that surprised if Trump wins, his chances arenât 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 âcope forecastsâ that âunskewedâ 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 âclosenessâ 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 wouldâve had to eat crow, but Romney didnât win.
Nate and 538 also do senate races, which are super valuable if youâre figuring out which candidates to donate money to. Often there are Democratic candidates in totally doomed races against Republicans I really donât like, and the data helps me look at those situations and go âyeah I hate Lindsey Graham, but his challenger has no chance, Iâm going to donate to the milquetoast Nevada senator whose race is on a knifeâs edge insteadâ.
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.
03/06/2025
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....
03/06/2025
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.
03/06/2025
agreed on all points
03/06/2025
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?
03/06/2025
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.
03/06/2025
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.
03/06/2025
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.
03/06/2025
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.
03/06/2025
I learned more from the reaction to Nate and 538âs 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 â538 predicts âAâ will win!â 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.
03/06/2025
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.
03/06/2025
> 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.
03/06/2025
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.
03/06/2025
> 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.
03/06/2025
Gotcha, thanks. I've never been able to find value in that platform so I must have missed it. On his podcast sometimes he TALKS about the argument he gets into on Twitter, but of course it all sounds more reasonable when he's explaining it I'm sure!
03/06/2025
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.
03/06/2025
538 hasn't really been 538 since Silver left, as Disney lost the rights to Silver's models (he maintained ownership of them) at that point. I'm honestly not too sad over the ABC News version of 538 folding; Silver's own continuing work will fill the niche that the old-school 538 flled.
03/06/2025
> almost never interfered in our editorial process
Almost. This means that they were perfectly willing to, but rarely had to.
If it were otherwise, as Chomsky said, "You wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting".
03/06/2025
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.
03/06/2025
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...
03/06/2025
Nate: "I wasnât technically laid off â but my existing contract was set to expire in June 2023, and there was profound mutual disinterest in negotiating a new deal."
03/06/2025
The interesting thing about his experience, though, is that he had the clout (and foresight?) to craft the deal so that he was merely licensing his models to Disney, and ever since he left, Disney has not been able to use them (well, for some of the sports-related ones, Disney was permitted to keep a copy, but not benefit from further work on it).
So Silver still seems to have the rights to the important stuff that made FiveThirtyEight what it was. He can (and has been) more or less building a new version of it, using all his old IP as a base.
03/06/2025
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.
03/06/2025
<Microsoft clears its throat and glances around nervously...>
03/07/2025
>538-style of election coverage in 2008... I'm not really convinced about what it adds to the conversation around elections
I'm not really convinced that conversations around elections add anything. <-- period.
for me, 538-style coverage is great substitute for having to listen to myriad opinions that are generally facially flawed, and neither a representative sample.
03/06/2025
I already miss the approval charts over time. Where the best place to see those, now?
03/06/2025
In this article Nate said his version would be up in a week or so.
03/06/2025
Pew Research.
03/06/2025
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.
03/07/2025
Nobody needs election predictions in a dictatorship.
03/06/2025
Glad to hear they will revive the NBA part. Was using the model extensively. It was very informative.
03/06/2025
> 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)
03/06/2025
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.
03/06/2025
[flagged]
03/06/2025
What does that mean?
03/06/2025
I'm guessing the first word is either "get" or "eat"
03/06/2025
I don't know if I'm just dense but I continue to have no idea what the implication is.
03/06/2025
both "get" and "eat" would be followed by an expletive.
op doesn't like nate.
03/06/2025
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.
03/06/2025
You're not alone. Can't be that important though.
03/06/2025
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03/06/2025
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03/06/2025
Innumerates keep self identifying, even 8+ years later. Please learn anything the FremdschÀmen is getting painful.
03/06/2025
538's final forecast was Kamala 50%, Trump 49%.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2024-election-forecast/
03/06/2025
"There's lies, damned lies, and statistics." --Unknown
03/06/2025
Nobody who thinks they can pin a probability on an event that only gets sampled once should ever be taken seriously.
03/06/2025
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.
03/06/2025
Not if the methodology is different per race, which it is. No other office is elected like the president is.
03/06/2025
Have you ever heard of a brier score?
Or bayes theorem, and bayseian inference?
You might change your mind if you investigate those topics.
03/06/2025
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.
03/06/2025
03/06/2025
>Statistics works
it does but just because nate silver calls something "statistics" doesn't necessarily mean that it is. If Donald Trump has a 20% chance of winning that means that we can hold the election 100 times and expect that he'll win approximately 20 elections and lose the other 80. Which is ridiculous because each voter is not an independent random variable.
03/07/2025
Each eligible voter is a random variable, independence aside. Silver's model does not operate on the level of the voter however. A random variable is a very flexible abstraction, almost anything can be a random variable if you can find a way to measure it. Polls are a measurement. They're imperfect, but all measurements contain error.
It's not statistics because any authority says it is, it's statistics because it starts with a measure of probability (aggregated polls) and builds an interpretation on top of it. That's what statistics is. It can be good statistics or bad statistics, but that's a separate question. Incidentally, it has a pretty good track record.
If you have a criticism of Silver's model I'm curious to hear it. However, as it is I don't see a criticism in your comment. You say it's ridiculous, but it isn't. It's complicated, not ridiculous. I can't say precisely what's on your mind, but if I had to guess, it doesn't make sense to you, which is a different matter.
03/12/2025
I don't see the point in anything that isn't falsifiable, and in order for that to happen there needs to be a sample size greater than one. If Hillary has a 99.9% chance of winning and Donald has a 0.1% chance of winning, does that mean the model was wrong or does that mean we're in the 0.1% timeline?
If you want to prove that a coin flip has a 50% chance of landing heads, a 50% chance of landing on tails, and a negligible chance of landing on its edge, you can run as many tests as you want and observe that as N approaches infinity the number of heads converges on 0.5N and the number of tails converges on 0.5N. Alternatively, you might find that the coin isn't well-balanced, in which case you've proven that the "50/50 model" was not accurate.
You can't do that with elections because each election only happens once. Even if the same two candidates are running against each other in every election, the issues at stake are different and the voterbase is different. In reality one candidate has a 100% chance of victory and the other has a 0% chance of victory but we don't know which candidate it is.
03/06/2025
And yet, the silver report final modal outcome was exactly the actual result.
03/06/2025
You mean polls like this that put Clinton 15% ahead? https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/blogs/wisconsin-voter/20...
I think thereâs a stronger argument that those polls were intended to suppress Trump voters into thinking they were not the majority (when in fact they were).
03/06/2025
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.
03/06/2025
Clinton won the popular vote by about 3 million votes in 2016.
03/06/2025
Are American elections decided on the popular vote?
03/06/2025
Nearly all of them, yes.
03/06/2025
Not presidential elections, no.
03/06/2025
03/06/2025
That poll was in August of 2016. A lot changed between then and election day. Obviously we can't know if Clinton really would have had a 15 point lead on the day that poll was taken, because no official vote was taken. You may think it's implausible that it could have been true, but you're just some rando on the internet, what do you know? (Same with me!)
> intended to suppress Trump voters into thinking they were not the majority (when in fact they were
Depends on what you mean by "majority". If you're just talking about Wisconsin and that specific poll, sure Trump voters ended up being in the majority, but we can't say with any certainty what that situation was in early August. Polls like that one are the best guesses we have for that particular snapshot in time.
If you're talking about an overall majority of those who ended up being actual voters, then that's also not the case, as Trump did not win a majority of votes; Clinton did. Sadly, though, popular vote majority is not how our presidential election system works.
03/06/2025
>I think thereâs 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?
03/06/2025
Are you saying that Trump won the popular vote in 2016?
03/06/2025
He won the popular vote in 2016 in States like Wisconsin that for months said he was 10-15% behind in the polls. Itâs my interpretation that those polls were wrong but the majority of the media didnât 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.
03/06/2025
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.
03/06/2025
Nate, no. FiveThirtyEight is being shut down because its election model is wrong.
03/06/2025