I feel like the correct strategy for 538 when it was actually niche was to be precise, but then it went viral and maybe should've hit the IDK button much harder and more often after that.
On the other hand, it does raise the question how valuable the 538 models for something like this really are if the outcome is a coin flip anyway.
I disagree that it's all pointless though. Most basically it's smart for campaigns to have a good model and let that inform strategy where appropriate. Since the president is a big deal other people's decisions are also impacted, and in the long run it pays to have good predictions of those chances. Also, the outcome sometimes is fairly certain and that isn't always easy to see.
People don't like seeing a 95% chance of winning and then losing. The game tweaks the odds, so certain thresholds become gimmes (something like "if the displayed odds are better than 75%, treat them as 100%").
So I have a bit of sympathy for people who don't have a good intuition for probabilities, given that the world is constantly gaslighting them.
I've even heard things like "70% chance of Hillary winning means she gets 70% of the votes!" (and tangentially, my far-too-long argument with someone on Reddit who insisted "there is no way in hell 50% of the people in this town make above the median income"...)
In the end, it turned out that predicting elections is still very hard, and that for all the fanfare, FiveThirtyEight performed only slightly better than what you could find in any other reputable newspaper, so it kinda lost its appeal.
So maybe we shouldn't be doing it. The value of predicting an election in the large out in public seems kind of dubious, and it's more like gambling than actually being useful. A candidate only runs, and continues running, if they think they can win. All predictions like these do is confuse voters leading up to election day and while they are voting. It keep candidates from making strong cases for their platform, keeps the voters from listening to the candidates' platforms, and encourages team-based partisan politics.
Think that's outweighed by the negatives?
FiveThirtyEight gave Trump double the odds of the next highest reputable prediction, which was The New York Times Upshot (15%). Princeton Election Consortium gave Trump less than 1%.
That is not "only slightly better" to anyone who's statistically literate.
A FiveThirtyEight reader in 2016 was significantly better calibrated regarding Clinton’s chances than a reader of other reputable newspapers.
People didn't come to 538 for explanations on subtle points of statistical literacy (although those were provided). They came because, for whatever reason, they wanted to know who would win the election.
People not trained in statistics treated like the scoreboard at a football game- it's always better to be winning, but score is a near perfect predictor in the last minute.
Once 538 stopped delivering perfect predictions and started delivering "Actually the difference between 1% and 30% are way bigger than you think" lectures, the appeal disappeared. There are better places to learn math from.
The purpose of FiveThirtyEight was never to be an oracle for the average person. It was always a deliberately wonky site for a wonky audience. They were very clear about that in the articles they published and topics they covered.
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Nov. 1, 2016 — Election Update: Yes, Donald Trump Has A Path To Victory — https://archive.is/kwdab
> Tuesday was another pretty good day of polling for Donald Trump.
> Trump remains an underdog, but no longer really a longshot: His Electoral College chances are 29 percent in our polls-only model — his highest probability since Oct. 2 — and 30 percent in polls-plus.
> This isn’t a secure map for Clinton at all. In a race where the popular vote is roughly tied nationally, Colorado and New Hampshire are toss-ups, and Clinton’s chances are only 60 to 65 percent in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
> If you want to debate a campaign’s geographic planning, Hillary Clinton spending time in Arizona is a much worse decision than Trump hanging out in Michigan or Wisconsin.
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Sept. 16, 2016 — How Trump Could Win The White House While Losing The Popular Vote — https://archive.is/rxP5l
> Using a prototype of a demographic election calculator that FiveThirtyEight will be unveiling in the next few weeks, I decided to simulate a few election scenarios.
> The result? Clinton would carry the popular vote by 1.5 percentage points. However, Trump would win the Electoral College with 280 votes by holding all 24 Romney states and flipping Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Iowa and Maine’s 2nd Congressional District from blue to red.
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Jun 29, 2016 — Donald Trump Has A 20 Percent Chance Of Becoming President — https://archive.ph/ryIkP
> A 20 percent or 25 percent chance of Trump winning is an awfully long way from 2 percent, or 0.02 percent. It’s a real chance: about the same chance that the visiting team has when it trails by a run in the top of the eighth inning in a Major League Baseball game. If you’ve been following politics or sports over the past couple of years, I hope it’s been imprinted onto your brain that those purported long shots — sometimes much longer shots than Trump — sometimes come through.
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FiveThirtyEight was probably the worst reputable source to read if you were looking for maximum assurances that Clinton would win.
538 was about analyzing and communicating the information from those polls in an easily accessible form. If you came to the site for that, you weren't mad that they "predicted poorly something that was impossible to predict from the data sources they used" ... you were just mad at Trump for winning (despite polls suggesting otherwise).
I thought it went without saying but a good analyst can't predict the future in politics, sports, or anything else. What they can do is make good probabilistic estimates of what is likely to happen. 538 wasn't pretending to do anything more than that.
If people want magic predictions there are plenty of touts and scammers willing to offer them, they don't need to waste time with charts and numbers though.
Well, sure, but how big is the market for that, really? Particularly for a binary outcome like an election, knowing who's going to win is fun, reading a pundit telling you who's going to win can be fun, but ultimately the man in the street is going to take whatever the pundit said and reduce it to candidate X or candidate Y, and you can only do so much better than replacement level at that.
If people are expecting anyone to have a magic prediction algorithm for things like this… I mean there’s only so much one can say. It’s not realistic.
This is especially viewable if you watch them during the 2020 election.
In 2024 the single most likely outcome his model had was trump winning all 7 swing states. The second most likely was Harris winning all 7.
Now you might say that it was on me as a consumer to understand this in 2016, but I remember the look of total shock on Nate Silver’s face when he called the winner on live TV that night, so clearly he didn’t really understand it either. Lesson learned for all of us, I guess.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FiveThirtyEight#2016_U.S._elec...