This ^^^^^^
And this ^^^^ again.
I’ll believe it when I see it.
I also suspect that Putin has some tricks up his sleeve.
They note this themselves. But 22% things happen more than 1 in 5 times. It’s still better to have a higher % chance of something than a lower one.
Putin is a much better spy than me, but if I were a spy who wanted to further destabilise the USA, I’d support the Democrats with my networks.
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I don’t disagree; this could be one of his ‘tricks’: take a foregone conclusion and throw some doubt in it.
No, you’d pretend to support the Democrats, because the day the Democrats actually take over they are going to fuck Russia right up the ass.
I’d put my “support” where the Democrats are already likely to win. In fact, the more likely they are to win the better. Ultimately, they don’t need to cause any seats to flip, they just need to sow the seeds of illegitimacy, continued division, and “libtard” hate among the less thoughtful Republicans supporters. That will cause the “Better Russian Than Democrat” types deeper into supporting American fascism, more division, the cycle goes round and round and deepens the problems for the USA.
I was a Nate 538 junkie in 2016, even signed up for updates. Maybe it was the graphs. Now I consider Nate less than accurate than Jimmy the Greek (rest his goofy-picking soul) and about as accurate as Elon Musk is genial.
It’s interesting, but I’m not sure the whole percentage-forecast concept really works to convey information to the general public about a binary outcome (the number of seats is a secondary concern to who gets the gavel). See all the comments (here and elsewhere) about 2016, where it’s reduced to being either right or wrong.
I was going to ask if people saw a 20% chance of rain and got pissed at the weather forecast for being “wrong” when it rained, but then I realized…that actually is what people do. Maybe the idea just doesn’t work.
Dunno, I worry that polls serve as a balancing mechanism. If the poll says that A will win, then everyone on side A stays home and everyone on side B goes to the voting booth. Large, rigorous, believable polls act to move the vote back to being 50/50 instead of whatever they would be naturally.
Nate’s track record, including in 2016, is very good. He works in percentages, and it’s pretty damn reasonable that things with about a 25% chance of happening actually happen pretty frequently (about a quarter of the time, in fact). He doesn’t deserve any heat for not being perfect.
Yeah, people (including me) are bad at probability when it comes to gut reaction and betting/planning/expectation. A 55% chance may as well be a surefire thing, a 45% chance is a sure loss.
Thank you, Lord Feldon and iiandyiiii. I’m sad to see that so many (including Locrian and, it seems, asahi) still don’t get it. Two years ago, in the run up to the 2016 election, I tried to explain this over and over. Here, for example, I likened a 75% chance to having four bottles of milk in the fridge. If you knew one contained brutally sour milk that would make you sick, would you just blindly reach in and grab one of the four bottles and start gulping, because it was a “foregone conclusion” (to quite asahi) the milk would be fine? Of course not!
In fact, as Nate Silver keeps saying over and over, he would be flat-out WRONG if, say, he predicted certain candidates to have a 75% chance of winning in each of 10 separate races, and all ten did end up winning. He’s MORE RIGHT — his prediction was MORE ACCURATE — if some of them LOSE. He was very clear about the many paths to a Trump victory, and Trump waltzed right down one of those paths.
My brain makes all kinds of mistakes — humans are humans — I’m as fallible as anyone, but it would be nice if this concept could penetrate more the consciousness of American voters who look at 538.
And consider that most of Silver’s competitors were putting the chances at over 99% for a Clinton win. He certainly did better than all of those folks.
One source of confusion, I think, is that there are two different percentages that get talked about in an election. Usually, when people talk about percentages for an election outcome, they mean the percentage of the vote that each candidate will get. And in those terms, a 60-40 outcome is a huge blowout, and even 55-45 is quite decisive. I think that a lot of people see someone like Silver saying “60% chance” of a Whig victory", and interpret it as “the Whig is going to get 60% of the vote”, instead of looking at is as, basically, a tossup that slightly favors the Whig but can very easily go either way.
Yes, that is definitely an important reason for the confusion; but even when someone does grasp the difference you mentioned, they’re still vulnerable to the “wet effect” Lord Feldon linked to in post 28.
I like that the vertical scale on “Chance of controlling the House” is odds rather than percentage.
I find it interesting that before the 2016 election some people criticized Nate Silver for being too pessimistic of Democratic chances, but afterwards is criticized for being too optimistic. Of course, since most people have little to no understanding of statistics, probabilities, precision, or accuracy, that is a likely outcome. 
By the way, everyone is invited to join our own SDMB election predictions contest. Put your token down on your own best estimate.
And every time he put out an article about how Trump could win or the projection adjusted toward Trump, people thought he had lost it.
my guy is 99% re-election because they packed a lot of NC Dems into his district to make other districts more red. He’s been there since 86 and shows no signs of quitting at age 77.
In general I don’t think this would be true, as both A and B supporters would be likely to not bother voting. The case where it likely makes a difference is when, like in 2016, there are a significant protest vote component, where people aren’t voting so much to elect person A or B but to “send a message to Washington”.
Then you have person A voters that they can safely send a message to the establishment by staying home, voting third party, or even voting for B because they know A will win anyway. Meanwhile person B’s supporters continue to come out because it wasn’t really about electing person B but instead simply voicing their opposition.
After the 2016 debacle I don’t think that voters are going to be so careless for some time to come.
This, in my opinion, is a weird thing to like.
I believe that 538 had a discussion after the last election on how they should describe chances of winning. IIRC, the thought was that people ar a gut level conflated 70% chance of winning with 70% of the vote, or some such.
When they put the (Aug 2016) notes about “Hold on, this election is NOT a lock.”
At that point, I started personally framing it as two coin flips away from a Trump presidency. So I was surprised but not shocked.