Trump could win the election in a nowcast by FiveThirtyEight

[CarnalK]

I thought it’d be a bit of a hijack in the election stretch thread to continue this conversation there. It more belongs here, imho:

@CarnalK

@LSLGuy:
Ok it’s a bogus analogy. So instead imagine one election predictor who pretty accurately predicts early and another who eventually settles on an accurate prediction late. “But a whole bunch of stuff happened in the middle so you can’t blame the guy for only being accurate late”. Sure, but one guy didn’t agree all that middle stuff made much difference and another did. Who’s better at predicting?

@LSLGuy

Depends.

If the stuff in the middle ends up netting to approximately zero then the early predictor was right, but for the wrong reasons. If the stuff in the middle ends up netting to a big change away from the opening day conventional wisdom, the early predictor simply ends up wrong.

So which scenario do you want to posit?

(Post shortened)

Here you are basically assuming you’re right and Wang is just lucky if he’s right. What if the middle stuff does in fact have little impact? It’s not like he pulled that idea out of his butt. He’s looked at previous elections and came to the conclusion that this one seems to be following the pattern of other recent polarized elections. And he doesn’t assume nothing could possibly change - that’s why he doesn’t give 100% probability months out.