Summary
Polling aggregator FiveThirtyEight has named Vice President Kamala Harris as the narrow favorite to win the presidential race on Election Day, shifting from former President Donald Trump for the first time since October 17.
Harris’s lead is razor-thin, with FiveThirtyEight’s model showing her winning 50 out of 100 simulations compared to Trump’s 49. Similarly, Nate Silver’s model in The Silver Bulletin also slightly favors Harris, giving her a win in 50.015% of cases.
Both forecasts emphasize the unprecedented closeness of this race, with Pennsylvania as a key battleground.
50.015% literally means that neither candidate is favored to win. Take out a coin, assign Harris as heads and trump as tails, now flip the coin a bunch of times - and that’s exactly how often Harris or trump is likely to win the election
EDIT
Nate Silver just posted his final pre-election blog post and he explains very clearly that this is a dead even race. Either candidate is just as likely to win as the other candidate.
https://www.natesilver.net/p/a-random-number-generator-determined
I heard that Nate was also being critical of pollsters who were “herding” their results to not get caught too far on the wrong side, and yet he’s doing it. I’m just going to watch the results come in and not worry about trying to predict the future that will be known soon enough.
The only good thing with all these “tied” poll reports is that it may encourage voting to break a perceived tie. So vote like it’s tied, and hope for a blowout.
He’s not doing anything. His model is setup many months before the election, and then it stays completely unchanged until the election is over. He doesn’t do any polling, he just runs his pre-set simulation model on the data that the pollsters release
His model and 538s have both produced outcomes where one candidate gets 520+ EVs.
He assigns the quality ratings to polls himself and publicly announces them. They’re based on whether or not they predicted the outcome of the election.
It’s his very poll scoring system that causes polls to herd. Because even if they’re wrong, they’re wrong together.
He determines the weights of those polls and chooses how to apply them.
Nate has done plenty.
The headline is misleading.
Out of 80,000 simulations, Harris won in 50.015 percent of cases, while Trump won in 49.65 percent of cases, per Silver’s model. Some 270 simulations resulted in a 269-269 Electoral College tie.
So a better headline would be “Simulations show Harris and Trump are equally likely to win the election.” The difference between them is insignificant.
And when you factor in all the underhand cheating tactics the Republicans have up their sleeve, the Democrats’ tendency to cave, and the Supreme Court’s bias, Trump looks a lot more likely to win than Harris.
So a better headline would be “Simulations show a high likelihood of political violence and another SCOTUS stolen election a la 2000”.
Dobbs effect
This aged well /s
Like fine milk.
This was one of the last things I read before going to sleep. I thought it might be true.
“Suddenly”. Mainstream media is realizing they are at a risk of becoming irrelevant due to their blatant lies and disparity in their coverage for Kamala vs Trump.
Americans have made it clear that will never elect a woman. This election was a mandate against women
Yea probably
I doubt it’s never (assuming we last much longer as a democracy). It’s just not soon.
You can’t spell President without P e n i s
The fucking media!
Look at this.
These two posts are about the exact same data from the exact same source:
Notice the subtle difference?
Nat Silver left fivethirtyeight and took his model with him. So the other headline is a lie.
The safest prediction of 50/50. No matter who wins they can claim to have called it.
The Nate Silver special!
That aged well
Like fine raw milk
kept outside in the sun with open lid
Half full of maggots
In 2016, Trump needed to win three states that were coin flips to win the race. With that, pollsters said he had a 1 in 8 chance. Trump took those coins, glued them together (the states had correlated outcomes) and then flipped the 3-coins-glued-together and got all three to land heads. So instead of a 1 in 8, it was a 1 in 2.
Clarification for those who haven’t taken college-level statistics:
A 50.015% chance of winning does not make you a “favorite” to win. It’s a fucking coin toss. I thought we’d have learned this lesson after 2016, but here we still are with headlines that pander to a country full of morons.
Also, these models are extremely rough. They are forced to make a bunch of very rough estimations and guesses, which are then aggregated to a stupidly precise number making it look scientific.
It’s a fun enough exercise, but it’s really just repeated endlessly because it’s so goddamn easy to report on.
There’s also the problem that if the polls are crap, the results of the model will also be crap, regardless of how accurate the model is. It’s similar to how publication bias affects meta-analyses. Several analysts have already argued that pollsters are unlikely to underestimate Trump again, and may in fact over-correct and underestimate Harris much like how they underestimated dems in 2022:
- https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/opinion/election-polls-results-trump-harris.html#link-647a30f1
- https://www.newsweek.com/kamala-harris-underestimate-polls-wrong-election-donald-trump-1979080
- https://nypost.com/2024/10/30/us-news/election-polling-could-be-underestimating-kamala-harris-democrats-in-key-states-cnn-data-reporter-warns/
The Nate Silver model (at least) puts in a bunch of “corrections” for poll quality and historical bias from individual pollsters.
So you’re really playing a second or third level game of “Did Nate (or your other poll aggregator) correct for all the effects and biases, or did they miss something important?”
And we will never be able to validate if these odds are accurate or not, because this specific election will never be replayed again.
Pollsters sucked in the election. It’s like forecasting a 50% chance of rain. “One candidate may win, but the other may win too!” I know that.
That’s pretty much always what the polls say for the presidential election. I don’t know why people expect pollsters to have crystal balls. The election is mostly decided on who is going to actually go vote, and a lot of people don’t know the answer to that until election day.
And even if they did predict anything convincingly, it would probably end up a self-defeatung prophecy, as people don’t care to show up. Or self-fulfilling, if people want to vote for the winning team. In either case it’s just very limited what polls can achieve.
Ideally, your vote shouldn’t depend on what you’re told by pollsters
Well, if anything was ideal, this whole situation would look very different.
It’s Newsweek, and Newsweek is a bit ratch, as publications go.
Nate said today that a coin actually has a 50.5% chance of heads, so this is technically closer than a coin flip!
This is why people keep complaining about the polls being wrong. The polls are often pretty good these days, but the people reporting and talking about them do not understand basic statistics.
If I had a coin with a small booger weighting one side and making it more likely to land booger side down 51% of the time, would I be surprised if it landed booger side up? No.
if the early voter demographics + recent polls only have it at a ‘coin flip’ as the polls open on the last day:
we’re screwed.
(please go vote and prove me wrong)
I’m not sure how accurate early voter demographics correlate to voting patterns anymore. I work for a municipality, and my office has a clear view of the voting lines. They were PACKED for the first week of early voting. They have been empty today. Like, people are still coming in to vote, but it’s onesie-twosies, not the 50+ person lines it was. Allegedly we had over 50% of our eligible voters cast their ballots during early voting. And my area is pretty solidly red. I’m having trouble making any sort of prediction based on it.
Every poll is a lie.
Vote!
Fuck the forecast and Vote!
Please flush the Orange Turd.
Doesn’t matter. Get off the couch. Vote.
Bring your friends.
I vote for you to lick my ball sack.
Because you’re unable to wash it properly yourself?
I cannot wait to stop seeing this comment. “Doesn’t matter. Go vote.” Like people on Lemmy or even reddit for that matter are unaware of the impact of voting.
Thanks for that worthwhile contribution. You really changed my mind.
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pls upvote me
Doesn’t matter. Go vote.
You son of a bitch!
Doesn’t matter. Go vote.
Doesn’t matter,
had sexgo vote.
Everyone’s been talking to grandma this cycle. The grandmas are out in force.
Respect granny and go do the same.
I voted almost a whole month ago mostly from the comfort of my couch, thank you very much.
