Date: December 12th, 2015 4:17 PM Author: Poppy talented area
Nate Silver's 08 and 12 predictions were accurate and based almost entirely on polling data. his prediction that trump will lose is obviously not based on polling data (which is highly favorable for Trump), but an assumption that someone like Trump can't win. we shouldn't put much value in the non-quantitative political analysis of a poll aggregator.
Date: December 15th, 2015 2:58 PM Author: coiffed orchestra pit
I used to work with a fat, ugly gay man, who was the first person ever to tell me about Nate Silver. I asked him what made this Nate Silver so good, and the homosexual slob said it was that Silver had never been wrong or some shit like that. I said Well that's a pretty good track record.
Date: December 30th, 2015 2:44 PM Author: onyx roommate heaven
"micah: Let me channel our vacationing editor-in-chief Nate Silver: What if Trump finishes second or third in Iowa, same in New Hampshire and South Carolina. He chugs along for a while with 15-20 percent of the vote. Or, maybe he quits the race after New Hampshire. Won’t the fact that we spent much of 2015 hyperventilating about Trump seem silly in retrospect?"
Date: December 30th, 2015 2:44 PM Author: onyx roommate heaven
One of the biggest errors I think I made in 2015 was concentrating too much on who would win the Republican nomination and not so much on who would drive the conversation.1 You can see that clearly with Donald Trump (who I still don’t think will win the Republican nomination). Not only did I dismiss Trump’s candidacy on many occasions (here, here, here and here, for example), I was sometimes eager to do so in order to confirm my original belief that he wouldn’t win.
But winning the race and affecting the race are different things. Trump may lose in Iowa, collapse in New Hampshire and disappear from the national stage. If that — or something like it — happens, much of the sound and fury surrounding Trump in 2015 will seem silly in retrospect. But regardless of where Trump ends up once voting starts, he has certainly been the dominant voice in the Republican nomination race so far.
Date: January 4th, 2016 2:22 PM Author: onyx roommate heaven
This phenomenon may not hold in 2016. Cruz could collapse in Iowa. Christie could fall apart in New Hampshire. And maybe Trump will outperform his polling in both contests. But the gap between their current state and national polls suggests the opposite is more likely.
Date: January 8th, 2016 4:56 PM Author: onyx roommate heaven
“HOW TRUMP WON” blares the headline on this week’s Time magazine cover in 80-point Duplicate Ionic. “Now he just needs the votes,” whispers the small subheadline underneath.
Oh, just that little detail? Trump actually needs people to vote for him? I’ve been encountering a lot of this lately: Coverage implying that Trump’s lead atop the Republican polls (which he’s held since mid-July) is a watershed event, perhaps even tantamount to his having won an election.
These headlines, needless to say, are presumptuous.
In a nomination race like the Republican one, you could draw up a list of reasons to be skeptical of any candidate’s chances. Here are some reasons to be skeptical about Ted Cruz’s position in Iowa, for example. Here’s why Marco Rubio’s strategy looks increasingly precarious. There are also good reasons to be skeptical about Donald Trump’s chances of winning the Republican nomination:
His polling in Iowa isn’t great, and he’s probably still the underdog there.
There’s reason to doubt the strength of his ground game, in Iowa and other states.
Trump’s favorable ratings and second-choice numbers are generally inferior to Cruz’s and Rubio’s, meaning that other candidates might benefit more as the field winnows.1
But the reason I’ve been especially skeptical about Trump for most of the election cycle isn’t listed above. Nor is it because I expected Trump to spontaneously combust in national polls. Instead, I was skeptical because I assumed that influential Republicans would do almost anything they could to prevent him from being nominated.
I’m in the midst of working on a long review of the book “The Party Decides,” so we’ll save some of the detail for that forthcoming article. But the textbook on Trump is that he’d be a failure along virtually every dimension that party elites normally consider when choosing a nominee: electability (Trump is extremely unpopular with general election voters); ideological reliability (like Sarah Palin, Trump’s a “maverick”); having traditional qualifications for the job; and so forth. Even if the GOP is mostly in disarray, my assumption was that it would muster whatever strength it had to try to stop Trump.
But so far, the party isn’t doing much to stop Trump. Instead, it’s making such an effort against Cruz. Consider:
The governor of Iowa, Terry Branstad, said he wanted Cruz defeated.
Bob Dole warned of “cataclysmic” losses if Cruz was the nominee, and said Trump would fare better.
Mitch McConnell and other Republicans senators have been decidedly unhelpful to Cruz when discussing his constitutional eligibility to be president.
An anti-Cruz PAC has formed, with plans to run advertisements in Iowa. (By contrast, no PAC advertising has run against Trump so far in January.)
You can find lots of other examples like these. It’s the type of coordinated, multifront action that seems right out of the “The Party Decides.” If, like me, you expected something like this to happen to Trump instead of Cruz, you have to revisit your assumptions. Thus, I’m now much less skeptical of Trump’s chances of becoming the nominee.
Can we take this a step farther, in fact? Can we say that the party has decided … for Trump?
I’ve seen some headlines to that effect, but they’re premature and possibly wrong. So far, the GOP’s actions are conspicuously anti-Cruz more than they are pro-Trump. For example, although former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin just endorsed Trump, no current Republican governors or members of Congress have.
Instead, it may be that Republicans think of Cruz as the more immediate threat, and then plan to turn around and attack Trump later. But that’s a high-degree-of-difficulty caper to pull off. For one thing, Trump, who’s in a much better position in the polls than Cruz in states after Iowa, could rack up several wins in a row if he takes the Hawkeye State.
Just as important, there are few signs that Republicans have much of a strategy for whom to back apart from Trump. Four “establishment lane” candidates — Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, John Kasich and Rubio — are tightly packed in New Hampshire polls. That could potentially change before New Hampshire votes because of tactical voting.2 And whichever of these candidates perform worst in the early states will probably drop out.
But Republican party elites seem indifferent among these four candidates, when in my view some are more capable than others of eventually defeating Trump and Cruz:
Rubio would seem to have the best shot. He’s easily the most conservative of the four, has the best favorability ratings and can make perhaps the best electability argument. His ground game may not be very good, but he has a decent amount of cash on hand.
Bush and Christie probably rank next, in some order. It’s hard to imagine Republican voters coming all the way around to the patrician Bush after flirting with bad-boy Trump for so long — especially when Bush’s favorability numbers with Republican voters are in the tank. But remember that those dalliances with Trump are hypothetical, only contemplated in polls and not yet actuated with votes. Perhaps the Republican electorate that shows up to vote is more like the 2012 version, which supported Mitt Romney. It’s a long shot, but if it happens, Bush will have plenty of money and organization to extend the race.
If the GOP electorate is in an angrier mood, then Christie’s personality overlaps the most with Trump’s. He’s a good debater, and his favorability ratings are on the upswing, although still just middling. But Christie entered the race with a lot of baggage that will receive more scrutiny if he surges in the polls. He also doesn’t have much of an organization beyond New Hampshire.
Kasich’s outlook seems the worst of the four, combining Bush’s lack of appeal to conservatives with Christie’s lack of organization beyond New Hampshire. The one qualification to this is that Kasich has a more conservative track record than he lets on.3
So if I were ranking the four establishment candidates’ chances of eventually defeating Trump and Cruz, I’d put Rubio first and Kasich last. But if I were ranking them in terms of who seems to have the most momentum right now, the order would be just the opposite. Kasich has gained 3 or 4 percentage points in New Hampshire polls over the past month, while Rubio has declined slightly in New Hampshire and national polls, and his once-steady flow of endorsements has turned into a trickle.
These differences might seem pretty minor — there’s room for near-daily momentum shifts before New Hampshire votes. Obviously, it’s also possible that Republicans’ efforts to stop Cruz in Iowa will backfire.
Things are lining up better for Trump than I would have imagined, however. It’s not his continued presence in the race that surprises me so much as the lack of a concerted effort to stop him.
Date: May 18th, 2016 10:13 AM Author: Outnumbered legal warrant hominid
In no way will your answer affect my conviction that this is an all-time great first ballot HOF poast, I'm just curious: How long did it take you to put this masterstroke together?
Date: June 29th, 2016 1:03 PM Author: onyx roommate heaven
Hillary Clinton has a nearly 80 percent chance of winning the White House in November, FiveThirtyEight polling guru Nate Silver predicted Wednesday.
FiveThirtyEight projected Clinton has a 79 percent chance of winning the general election against Donald Trump, who has just a 20 percent chance of succeeding President Barack Obama in the Oval Office.
“Here’s how to think about it: We’re kind of at halftime of the election right now, and she’s taking a seven-point, maybe a 10-point lead into halftime,” Silver told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on “Good Morning America.” “There’s a lot of football left to be played, but she’s ahead in almost every poll, every swing state, every national poll.”
Indeed, a Ballotpedia survey of seven swing states released Wednesday shows the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee sweeping Trump in Iowa, Michigan, Florida, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia by margins ranging from 4 to 17 percentage points.
Silver, who correctly forecast 49 out of 50 states in 2008 and every state in 2012, noted that both camps “have a lot of room to grow,” but no candidate has blown a lead as large as Clinton’s advantage over Trump in nearly 30 years, when former Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis lost to George H.W. Bush despite maintaining a large lead coming out of the spring and summer.
“It’s been a crazy year, politically,” Silver said, adding that more states, particularly red states, are in play in 2016 than in previous elections. “For example, Arizona looks like a toss-up. Maybe Georgia. Maybe Missouri, North Carolina again.”
“Likewise,” Silver continued, “if Trump gains ground on Clinton then maybe a state like Maine — used to be a swing state, not so recently” — could be in play, too.
Silver also defended his August forecast that gave the billionaire businessman a 2 percent chance to win the GOP nomination.
“That wasn’t based on looking at polls. Trump was always ahead in the polls, and one big lesson of his campaign is don’t try and out-think the polls and try and out-think the American public,” Silver said. “And Trump has never really been ahead of Clinton in the general election campaign. He did a great job of appealing to the 40 percent of the GOP he had to win the election, the primary — a lot different than winning 51 percent of 100 percent.”
Let’s not bury the lead: Clinton is polling really well right now, and if you held an election today, she’d probably win in a landslide, possibly including states such as Georgia and Arizona along with most or all of the traditional swing states.
Date: August 12th, 2016 9:03 PM Author: adventurous faggotry
THEN: "August 17, 2016: "Clinton Machine Gears Up For Largest Electoral Landslide Since 1984"
NOW: August 12, 2016: "What A Clinton Landslide Would Look Like"
"That would work out to 471 electoral votes, to 67 for Trump, which would be fairly typical for a win of that magnitude. Dwight D. Eisenhower won 457 electoral votes when beating Adlai Stevenson by 15 points in 1956, for example. And Franklin D. Roosevelt won 472 electoral votes in 1932, in an 18-point win against Herbert Hoover. Clinton would be a ways short of Ronald Reagan’s 525 electoral votes in 1984, however."
Date: October 10th, 2016 10:56 AM Author: mewling fragrant lay weed whacker
nate silver simultaneously claiming that all "insta polls are garbage" while citing this poll as a good news for HILLARY:
It’s not clear that voters judge debates in the same way, however. A CNN poll of debate watchers found that even though most voters thought Trump exceeded expectations, 57 percent of them nevertheless declared Clinton the winner, compared with 34 percent for Trump. A YouGov poll of debate watchers showed a much closer outcome, but with Clinton also winning, 47 percent to 42 percent.
These instant-reaction polls actually do have a correlation with post-debate horse-race polls: The candidate who wins the former usually gains in the latter. Perhaps Clinton’s win was modest enough that this will be an exception, especially given that the sentiments of pundits and television commentators (which sometimes matter as much as the debate itself) were all over the map
Big Surprise: Trump Won Instant Junk Polls About Who Won The Debate
As Harry said, the instant online opt-in junk polls — call them troll polls, faux polls, clickers, or your favorite term for them — should be ignored as indicators of who really won. And after Trump touted his win in these junk polls after the first debate, and was widely ridiculed for it, he didn’t cite the junk polls that showed Pence beating Kaine in the vice-presidential debate. Nonetheless, Trump supporters appear to still be flooding these things. Trump’s getting 77 percent in a Heavy.com junk poll asking who won tonight’s debate, an identical 77 percent in Fox 5 San Diego’s and 90 percent in Drudge Report’s.
Date: November 9th, 2016 7:08 PM Author: adventurous faggotry
November 9, 2016: "We’ll have more to say about the polling in the coming days. But to a first approximation, people are probably giving the polls a little bit too much blame."
TBF this is mostly 538 gloating about how they were one of the only outlets to give Trump a reasonable chance of winning and how most were ignoring these factors
I'm not sure I agree that they should be gloating given that they were pretty confident and ended up being wrong, but I do agree that they were better than pretty much any other similar source out there for the last week or so of the election. The cynic in me says that they probably just said 70% because they figured it was no-lose since they're either right or least wrong (as they ended up being).
it's not like their number didn't change over time. IIRC it peaked around ~85% in the middle of the debates and slid over the last couple weeks when her lead was slipping
it's still basically an aggregator, just one that processes the numbers in a way to arrive at a more reasonable prediction % than others. e.g. princeton puts way too much faith in state polls not swinging by a good amount the last couple weeks (if I had to guess)
it seems they learned their lesson after taking the "party decides" BS as bible pre-primary and numbers-wise when they had Hillary >99% to win Michigan (state polls can be very volatile). obviously the staff is lib but that actual model is fine for what it is
Date: March 13th, 2019 11:17 AM Author: adventurous faggotry
Brendan makes some good points here. All that said, my main point would be this — a lot of people misremember Trump bucking the CW and winning the 2016 nomination as a “polls were wrong” case when actually it was an “sophisticated experts dismissed the polls” case.
Yeah, this. Trump didn't lead the polls at *this* stage, but he did from summer 2015 on as people like me kept coming up with elaborate explanations for why he'd lose to Rubio etc. He's a good data point for "'experts' are full of shit, so you might as well go with the polls."
Date: June 24th, 2019 9:04 AM Author: Stubborn jade whorehouse foreskin
There was a new leader every 2 weeks in the 2012 primary. Polls can’t predict future changes. Trump stuck, Herman Caine didn’t, but yeah, experts are full of shit.
In case you don't get the joke, the Republican in Wisconsin won by 14, & the Republican in California is up 10 with most ballots in for a seat Dems have held since 1998.
As FiveThirtyEight makes clear in their piece, “While the polls in a few closely watched races—like Arizona’s governorship and Pennsylvania’s Senate seat—were biased toward Republicans, the polls overall still had a bit of a bias toward Democrats. That’s because generic-ballot polls, the most common type of poll last cycle, had a weighted-average bias of D+1.9, and polls of several less closely watched races, like the governorships in Ohio and Florida, also skewed toward Democrats.”
I’m ending the interview. I’m ending the interview because what you’re doing is ridiculous.
Wait, wait—why?
Because I have definitive proof that what you’re saying is not true. And I don’t care. I know what FiveThirtyEight wrote. I live this every day. And so, the point is what you’re saying is wrong. I am on record saying that what FiveThirtyEight has written is incorrect, and I’ve given you definitive proof otherwise. So if you want to keep coming back at this, do it. But this has become one of the most ridiculous interviews that I’ve ever done my entire professional career.
Date: May 15th, 2026 12:08 PM Author: onyx roommate heaven
ABC News has now taken all FiveThirtyEight articles completely offline. They now redirect to abcnews dot com/politics. A needless erasure of thousands of pages of knowledge.