Who is this guy and how serious should we take this information? This is by far the highest number I’ve seen for Trump so far.
He’s quite a well known pollster. Up until recently he was responsible for Five Thirty Eight, but it got sold and he left.
He got the 2016 election wrong (71 Hilary, 28 trump) He got the 2020 election right (89 Biden, 10 Trump)
Right and wrong are the incorrect terms here, but you get what I mean.
He didn’t get it wrong. He said the Clinton Trump election was a tight horse race, and Trump had one side of a four sided die.
The state by state data wasn’t far off.
Problem is, people don’t understand statistics.
If someone said Trump had over a 50% probability of winning in 2016, would that be wrong?
In statistical modeling you don’t really have right or wrong. You have a level of confidence in a model, a level of confidence in your data, and a statistical probability that an event will occur.
So if my model says RFK has a 98% probability of winning, then it is no more right or wrong than Silver’s model?
If so, then probability would be useless. But it isn’t useless. Probability is useful because it can make predictions that can be tested against reality.
In 2016, Silver’s model predicted that Clinton would win. Which was wrong. He knew his model was wrong, because he adjusted his model after 2016. Why change something that is working properly?
You’re conflating things.
Your model itself can be wrong, absolutely.
But for the person above to say Silver got something wrong because a lower probability event happened is a little silly. It’d be like flipping a coin heads side up twice in a row and saying you’ve disproved statistics because heads twice in a row should only happen 1/4 times.
Silver made a prediction. That’s the deliverable. The prediction was wrong.
Nobody is saying that statistical theory was disproved. But it’s impossible to tell whether Silver applied theory correctly, and it doesn’t even matter. When a Boeing airplane loses a door, that doesn’t disprove physics but it does mean that Boeing got something wrong.