4 ms·
They gave Trump 28.6 which was beyond problematic. You can give baseball analogies but they were wrong. All that bad polling lead into people believing some r
by protomyth 6y ago
They gave Trump 28.6 which was beyond problematic. You can give baseball analogies but they were wrong. All that bad polling lead into people believing some really dumb things about the election. They've published several articles since then on why the polling is better now. Heck, even their article on being more bullish was tepid. The pre-election article they wrote[1] should have made them actually examine what they were doing. It did not. IDP/TIPP and USC/LA Times got it right.
I get that 538 is an HN favorite, but they are too damn politically biased for their own good.
1) https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-i-acted-like-a-pundit-and-screwed-up-on-donald-trump/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-i-acted-like-a-pund...
- bryanlarsen 6y agoYes, they screwed up the primary, then acknowledged and fixed their mistake. It's a large part of the reason they did much better than everyone else on the election.
- wtallis 6y ago> They gave Trump 28.6 which was beyond problematic. I don't see where you've said anything that comes close to supporting such a strong assertion. 2016 was FiveThirtyEight's third time forecasting a presidential election. Getting one of those three "wrong" when they gave themselves slightly less than one in three chances of getting the 2016 election "wrong" doesn't seem at all surprising. It sounds like you're demanding that FiveThirtyEight make their forecasts deliberately underconfident but still expecting them to call the correct winner every time.
- weakfish 6y agoI do not understand how 28.6% is "problematic," if that's roughly a 1/3 chance. That means, every third election, Trump would win with those odds - far from impossible, and it happened.
- pwinnski 6y ago> They gave Trump 28.6 which was beyond problematic How was that problematic?