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See also this Twitter thread from Nate Cohn (who has no dog in the fight): https://twitter.com/Nate_Cohn/status/1320042092694065153 https://twitter.com/Nate_Coh

• happytoexplain 6y ago
  That's a pretty bold claim to make about essentially anybody in regards to the US presidential election. Not that I don't believe his account is even-handed and valuable, just that I'm curious what makes you say he has no dog in the fight.
  • chki 6y ago
    I think he is not talking about the election in general but referencing the "fight" between the 538 model/Nate Silver vs. the Economist/Andre Gelman.
    • jsnell 6y ago
      Correct.
• noirbot 6y ago
  I think the third post in that thread really nails the underlying issue here. We, as humans, know that it would be silly to think that some configurations could happen. We know there's no reason to expect Biden to win Alabama outside of him winning nearly every state. A statistical model only has a vague idea of context/the real world. It looks at polls (and probably not really that many polls of Alabama or Mississippi or Alaska) and sees that, statistically, Biden should win 3% of the time or so. It doesn't have a specific world set of events in mind that would cause that, it just knows that that's how the numbers go, and thus may lead to weird circumstances in the grander results because it has to make the world match the numbers in these small corners.