6 ms·

One of the things that's annoying about 538 is that they don't admit they're wrong. The excuse they keep repeating is that "1 in 10 chance Trump can win. That's

One of the things that's annoying about 538 is that they don't admit they're wrong. The excuse they keep repeating is that "1 in 10 chance Trump can win. That's about the same chance as rain in LA, but it does rain in LA!". 538 seems to have forgotten in their condenscencion is that we are not look at you to explain the odds. We are looking at you to provide an accurate probability estimate. Their defense is completely ridiculous. I follow betting odds which had Biden/Trump at 60/40 split before the election day - what's the point of polling when you can look at people putting money on the line, let the incentives work for you.

evgen 6y ago
They provided the probability distribution. The fact that you can’t handle math and need some sort of absolute certainty for a future event is not 538’s problem.
- systemvoltage 6y ago
  I am questioning - why even bother? It's not like we do elections every month to test out their probability distribution against empirical data. The distribution collapses into a binary outcome at the end. I have a dice. I claim the distribution is of equal outcome for each side. Well...we don't get to test the dice more than once. 1 sample size does not prove that the 538's predictions were right (or wrong). Thanks for assuming I can't do math, no way to argue with someone but I am actually pretty bad at it. :-)
  - evgen 6y ago
    Everyone is bad at probability and statistical distributions, not just you. The problem with modeling elections is that there are so few of them and the data is very noisy and until quite recently rather suspect. Let's not pretend that this was a normal election, either in the candidates running or in the manner in which the campaign and election was conducted. As to the question of why bother, it is because bad polling is better than no polling at all. Campaigns are now multi billion dollar enterprises managing tens of thousands of temporary employees for the creation of a product that will only be sold once and in 18+ months from when they start the process. Any data is better than nothing. The fact that the public has become obsessed with polls is probably due to the ongoing nationalization of politics.
- listenallyall 6y ago
  it's not one single election -- it's consistent failure over multiple state elections, by large margins, all in the same direction -- which falls beyond any reasonable probability
  - roenxi 6y ago
    I don't think much of evgen's unreasonable personal attack. But 538 isn't necessarily claiming that the per-state error will be normally distributed around their predictions. I don't know the specifics of their model, but probably they are claiming "with these polls, the probability of this outcome is...". The polls being consistently biased doesn't tell us much about 538s model. They said Biden would almost surely win and despite a massive surprise in favour of Trump, Biden won. And even if Biden lost, 10% upsets in presidential are expected to happen once every 10 elections like this one.
    - listenallyall 6y ago
      > But 538 isn't necessarily claiming that the per-state error will be normally distributed around their predictions. If per-state error isn't normally distributed, that's evidence of bias, or bad polling.
      - roenxi 6y ago
        Yep. But 538 does not run polls.
        listenallyall 6y ago
        The inputs it uses to spit out probabilities is known to be bad. Any scientist or researcher who claimed to get valid results from known bad inputs would be ridiculed.
        roenxi 6y ago
        Science does not require an unbiased sample from a normal distribution to work. Bias is a technical term that the field of statistics is very comfortable working with. Scientists can also often get good results out of biased inputs. 538 has corrections for bias already. They seem to have worked in this instance - I repeat myself but: massive surprise, Biden still president.
- defen 6y ago
  Here is a guy who is fairly good at math saying that the polls did in fact fail: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/11/04/dont-kid-yourself-the-polls-messed-up-and-that-would-be-the-case-even-wed-forecasted-biden-losing-florida-and-only-barely-winning-the-electoral-college/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/11/04/dont-kid-y... https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/11/07/what-would-would-mean-to-really-take-seriously-the-idea-that-our-forecast-probabilities-were-too-far-from-50/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/11/07/what-would...
  - evgen 6y ago
    Ah yes. Mr 'let me tell you why Nate is wrong' Gelman, who is now Mr 'let me tell you why the fact that I missed bigger than Nate is not my fault and in fact is entirely the fault of these other people' Gelman. Forgive me if I find his excuses laughable, but I guess if it makes him feel better about himself we can humour him. He even manages to choke his first rant by missing once again on EV and vote percentages.
    - defen 6y ago
      Whatever your complaint about Gelman is, I don't think "he can't handle math" is very convincing.
  - Karrot_Kream 6y ago
    That's a bit strong for what Gelman said. I'm a big fan of Gelman (and learned from his books!), but he specifically mentioned that both Gelman et al's Model and 538's Model did indeed capture the outcomes in their probability distributions, but that to improve performance going forward it was much better to predict closer to the median than closer to the tails. (And funny enough, Gelman gave 538 some grief earlier on making a model with very wide tails.) This is a nuanced but very fair criticism, and taking a Twitter-style summary of it I think is overly reductionist.
scrooched_moose 6y ago
I'm not sure that's quite fair. They do write some excellent retrospectives and admit when they made mistakes, at least more so than almost any other news outlet I've seen: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-real-story-of-2016/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-real-story-of-2016/ 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... https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-i-got-wrong-in-2019/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-i-got-wrong-in-201... https://fivethirtyeight.com/videos/what-harry-got-wrong-in-2016/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/videos/what-harry-got-wrong-in-2... I have noticed them getting a bit more defensive recently which is irritating, but I think they are honest. There's only so much "garbage in garbage out" they can compensate for. If this ends up at +74 EV, which is where it looks to be heading, it'll be "Z=-.6" prediction (not actually normally distributed, but it's the easy calculation) prediction, meaning 27% of the outcomes were more Trump. It's not great, but I appreciate them giving a realistic model.
- systemvoltage 6y ago
  Thanks for these, I've been following it for last few months. Nate Silver still makes fun of Betting odds: https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1325186985988935680 https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1325186985988935680 I don't see him posting how the Bettfair was way more accurate than his polls. I also get that Nate Silver doesnt poll himself, but he aggreates polling information, assign grades and mixes it into his formula. I just have zero trust in it. It's not like we get to test his predictions often. 1 sample size every 4 years.
  - robryan 6y ago
    Biden got out to around $4-$5 during election night. I wouldn’t put much weight in the betting when it appeared to fail to account for the expected composition of postal votes. Trump should have been at best a slight favorite before the effect of the postals started showing in the counts.
whack 6y ago
And why do you think they failed to provide an accurate probability estimate? If I tell you that the odds of your dice roll being a 6 is only 16%, and you roll a 6, does that mean I failed to provide an accurate probability estimate? The only way to judge the accuracy of a probabilistic model, is by quantifying the weighted error across numerous predictions. Not by looking at two yes/no outcomes. This is the exact point they are trying to get across, which you wrote off as annoying. You do raise an interesting point about the betting markets - I too am very curious about whether they have a better track record than people like Nate Silver. Looking forward to someone analyzing their relative accuracy over a large sample of independent elections.
- klipt 6y ago
  I saw predictit.org swing from pro Biden the morning of the election, to Trump in the afternoon, to Biden the next morning, so it seemed they were as confused as anyone. They also didn't seem very aware that mail votes (leaning Biden) would likely be counted after in person votes (leaning Trump), which 538 had been predicting would cause a temporary pro-Trump lean for ages.
- hackinthebochs 6y ago
  If you roll that same die 10 times and you get a 6 each time, then we can say that your probability estimate was wrong. But that's what happened with the polling of these states. The fact that the estimates consistently overestimated the Biden vote points towards a bias in the model used to estimate likely voters. If this were just a matter of the margin of error at work, each pull at the lever (each state) should be randomly distributed around the estimate. But that wasn't the case.
  - whack 6y ago
    > If you roll that same die 10 times and you get a 6 each time, then we can say that your probability estimate was wrong. But that's what happened with the polling of these states. The 538 model is explicitly based on the assumption that the state-polling errors are correlated to one another to some extent. Ie, if Trump performs better-than-expected in OH, he will likely perform better-than-expected in FL as well. This is why they rated Trump's chances as being 0.1, not 0.1^8. Given how polling works, this is exactly the right assumption to make. Hence my earlier comment that if you want to evaluate the accuracy of 538 or any other model, you need to evaluate it across numerous different elections/events, over an extended period of time. Not a single day of elections in a single country.
ashtonkem 6y ago
538 is a poll aggregator, not a pollster. If the polls are systemically wrong, which is what is being alleged above, there is <explicative> all that 538 can do to fix that.
- systemvoltage 6y ago
  Yes, I’ve been following 538 for a while now. They also grade each pollster. The point is - 538’s input is a bunch of polls, their output is a prediction. Whether they do the polls or aggregate them is not relevant - they’re analysts whose job is to provide accurate estimates. You can’t shift the blame on inaccurate underlying polls - Nate has time and again said, they look at many aspects in their estimates. Not just polls.
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    They look at many aspects at the beginning of the race. By the end these other aspects, the “fundamentals”, are purposefully dialed down to 0 and all that remains is an aggregate of polls. This is based on a theory that polls should be more accurate the closer you get to Election Day because voters have less time people have to change their minds. If those polls are systemically wrong, then there is nothing 538 can do to fix that; it’s a literal garbage in garbage out moment.
    - ece 6y ago
      Looking at trends, which is easy to do on real clear politics, you could have seen the Senate was going to be extremely close, and the presidency, while not the blowout everyone expected thanks to 538, would still favor Biden. Here's one forecast that was arguably closer than 538: https://www.270towin.com/ https://www.270towin.com/ The polls did tighten at the end, but you can't just look at a snapshot (even near the end) to account for the trend. In all of these states the polls narrowed in some, but the final results were within MoE: FL: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/fl/florida_trump_vs_biden-6841.html https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/fl/f... PA: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/pa/pennsylvania_trump_vs_biden-6861.html https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/pa/p... NV: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/nv/nevada_trump_vs_biden-6867.html https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/nv/n... AZ: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/az/arizona_trump_vs_biden-6807.html https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/az/a... GA: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/ga/georgia_trump_vs_biden-6974.html https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/ga/g... NC: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/nc/north_carolina_trump_vs_biden-6744.html https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/nc/n... In Iowa the Des Moines Register poll had Trump at +7, which is within MoE, the rest were garbage: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/ia/iowa_trump_vs_biden-6787.html https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/ia/i... In Ohio, none of polls were within MoE, so all of the polls there were garbage: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/oh/ohio_trump_vs_biden-6765.html https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/oh/o... For the Senate I think North Carolina was wrong everywhere I looked, but 75/25 for Democratic control at 538 was the most wrong I think: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/final-2020-senate-forecast/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/final-2020-senate-forec... https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/senate/2020_elections_senate_map_no_toss_ups.html https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/senate/2020_el... https://www.270towin.com/2020-senate-election/consensus-2020-senate-forecast https://www.270towin.com/2020-senate-election/consensus-2020... You can go state by state[1] to see which polls were more/less accurate within MoE compared to the final result and the trends in each state. 538 had a better chance of Biden winning by 400+! EVs [2], than the 306 he's likely to win with. It's this distribution that could have been better at accounting for severe polling errors in some states. 538 did do CYA posts[3], but here while bringing forward the error from 2016 in Ohio seems right, it still projects a win of 335+ EVs. Optimistic for Biden is the kind way of saying what the final 538 projection were, severely more wrong than individual polls is more accurate. If their distribution in [2] was better, I would be more willing to give them a pass. [1] click on the state: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/2020_elections_electoral_college_map_no_toss_ups_race_changes.html https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/2020... [2] "Every outcome in our simulations" https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/ https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/ [3] "What if polls are as wrong as 2016? Biden still wins" https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-can-still-win-but-the-polls-would-have-to-be-off-by-way-more-than-in-2016/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-can-still-win-but... https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/im-here-to-remind-you-that-trump-can-still-win/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/im-here-to-remind-you-t...

evgen 6y ago

They provided the probability distribution. The fact that you can’t handle math and need some sort of absolute certainty for a future event is not 538’s problem.

systemvoltage 6y ago
I am questioning - why even bother? It's not like we do elections every month to test out their probability distribution against empirical data. The distribution collapses into a binary outcome at the end. I have a dice. I claim the distribution is of equal outcome for each side. Well...we don't get to test the dice more than once. 1 sample size does not prove that the 538's predictions were right (or wrong). Thanks for assuming I can't do math, no way to argue with someone but I am actually pretty bad at it. :-)
- evgen 6y ago
  Everyone is bad at probability and statistical distributions, not just you. The problem with modeling elections is that there are so few of them and the data is very noisy and until quite recently rather suspect. Let's not pretend that this was a normal election, either in the candidates running or in the manner in which the campaign and election was conducted. As to the question of why bother, it is because bad polling is better than no polling at all. Campaigns are now multi billion dollar enterprises managing tens of thousands of temporary employees for the creation of a product that will only be sold once and in 18+ months from when they start the process. Any data is better than nothing. The fact that the public has become obsessed with polls is probably due to the ongoing nationalization of politics.
listenallyall 6y ago
it's not one single election -- it's consistent failure over multiple state elections, by large margins, all in the same direction -- which falls beyond any reasonable probability
- roenxi 6y ago
  I don't think much of evgen's unreasonable personal attack. But 538 isn't necessarily claiming that the per-state error will be normally distributed around their predictions. I don't know the specifics of their model, but probably they are claiming "with these polls, the probability of this outcome is...". The polls being consistently biased doesn't tell us much about 538s model. They said Biden would almost surely win and despite a massive surprise in favour of Trump, Biden won. And even if Biden lost, 10% upsets in presidential are expected to happen once every 10 elections like this one.
  - listenallyall 6y ago
    > But 538 isn't necessarily claiming that the per-state error will be normally distributed around their predictions. If per-state error isn't normally distributed, that's evidence of bias, or bad polling.
    - roenxi 6y ago
      Yep. But 538 does not run polls.
      - listenallyall 6y ago
        The inputs it uses to spit out probabilities is known to be bad. Any scientist or researcher who claimed to get valid results from known bad inputs would be ridiculed.
        roenxi 6y ago
        Science does not require an unbiased sample from a normal distribution to work. Bias is a technical term that the field of statistics is very comfortable working with. Scientists can also often get good results out of biased inputs. 538 has corrections for bias already. They seem to have worked in this instance - I repeat myself but: massive surprise, Biden still president.
defen 6y ago
Here is a guy who is fairly good at math saying that the polls did in fact fail: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/11/04/dont-kid-yourself-the-polls-messed-up-and-that-would-be-the-case-even-wed-forecasted-biden-losing-florida-and-only-barely-winning-the-electoral-college/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/11/04/dont-kid-y... https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/11/07/what-would-would-mean-to-really-take-seriously-the-idea-that-our-forecast-probabilities-were-too-far-from-50/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/11/07/what-would...
- evgen 6y ago
  Ah yes. Mr 'let me tell you why Nate is wrong' Gelman, who is now Mr 'let me tell you why the fact that I missed bigger than Nate is not my fault and in fact is entirely the fault of these other people' Gelman. Forgive me if I find his excuses laughable, but I guess if it makes him feel better about himself we can humour him. He even manages to choke his first rant by missing once again on EV and vote percentages.
  - defen 6y ago
    Whatever your complaint about Gelman is, I don't think "he can't handle math" is very convincing.
- Karrot_Kream 6y ago
  That's a bit strong for what Gelman said. I'm a big fan of Gelman (and learned from his books!), but he specifically mentioned that both Gelman et al's Model and 538's Model did indeed capture the outcomes in their probability distributions, but that to improve performance going forward it was much better to predict closer to the median than closer to the tails. (And funny enough, Gelman gave 538 some grief earlier on making a model with very wide tails.) This is a nuanced but very fair criticism, and taking a Twitter-style summary of it I think is overly reductionist.

scrooched_moose 6y ago

I'm not sure that's quite fair. They do write some excellent retrospectives and admit when they made mistakes, at least more so than almost any other news outlet I've seen: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-real-story-of-2016/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-real-story-of-2016/ 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... https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-i-got-wrong-in-2019/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-i-got-wrong-in-201... https://fivethirtyeight.com/videos/what-harry-got-wrong-in-2016/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/videos/what-harry-got-wrong-in-2... I have noticed them getting a bit more defensive recently which is irritating, but I think they are honest. There's only so much "garbage in garbage out" they can compensate for. If this ends up at +74 EV, which is where it looks to be heading, it'll be "Z=-.6" prediction (not actually normally distributed, but it's the easy calculation) prediction, meaning 27% of the outcomes were more Trump. It's not great, but I appreciate them giving a realistic model.

systemvoltage 6y ago
Thanks for these, I've been following it for last few months. Nate Silver still makes fun of Betting odds: https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1325186985988935680 https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1325186985988935680 I don't see him posting how the Bettfair was way more accurate than his polls. I also get that Nate Silver doesnt poll himself, but he aggreates polling information, assign grades and mixes it into his formula. I just have zero trust in it. It's not like we get to test his predictions often. 1 sample size every 4 years.
- robryan 6y ago
  Biden got out to around $4-$5 during election night. I wouldn’t put much weight in the betting when it appeared to fail to account for the expected composition of postal votes. Trump should have been at best a slight favorite before the effect of the postals started showing in the counts.

whack 6y ago

And why do you think they failed to provide an accurate probability estimate? If I tell you that the odds of your dice roll being a 6 is only 16%, and you roll a 6, does that mean I failed to provide an accurate probability estimate? The only way to judge the accuracy of a probabilistic model, is by quantifying the weighted error across numerous predictions. Not by looking at two yes/no outcomes. This is the exact point they are trying to get across, which you wrote off as annoying. You do raise an interesting point about the betting markets - I too am very curious about whether they have a better track record than people like Nate Silver. Looking forward to someone analyzing their relative accuracy over a large sample of independent elections.

klipt 6y ago
I saw predictit.org swing from pro Biden the morning of the election, to Trump in the afternoon, to Biden the next morning, so it seemed they were as confused as anyone. They also didn't seem very aware that mail votes (leaning Biden) would likely be counted after in person votes (leaning Trump), which 538 had been predicting would cause a temporary pro-Trump lean for ages.
hackinthebochs 6y ago
If you roll that same die 10 times and you get a 6 each time, then we can say that your probability estimate was wrong. But that's what happened with the polling of these states. The fact that the estimates consistently overestimated the Biden vote points towards a bias in the model used to estimate likely voters. If this were just a matter of the margin of error at work, each pull at the lever (each state) should be randomly distributed around the estimate. But that wasn't the case.
- whack 6y ago
  > If you roll that same die 10 times and you get a 6 each time, then we can say that your probability estimate was wrong. But that's what happened with the polling of these states. The 538 model is explicitly based on the assumption that the state-polling errors are correlated to one another to some extent. Ie, if Trump performs better-than-expected in OH, he will likely perform better-than-expected in FL as well. This is why they rated Trump's chances as being 0.1, not 0.1^8. Given how polling works, this is exactly the right assumption to make. Hence my earlier comment that if you want to evaluate the accuracy of 538 or any other model, you need to evaluate it across numerous different elections/events, over an extended period of time. Not a single day of elections in a single country.

ashtonkem 6y ago

538 is a poll aggregator, not a pollster. If the polls are systemically wrong, which is what is being alleged above, there is <explicative> all that 538 can do to fix that.

systemvoltage 6y ago
Yes, I’ve been following 538 for a while now. They also grade each pollster. The point is - 538’s input is a bunch of polls, their output is a prediction. Whether they do the polls or aggregate them is not relevant - they’re analysts whose job is to provide accurate estimates. You can’t shift the blame on inaccurate underlying polls - Nate has time and again said, they look at many aspects in their estimates. Not just polls.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  They look at many aspects at the beginning of the race. By the end these other aspects, the “fundamentals”, are purposefully dialed down to 0 and all that remains is an aggregate of polls. This is based on a theory that polls should be more accurate the closer you get to Election Day because voters have less time people have to change their minds. If those polls are systemically wrong, then there is nothing 538 can do to fix that; it’s a literal garbage in garbage out moment.
  - ece 6y ago
    Looking at trends, which is easy to do on real clear politics, you could have seen the Senate was going to be extremely close, and the presidency, while not the blowout everyone expected thanks to 538, would still favor Biden. Here's one forecast that was arguably closer than 538: https://www.270towin.com/ https://www.270towin.com/ The polls did tighten at the end, but you can't just look at a snapshot (even near the end) to account for the trend. In all of these states the polls narrowed in some, but the final results were within MoE: FL: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/fl/florida_trump_vs_biden-6841.html https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/fl/f... PA: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/pa/pennsylvania_trump_vs_biden-6861.html https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/pa/p... NV: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/nv/nevada_trump_vs_biden-6867.html https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/nv/n... AZ: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/az/arizona_trump_vs_biden-6807.html https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/az/a... GA: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/ga/georgia_trump_vs_biden-6974.html https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/ga/g... NC: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/nc/north_carolina_trump_vs_biden-6744.html https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/nc/n... In Iowa the Des Moines Register poll had Trump at +7, which is within MoE, the rest were garbage: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/ia/iowa_trump_vs_biden-6787.html https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/ia/i... In Ohio, none of polls were within MoE, so all of the polls there were garbage: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/oh/ohio_trump_vs_biden-6765.html https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/oh/o... For the Senate I think North Carolina was wrong everywhere I looked, but 75/25 for Democratic control at 538 was the most wrong I think: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/final-2020-senate-forecast/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/final-2020-senate-forec... https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/senate/2020_elections_senate_map_no_toss_ups.html https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/senate/2020_el... https://www.270towin.com/2020-senate-election/consensus-2020-senate-forecast https://www.270towin.com/2020-senate-election/consensus-2020... You can go state by state[1] to see which polls were more/less accurate within MoE compared to the final result and the trends in each state. 538 had a better chance of Biden winning by 400+! EVs [2], than the 306 he's likely to win with. It's this distribution that could have been better at accounting for severe polling errors in some states. 538 did do CYA posts[3], but here while bringing forward the error from 2016 in Ohio seems right, it still projects a win of 335+ EVs. Optimistic for Biden is the kind way of saying what the final 538 projection were, severely more wrong than individual polls is more accurate. If their distribution in [2] was better, I would be more willing to give them a pass. [1] click on the state: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/2020_elections_electoral_college_map_no_toss_ups_race_changes.html https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/2020... [2] "Every outcome in our simulations" https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/ https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/ [3] "What if polls are as wrong as 2016? Biden still wins" https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-can-still-win-but-the-polls-would-have-to-be-off-by-way-more-than-in-2016/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-can-still-win-but... https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/im-here-to-remind-you-that-trump-can-still-win/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/im-here-to-remind-you-t...