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No, I understand what the probabilistic prediction means. The problem is that there is no way to tell if 538's prediction was any more accurate than if they'd
by khazhoux 4y ago
No, I understand what the probabilistic prediction means. The problem is that there is no way to tell if 538's prediction was any more accurate than if they'd said 50-50 (or any numbers whatsoever) because the presidential election is only every 4 years. We can't measure the predictive ability of his model at all. If Hillary won, we'd say "Yup, the model gave her 70%". When Trump won, we said "Yup, the model gave him 30%".
- tomrod 4y agoCorrect. It's a forecast based on polling sentiment. Who does it help? People who face regulatory uncertainty between the regimes. Mostly businesses, nonprofits, etc.
- Nition 4y agoI get where you're coming from, but it's not strictly true. For instance if their model had given Hillary a 99.5% chance and Trump only 0.5%, then we could be pretty sure it wasn't a good model when Trump won. You might say even then, how do we know the result didn't just fall into that 0.5% remaining chance? But polls can and do still give some useful idea of what the result might be.