23 ms·

An election forecast that’s 50-50 is not “giving up”

124 points by luu 2y ago

bryanlarsen 2y ago
Nate Silver also had an article saying that the most likely scenario would be a blowout. There was a 25% chance that Trump would win all 7 battleground state, a 15% chance Harris would win all 7. No other permutation of the 7 states was anywhere close.
- bombcar 2y ago
  If they're not completely independent variables, that should be the expected outcome (e.g., they all trend the same direction). And if they're not that close, they're not battleground.
  - fullshark 2y ago
    They are where the campaign money and attention is going, what about battleground implies independence? Whoever wins them will win the election.
- chicagobob 2y ago
  True, but the word "blowout" in this case is just a crazy side-effect of our weird electoral college system. Everyone knows that in all the swing states (except Arizona), the final vote margin was just a few percent, and that was well within the MOE for all the "50-50" polling in each of those states. No one seriously believes that any President has had a blowout election since maybe Obama in 2008 or Bush in 2004, but the media sure loves the word "blowout".
  - nightski 2y ago
    So basically, if you ignore how the entire system works then it wasn't a blowout lol. I'm guessing the media was taking into account that we indeed use an electoral college system so that is all that matters.
    - DangitBobby 2y ago
      I think "blowout" to some (most? vast majority?) without more context implies that the voting citizens strongly preferred a candidate. So people pushback against the clickbait word being used to drive engagement.
      - rayiner 2y ago
        The only score that matters is the one used to call the game, because that’s the only score anyone is trying to win. We simply don’t know what would have happened under a different set of rules. The “ground game” is extremely expensive: https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/4934604-kamala-harris-ground-game-gotv https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/4934604-kamala-harris-g.... Especially for republicans, whose voters are spread out over rural areas. In post-election interviews, Trump campaign strategists revealed that to save money they largely eschewed a traditional ground game in favor of target outreach to low propensity voters. Even then, Trump received a lot of criticism on the right for doing a handful of rallies in California and New York. As it is, both campaigns focused most of their resources on the seven swing states, and Trump swept all of them. Had the election been close you would’ve expected by sheer chance each candidate to get some of the swing states, but that didn’t happen.
        toast0 2y ago
        Certainaly there are no rules for what is a blowout or a mandate... But we can look back and see Reagan won all but one state, and say yeah, that was a blow out, and Reagan had a mandate. IMHO, if you don't win in any of your opponent's stronghold states, it's not much of a blowout. Yes, it was a win and any win gets you the whole four years, so it doesn't really matter what you want to call it, but it's yet another gaslighting IMHO.
        rayiner 2y ago
        To be clear, I don’t think it was a blowout or a landslide or anything like that. I’m just saying it’s not as close as the PV would make it seem. Harris’s campaign said their internal polling never showed her ahead, and the result was consistent with that. In particular, he wiped out two decades of immigration-driven leftward shift in the electorate, which was how Biden was able to win traditionally red states like Arizona and Georgia. Trump won Nevada, which is now under 45% white, by more than Bush did in 2000, when it was 65% white. He lost New Jersey by less than six points, doing better now that the state is only 55% white than Bush did in 2004 when it was 70% white. He won Texas by a similar margin to Bush in 88 and Florida by more than Reagan did in 1980.
- culi 2y ago
  Trump won the popular vote by 1.5%. That's the 8th closest election in all of US history. Maybe he meant an EC blowout. But that's easier to predict. Most polling had almost all the swing states as extremely close. The outcome was likely to swing in the same direction across all swing states so an EC blowout is likely
  - wakawaka28 2y ago
    As I recall none of the big polls the mainstream media was pushing projected Trump to win. They even refused to call the election until the wee hours of the morning, when the results were pretty clear. Just like in 2016, the polls were intended to deceive people into thinking there was no hope for an alternative candidate.
    - culi 2y ago
      Major decisions desks (AP, Edison, and Fox News; plus a recent newcomer called DDHQ) have made about 3 incorrect calls in their entire history (they were house races, not senate or presidential calls). An incorrect call is a HUGE deal and they have an extremely high bar for certainty. Even for Obama, who's wins were basically a landslide compared to the past 3 elections, calls weren't made until around midnight. Historically it's even common for presidential candidates to concede even before decision desks have made an official call (another norm Trump has challenged). Anyways Decision Desks are a very different topic than pollsters and have no overlap. I don't know what "mainstream media" you were consuming but as a bettor, I definitely didn't get the sense that the race was locked in. All major polls had Biden trailing Trump. Harris got a big boost but that only pushed her to being neck and neck with Trump. We can check the Wayback Machine to verify your claim * NYTimes frontpage the day before the election says "turnout is a focus in a closely divided race" https://web.archive.org/web/20241105011526/https://www.nytimes.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20241105011526/https://www.nytim... * Vox frontpage says "5 reasons Harris could win and 4 reasons Trump could" and "Should it really be this hard to beat Trump?" https://web.archive.org/web/20241106000611/https://www.vox.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20241106000611/https://www.vox.c... * CNN frontpage does not include any particular characterization of chances https://web.archive.org/web/20241105000156/https://edition.cnn.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20241105000156/https://edition.c... A cursory look at other "mainstream" media sources will easily verify that the race was clearly represented as a very close tossup.
bitshiftfaced 2y ago
An accurate model can output a 50-50 prediction. Sure, no problem there. But there is a human bias that does tend to make 50% more likely in these cases. It is the maximum percentage you can assign to the uncomfortable possibility without it being higher than the comfortable possibility. 538 systematically magnified this kind of bias when they decided to rate polls, not based on their absolute error, but based on how close their bias was relative to other polls' biases.(https://x.com/andrei__roman/status/1854328028480115144 https://x.com/andrei__roman/status/1854328028480115144) This down-weighted pollsters like Atlas Intel who would've otherwise improved 538's forecast.
- culi 2y ago
  I'm not sure how to verify your comment since 538 was cut by ABC a month or 2 ago. But Nate Silver's pollster rating methodology is pretty much the same as 538's was during his tenure there and can be found here: https://www.natesilver.net/p/pollster-ratings-silver-bulletin https://www.natesilver.net/p/pollster-ratings-silver-bulleti... It actually explicitly looks for statistical evidence of "herding" (e.g. not publishing poll results that might go against the grain) and penalized those pollsters. In both rating systems, polls that had a long history of going against the grain and being correct, like Ann Seltzer's Iowa poll, were weight very heavily. Seltzer went heavily against the grain 3 elections in a row and was almost completely correct the first 2 times. This year she was off by a massive margin (ultimately costing her her career). Polls that go heavily against the grain but DON'T have a polling history simply aren't weighted heavily in general.
  - tantalor 2y ago
    538 was cut by ABC 6 days ago. https://archive.is/E2nre https://archive.is/E2nre
    - culi 2y ago
      Wow thanks. As a former regular reader it's felt a lot longer They've had several major cuts in the past couple of years so maybe that's why it's felt like that
jdoliner 2y ago
I don't know about the framing of "giving up." But I think anyone who's been following election models since the original 538 in 2008 has probably gotten the feeling that they have less alpha in them than they did back then. I think there's some obvious reasons for this that the forecasters would probably agree with. The biggest one seems to be a case of Goodhart's Law, leading to herding. Pollsters care a lot now about what their rating is in forecasting models, so they're reluctant to publish outlier results, those outlier results are very valuable for the models but are likely to get a pollster punished in the ratings next cycle. Lots of changes to polling methods have been made due to polls underestimating Trump. Polls have become like mini models unto themselves. Due to their inability to poll a representative slice of the population they try to correct by adjusting their results to compensate for the difference between who they've polled and the likely makeup of the electorate. This makes sense in theory, but of course introduces a whole bunch of new variables that need to be tuned correctly. On top of all this is the fact that the process is very high stakes and emotional with pollsters and modellers alike bringing their own political biases and only being able to resist pressure from political factions so much. The analogy I kept coming back to watching election models during this last cycle was that it looked like an ML model that didn't have the data it needed to make good predictions and so was making the safest prediction it could make given what it did have. Basically getting stuck in this local minima at 50-50 that was least likely to be off by a lot.
- genewitch 2y ago
  okay, now change "election prediction models" to "Climate models" and see if you feel like downvoting me merely for pointing out the (slight?) hypocrisy in "excusing" every other model we humans use for being "inaccurate" or "not having the full details" or the "whole slice of"... when none of the models tend to agree... and the IPCC literature published however often they do it is hung upon the framework of models.
  - sojournerc 2y ago
    All models are wrong, but some are useful. Climate modeling is way messier than the media portrays, yet even optimistic models show drastic change. I'm not in the catastrophy camp, but it's worth preparing for climate change regardless of origin. It's good for humanity to be resilient to a hostile planet.
lyu07282 2y ago
At the end of the day it was a 312 vs. 226 in the Electoral College. Seems a bit odd that this is supposed to be impossible to be predicted with any useful amount of certaintly. But perhaps that says more about the nature of the Electoral College than it says about pollsters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efforts_to_reform_the_United_States_Electoral_College https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efforts_to_reform_the_United_S...
- culi 2y ago
  Almost every major model had this outcome as very likely. There was an inordinate amount of very close swing states in 2024. Whichever way the swing was gonna be was likely to apply across the board. If you're going by popular vote, then this was actually the 8th closest election in all of US history.
  - stevenwoo 2y ago
    Not that I'm claiming this for this particular discussion, but a lot of people in favor of what is happening in the USA want to justify what's going on by claiming this was some sort of overwhelming political sweep in this country instead of being a close race at all levels (roughly handful of votes in House and Senate to achieve parity). Who would have picked a Arab American protest vote as major factor in swing states in 2024 when asked in 2020?
    - culi 2y ago
      It's beyond the Arab American vote. It's also the youth vote When the George Floyd uprising happened, it was the largest civil rights protest in human history. Over 70 nations held demonstrations. Where I was, the Students for Justice and Peace in Palestine organized most of the protests. Black-Palestinian solidarity has an extremely long history. So does Irish-Palestinian and Palestinian-Native American solidarity. They've been engaged in building a worldwide network of solidarity with oppressed people for decades now. Almost every George Floyd protest included chants about freeing Palestine and it's shocking how little coverage this got I think people continue to radically underestimate how much youth, Black, and other minorities will continue to follow the lead of Palestinian organizers. And the Democratic party needs to take it seriously if they want to win again
alphazard 2y ago
Highly recommend this video by NNT about why prediction markets tend towards 50-50. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRvPF__du9w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRvPF__du9w Prediction markets are usually implemented as binary options. Like vanilla options, their price depends not just on the most likely outcome, but the whole distribution. When uncertainty increases (imagine squishing a mound of clay), you end up pushing lots of probability mass (clay) to the other side of the bet and the expectation of the payoff (used to make a price) tends towards 1/2.
- gruez 2y ago
  > When uncertainty increases (imagine squishing a mound of clay), you end up pushing lots of probability mass (clay) to the other side of the bet and the expectation of the payoff (used to make a price) tends towards 1/2. This doesn't make any sense. If you think the chances of someone of getting elected is very high (eg. Putin getting re-elected), nobody will be buying shares in him losing. True, the shares of "putin loses" is dirt cheap, but that doesn't mean much if he has a high chance of getting elected.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > the shares of "putin loses" is dirt cheap, but that doesn't mean much if he has a high chance of getting elected This absolutely happens when you can make bets across multiple markets. But it doesn’t lead to every market with two outcomes drifting towards 50/50. The reason election markets in competitive democracies tend towards 50/50 is because the outcome really isn’t that predictable.
  - ngriffiths 2y ago
    It matters a lot what the price is of "putin loses." If Putin does in fact lose 5% of the time, but the odds are 3%, you should bet on it. It may feel silly to do that in this instance but consider what happens if you regularly bet in prediction markets. Always betting on the "putin wins" outcome loses money in the long run.
- lores 2y ago
  It's the same as bookies, right? They are often seen as predicting the odds of an event happening, but that's actually the odds they estimate so that the bets are roughly divided 50/50, to limit their exposure, which is pretty different and depends on their market. English bookies will always overrate the chance of England winning at football, because English people will disproportionately place a bet for their team to win.
a3w 2y ago
[flagged]
- genewitch 2y ago
  Can you explain what you mean about "democracy in place until recently"?
moduspol 2y ago
Agreed with the points in OP. Though we did have the story that came out shortly after the election that apparently internal polling for the Harris campaign never showed her ahead [1]. Obviously it says in the article that they did eventually fight it to a dead heat, which is in-line with a 50-50 forecast, but I do wonder what, if anything, failed such that this key detail was never reported on publicly until after the election. As the article notes, public polls started appearing in late September showing Harris ahead, which they never saw internally. Are internal polls just that much better than public ones? Is the media just incentivized to report on the most interesting outcome (a dead heat)? [1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/11/27/kamala-harris-advisers-internal-polling/76626278007/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/...
- t-3 2y ago
  > As the article notes, public polls started appearing in late September showing Harris ahead, which they never saw internally. Are internal polls just that much better than public ones? Is the media just incentivized to report on the most interesting outcome (a dead heat)? Intentional bias for motivational purposes is a thing - it doesn't make any logical sense, but people want to vote for the winner.
  - HKH2 2y ago
    Well, trying to have 'safe' opinions is not completely illogical. It's a survival strategy.
  - doctorpangloss 2y ago
    People want to vote for whomever. People want to DONATE to winners.
- roenxi 2y ago
  Don't rule out Harris' internal polling just being bad and the public polling was superior. We're looking at a team whos message was "our opponent is a racist, homophobic, sexist, rapist, felonic avatar of Hitler" and then saw him gain margin which is quite remarkable. What did voters have to see in Harris' team for that to happen? They're clearly doing something wrong. If the team managed that I wouldn't assume their pollsters were a lone beacon of competence. It seems quite plausible they hired bad pollsters and their internal data was off.
delichon 2y ago
There's a pretty clear test of whether a pollster is about reporting or influencing: the partisanship of their errors. Neutral pollsters have differences with the results randomly distributed across parties. Propagandists have errors that favor their patrons. This essay leans on the magnitude of the errors, but that's less probative than their distribution. Does any poll aggregator order by randomness of polling error?
- culi 2y ago
  This mixes up accuracy with precision and 538 had written at length about this. There's a big difference between pollster bias correction vs rating. There are many pollsters that are pretty consistently +2D/R but are reliably off from the final result in that direction. These polls are actually extremely valuable once you make the correction in your model. Meanwhile, polls that can be off from the final result by a large amount but average out to about correct should not be trusted. This is a yellow flag for herding A pollster can have an A+ rating while having a very consistent bias in one direction or another. The rating is meant to capture consistency/honesty of methodology more than result
  - delichon 2y ago
    A fair scale does not favor the grocer.
    - culi 2y ago
      In this case it does. What pollsters sell is their reputations
- ForTheKidz 2y ago
  This doesn't account for poll bias that biases both parties, of course. Not all polling is designed to wage parties against each other: some is designed to pit parties against populace.
- aredox 2y ago
  Except the methodology biases the response: phone-only vs. in-person for example.
notfried 2y ago
For each of the 2024 7 swing states, the winner was <1% ahead on average, so what good are these polls if the results are going to be within their margin of error? They need to either find a more accurate way, or... give up!
- culi 2y ago
  We had a pretty weird year in general. Harris did bad across most safe states but seemed to do much better than her average in swing states (not enough to win them, but much better than she did in non-competitive states) Many election models rely heavily on historical correlation. States like OH and IN might vote quite differently but their swings tend to be in the same direction. The weirdness this year (possibly caused by the Harris campaign having a particularly strong ground game in swing states) definitely challenged a lot of baked in assumptions of forecasts.
- rachofsunshine 2y ago
  What they're good for is telling you that things are close. A tied poll or a 50-50 model can tell you that if your beliefs think it's 99% to go one way, you're probably overconfident, and should be more prepared for it to go the other way. I cared about the result, because it was going to decide whether I settled down in the US or whether I wanted to find a different place to live. And because I paid attention to those polls, I knew that what happened was not particularly unlikely. I prepared early. A lot of people I know thought it couldn't happen. They ignored the evidence in front of them, because it was distasteful to them (just as it was to me). And they were caught flat-footed in a way that I wasn't. That's not the benefit of hindsight: I brought receipts. You can see the 5,000 equally-likely outcomes I had at the start of the night (and how they evolved as I added the vote coming in) here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11nn9y9fusd-6LQKCof3_ynImgRHMic2a86B7OTspsX4/ https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11nn9y9fusd-6LQKCof3_... .
- dionian 2y ago
  The changes in the polls over time are useful and the campaigns often change based on the changes in the polling.
randomNumber7 2y ago
Tell me you don't know the difference between bias and variance. The longest article/comment wins.
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jmyeet 2y ago
It is insufficient to make a prediction like 50-50 in a US election unless you also can explain turnout. Anyone can throw out numbers like "51-49" or "55-45" but how did you get to those numbers? How are different demographics voting? How is there turnout changing? I've seen people laud their own accuracy in 2020 while being off by about 30 million in predicted turnout. The way different demographics vote in US elections doesn't change much from election to election. What does change is turnout and turnout is a function of many things: enthusiasm for the candidate, voter suppression, ease of access to voting and so on. 2020 was unprecedented because of the pandemic. We greatly expanded early voting and mail-in ballots, which greatly increased participation. A perfect example of this is Arizona. In 2020, Native Americans were crucial to flipping the state to Biden. Arizona state lawmakers responded to this by essentially punishing them and making it way more difficult to vote. Voter ID requirements, birth certificates and even having a physical address are all impediments to people who were born on and/or reside on reservations. There were fewer voting places and voting options. A rural voting place might randomly close early too after being an hours long drive. Some looked at this and said Native Americans in Arizona swung hard to Trump. No, they were simply largely prevented from voting such that the only Native Americans who could reliably vote were more affluent and thus more likely to be Trump voters. My point is: what polling model captured this prior to the 2024 election? I guarantee you it's none. What really happened in 2024 was: 1. Biden voters swung to the couch in the millions; 2. Trump basically didn't lose white women, despite the abortion issue; and 3. Trump activated a previously low-propensity voter demographic: angry, young, terminally online white males, basically the Andrew Tate and 4chan crowd. Any model has a difficulty with low-propensity demographics. Did any model capture this? I think it only started to become apparent with early voting exit polls. I don't think the 2024 polls were particularly accurate. I do think they threw their hands up and simply converged to 50-50. Small differences in turnout predictions for different demographics can massively impact the result.
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asdf6969 2y ago
more cope from the “experts”
atoav 2y ago
My pet conspiracy theory is that the monetary influence in US politics is a deciding factor in keeping it close to 50/50 as this allows for the biggest footballification of politics and thus allows politicans/donors to extract the most from people who vote against their interest just to see the other side lose. The only thing I am unsure about is whether this needs coordination (a conspiracy) or is just a systemic dynamic that emerges from the rules of the system.
- darkerside 2y ago
  Per Occam's Razor, it's usually the systemic dynamic
anovikov 2y ago
I think polling these days is all but useless just because a very small proportion of people actually respond to pollsters and it's next to impossible to statistically account for "what would the other 80% say if they did't tell the pollster to fuck off". There's no way to build a "representative sample" to account for that. People are way more likely to respond to a "friendly" pollster and if they don't know whether pollster is "friendly" (works for the organisation aligned with their party), they assume they are from the other camp. It's a mess.
- arrrg 2y ago
  But the surveys were pretty accurate this election. So I’m not sure why you say they are useless.
antman 2y ago
There is the statisticians aphorism often attributed to George Box that "All models are wrong but some are useful". This goes against the core argument of this essay that pretty much says that "The models were mostly right, but not useful" which not a useful argument itself, even if its right
- 1970-01-01 2y ago
  Predict 100 fair coin flips.. My result didn't match yours. The model isn't useful?
jdietrich 2y ago
The odds on Polymarket (and other betting markets) started diverging at the start of October; by the end of the month, the odds were 65/35 in favour of Trump. At the time, many commentators were arguing that this was obvious market manipulation. It turned out that the trader who had supposedly manipulated the market had in fact commissioned private polls using an alternative methodology - rather than asking people how they would vote, it asked how they expected their neighbours to vote. https://polymarket.com/event/presidential-election-winner-2024 https://polymarket.com/event/presidential-election-winner-20... https://www.ft.com/content/e8b2ff85-a4dd-40cd-a4c1-e3d70686917f https://www.ft.com/content/e8b2ff85-a4dd-40cd-a4c1-e3d706869... https://www.ft.com/content/4b302ab8-7e40-4d1a-bbe6-3d46f6811d85 https://www.ft.com/content/4b302ab8-7e40-4d1a-bbe6-3d46f6811...
- thierrydamiba 2y ago
  Was this a new development in polling?
  - DrillShopper 2y ago
    Can't wait to check the DraftKings odds on the presidential election before I head to the polls to see if it's worth bothering to vote./s
  - Izkata 2y ago
    No, it was fairly well known a decade or more ago as a very good way to remove bias for how low-effort it is. We were using a variation of it at work back then for an unrelated subject. How much it's used in political polling I can't say.
    - thierrydamiba 2y ago
      It just seems so obvious-I would have been surprised if it was only discovered in the last election.
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  Interesting. If you think about it, that's how the stock market works. It's not how much you think a stock is worth; it's really how much you think everyone else thinks the stock is worth.
Uehreka 2y ago
I’m gonna take this opportunity to clarify a comment I wrote earlier this week: Sure, polling may be difficult to interpret when uncertainty is high and margins are small, but there are many elections every year that are easily predictable blowouts, but which are often not portrayed that way depending on your information diet. Like, I can’t count the number of times someone will show me an awesome political ad for an awesome person who’s going up against an awful politician I hate, and there’ll be all this hope and the person showing me the ad will be thinking this person has a chance of winning. And then I’ll look at the polling and realize they’re down by 20 points in a state Trump carried by 30 and the error bars are only 3 points in each direction. So even if polling close races can get messy, polling overall provides an extremely powerful antidote to a lot of propaganda and echo-chamber thinking.
aaron695 2y ago
[dead]
hoseja 2y ago
In fact it is the result of much effort to keep the people as perfectly divided as possible.
- throwway120385 2y ago
  I think it's fascinating that the colorized maps of each voting precinct are always almost perfect population maps where high-population centers are blue and low-population areas are red.
sannysanoff 2y ago
It seems to be a matter of indifference to many that a persistent societal division of fifty-fifty is symptomatic of a profound societal schism. This is because such a division, in any configuration, maximizes the number of those who are discontented. As it is written, "A house divided against itself cannot stand." To my mind, this matter is of far greater significance than any secondary, tangible processes that may be occurring in consequence. Furthermore, the mechanisms that ensure the mathematical expectation of electoral outcomes to hover around a fifty-fifty split — a phenomenon observable in many nations — are fundamentally economic in nature. Both factions commit resources to the electoral contest to secure a mere one percent advantage, as such is the foundational principle of democracy: a majority of fifty-one percent prevails. Thus, economic factors — for an electoral campaign is, in essence, a contest of capital—having, in effect, subverted the very system of democratic elections, inevitably lead to the decay of nations that religiously adhere to the mathematics of a single percentage point as the sole criterion of legitimacy. In optimizing for democratic representation, social stability and equilibrium have been forfeited. It is akin to the psychological paradox: "I am correct, and all acknowledge it, yet why do I not experience contentment?" It is because one has optimized for correctness — or in the context of elections, for fairness and representativeness — rather than for overall well-being. Such is the predicament inherent in the pursuit of a mere fifty-one percent majority.
- Tuna-Fish 2y ago
  > Furthermore, the mechanisms that ensure the mathematical expectation of electoral outcomes to hover around a fifty-fifty split — a phenomenon observable in many nations — are fundamentally economic in nature. What? No they are not. This is 100% created by the FPTP voting system. It is the single cause that leads to this, everywhere where it's used. FPTP means that if your party cannot hoover up a base that gets 50%+1 of the votes, you change your platform until it can. The stable equilibrium is two parties at very nearly 50% split. Then both parties have to cater to their 50%, can ignore the other 50%, and do not benefit from co-operation across party lines. This equilibrium is not visible in democratic countries that use some kind of proportional representation. In such systems, parties tend to be smaller, and necessarily have to co-operate to form government.
827a 2y ago
Rambling about why a 50-50 forecast on a blowout election is "fine" and actually, like, totally cool and actually you're the dumb one for thinking it isn't, holds no water in my book. Election forecasters are not scientists discovering the nature of the universe, where it might be ok to say "yeah there's nothing to discover here" / "we don't know what we don't know". They're businesspeople selling a product. If AWS says "well, actually, hosting servers is just really really hard and its totally normal that 10% of your requests are failing!" they'd go out of business, full stop. No one is going to buy your product. Trump did not win by a little bit. They missed something about the 2016 election, and it is wild that they missed it again EIGHT years later. Don't let them hide behind the veil of "we said it was 50-50!"
- rexpop 2y ago
  > blowout Trump won 49.8% of the popular vote, compared to Harris's 48.2%, giving him a margin of 1.6% (approximately 2.3 million votes). This margin ranks as one of the smallest in modern history, smaller than Joe Biden's 4.45% margin in 2020 and smaller even than George W. Bush's narrow win in 2004 (2.46%). Trump won 312 Electoral College votes to Harris's 226, marking a margin of 86 votes. This is larger than his 2016 victory (304-227) and Biden's 2020 win (306-232), but it does not approach historical landslides like Reagan's 1984 victory (525-13) or Lyndon B. Johnson's in 1964 (486-52). Trump's popular vote margin is the fifth smallest since 1960, ie #12 in the last 17 largest, #13 by vote % margin. > Trump did not win by a little bit. Yeah, he did. 0. https://infogram.com/untitled-1hnq41on3mjwp23 https://infogram.com/untitled-1hnq41on3mjwp23 1. https://infogram.com/untitled-1h0n25oz3rxjz4p https://infogram.com/untitled-1h0n25oz3rxjz4p
  - sigzero 2y ago
    It was who he won that mattered. Democrats are using 1.5% to justify a "we didn't do that badly" attitude and yes, they did do badly. Trump won demographics he had no reasonable right to win and He took all of the swing States. He won the popular vote that no Republican has been able to do since 2004.His Electoral College win was resounding. That and the Republicans winning the House and Senate. The Democrats really really need to rethink things.
skybrian 2y ago
Suppose you want to know whether it will rain on your wedding day. Without any forecast, there are two scenarios you need to prepare for: it will rain, or it won't. A 50-50 forecast doesn't change anything. You still need to prepare for both scenarios. There's a sense in which it's "useless" even though it's a valid forecast. Forecasts are most useful when they allow you to eliminate a possibility, so you don't need to prepare for it. This means even something like an 80% chance might be of limited use, if you still need to prepare for the 20% case. (Gambling and investing are different, because you can accept losses and make up for them with repeated bets. You still need to be prepared for losses, but that's a matter of not betting too much compared to your bankroll.) Even if the forecasters don't do anything wrong, for many people, presidential election forecasts are of limited use. Either they don't have anything they need to do to prepare, or they still have to prepare for either candidate to win.
- CJefferson 2y ago
  50-50 forecasts can be massive depending on your priors. If someone (who I trusted) told me there was a 50-50 chance I would get shot tomorrow if I went outside, you couldn’t pay me enough to go leave the house.
  - skybrian 2y ago
    Absolutely! It didn't work that way for recent presidential elections, though. The prior odds weren't always 50:50, but they were well within the range of "both sides could win" and didn't go outside that.
    - mannykannot 2y ago
      In the case of an election, a 50:50 forecast is a clear reminder to the wise of the importance of voting, no matter how certain the outcome might seem from the necessarily limited perspective of your acquaintances and your consumption of possibly (or likely) biased news media.
    - wenwolf 2y ago
      If a modern US election went far outside that that would just mean some fool was burning a huge amount of money and probably to no purpose as it would cause a response from donors on the other side who would like an outcome but also aren't going to throw money away.
SirMaster 2y ago
>Trump and Harris are both a normal polling error away from a blowout If this is the conclusion from all the data gathering and analysis then what's even the point? If the conclusion is: it could be a blowout either way, we have no idea. Seems like a waste of a lot of time and resources, for what gain exactly?
1970-01-01 2y ago
Seems like there is a hidden function when 50-50 polls exist: 100% uncertainty with 100% certainty. This is the equivalent to having no data at all. Maybe we should just start saying "This is the equivalent scenario/situation to having no data at all." instead of 50-50.
- geysersam 2y ago
  Having no data at all is better than having the wrong information. If you were previously pretty sure one side would win you gain information from a study that says it's 50-50. If you already though it was even then the new study is pointless.
- ttctciyf 2y ago
  I think the lack of signal from the electorate does represent an entropic state and is likely because available information channels are saturated with noise.
- swid 2y ago
  Lets says I have a coin. I have no data on it. I do not know if it will come up heads or tails or if it is a fair coin. I throw the coin N number of times and determine the coin is fair. I still do not know which side the coin will come up. But this isn't the same as having no data on the coin. I've determined the coin is fair by gathering data, which otherwise I would not know. Often this added piece of information is crucial to making good decisions and not at all equivalent to the first case. For instance, I might want to bet you that the next 10 throws in a row will all be heads. If you know the coin is fair, this is a good bet - but without data on the coin, it could be a trap.
  - 1970-01-01 2y ago
    The goal of polls is not to determine if an election is or is not a fair election. The goal of polls is to predict the final outcome of the election.
    - swid 2y ago
ThinkBeat 2y ago
A close race, creates more excitement and more cash for the media. If you get on a horses and your horse keep losing and losing ground, watching the race becomes quite boring. If the horses are neck on neck you will be captivated watching it till the very end. The media has a strong incentive to sell the elections as close to keep more people seeing their ads and buying subscriptions.
ThinkBeat 2y ago
I guess the article says that election polling in the US given the current landscape, or rather the landscape during the past election, is useless. Today Biden is up 2%, please remember that the polls have a +-3% uncertainty built in, so we have nothing to report
joshdavham 2y ago
I always get annoyed when people look at election outcomes and say “the polls were wrong” when the most likely outcome didn’t happen. It’d be like saying there’s a 5/6 chance that a 6-sided dice will not roll a 4, rolling a 4, and then concluding that the initial proposed probability was wrong.
- afavour 2y ago
  I came away from 2016 wondering if any of the electoral outcome stuff is worth doing given how much it gets misunderstood. “They said Hillary had a 90% but Trump won! They’re idiots!” No! They said Trump had a 10% chance and he won. It was a predicted outcome!
  - knightfall21 2y ago
    The problem is using statistical models at all for predicting the probability of one time events. (elections are every 4 years, but those future models will be different). You can't validate such a model, and it's not useful since any upset victory was "accounted for" simply because its possibility was named.
  - jefftk 2y ago
    538 had Trump at 30.7% the night before, FWIW: https://web.archive.org/web/20161107224336/https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/ https://web.archive.org/web/20161107224336/https://projects....
  - staticman2 2y ago
    But is your 10% chance of Trump winning model a better model than one that gave Trump a 40%, 50%, 60%, 70%, 80%, or 90% chance of winning? If you can't show that why should anyone listen to you?
  - oersted 2y ago
    It is a rational behavior to question a prediction if an event that was deemed to have low probability actually happened, I don’t like the implication that it is stupid to do so. In fact, after thorough investigation, most polling agencies did identify significant factors that let to bias, and almost all major pollsters have adapted their methods in later elections as a result: education weighting, compensating for nonresponse bias, diversified polling channels beyond phone calls (online surveys, text messages, in-app polling), likely-voter modeling… I don’t think any professional pollster will tell you that the prediction you mentioned was reasonably accurate in retrospect, regardless of affiliation. I don’t attribute malice or incompetence, it’s clear that the game changed suddenly and new confounding factors became significant. People that would previously vote together diverged significantly, lots of politically inactive people became involved, people were afraid to be honest, and people that were harder to reach were voting much differently to those that were more accessible to pollsters. That will really mess with any sampling strategy that proved reliable for many years before.
James_K 2y ago
The whole question of using probability here is philosophically fraught. If you are saying "this has a probability of 50%" then you're saying "this will happen half of the time if you repeat the test". I don't think Harris would win 5 times if you ran that election 10 more times. From that regard, the 50% guess is quite inaccurate, and does just seem to be the pollsters "giving up" in the sense that they're pretty clueless and so ended up going with an even split. This is speculation on my part, but I think that election was decided in Trump's favor pretty decisively long before the publishing date of the last 50/50 poll. Edit: to elucidate, suppose it rains on 50% of days. One forecaster gives a 50% chance of rain every day. Another gives a 90% chance of rain/not rain and is "wrong" 10% of of time. Both stations are giving you accurate information from a probability perspective (when station A says a 50% chance, you know there's a 50% chance of rain tomorrow, when station B says 90%, you know there's a 90% chance of rain tomorrow) but the 50% chance station is less useful as the number is lower. They have effectively given up in the same way pollsters have given up; they're saying there is no information that could give them a higher probability. The reason a single event can have many different probabilities is because probability is about repeated events. Both stations are predictions accurately reflect the distribution of rain/not rain days.
AtlasBarfed 2y ago
Hyperaccurate voter profiling and predictions is a tool of oppression in democracy. It highlights precise means for the rich to use targeted propaganda to maximum effect for wedge issues and electioneering to serve their ends, both in forming the winning coalition, and it neutering the opposition.

124 points by luu 2y ago

Nate Silver also had an article saying that the most likely scenario would be a blowout. There was a 25% chance that Trump would win all 7 battleground state, a 15% chance Harris would win all 7. No other permutation of the 7 states was anywhere close.

bombcar 2y ago
If they're not completely independent variables, that should be the expected outcome (e.g., they all trend the same direction). And if they're not that close, they're not battleground.
- fullshark 2y ago
  They are where the campaign money and attention is going, what about battleground implies independence? Whoever wins them will win the election.
chicagobob 2y ago
True, but the word "blowout" in this case is just a crazy side-effect of our weird electoral college system. Everyone knows that in all the swing states (except Arizona), the final vote margin was just a few percent, and that was well within the MOE for all the "50-50" polling in each of those states. No one seriously believes that any President has had a blowout election since maybe Obama in 2008 or Bush in 2004, but the media sure loves the word "blowout".
- nightski 2y ago
  So basically, if you ignore how the entire system works then it wasn't a blowout lol. I'm guessing the media was taking into account that we indeed use an electoral college system so that is all that matters.
  - DangitBobby 2y ago
    I think "blowout" to some (most? vast majority?) without more context implies that the voting citizens strongly preferred a candidate. So people pushback against the clickbait word being used to drive engagement.
    - rayiner 2y ago
      The only score that matters is the one used to call the game, because that’s the only score anyone is trying to win. We simply don’t know what would have happened under a different set of rules. The “ground game” is extremely expensive: https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/4934604-kamala-harris-ground-game-gotv https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/4934604-kamala-harris-g.... Especially for republicans, whose voters are spread out over rural areas. In post-election interviews, Trump campaign strategists revealed that to save money they largely eschewed a traditional ground game in favor of target outreach to low propensity voters. Even then, Trump received a lot of criticism on the right for doing a handful of rallies in California and New York. As it is, both campaigns focused most of their resources on the seven swing states, and Trump swept all of them. Had the election been close you would’ve expected by sheer chance each candidate to get some of the swing states, but that didn’t happen.
      - toast0 2y ago
        Certainaly there are no rules for what is a blowout or a mandate... But we can look back and see Reagan won all but one state, and say yeah, that was a blow out, and Reagan had a mandate. IMHO, if you don't win in any of your opponent's stronghold states, it's not much of a blowout. Yes, it was a win and any win gets you the whole four years, so it doesn't really matter what you want to call it, but it's yet another gaslighting IMHO.
        rayiner 2y ago
        To be clear, I don’t think it was a blowout or a landslide or anything like that. I’m just saying it’s not as close as the PV would make it seem. Harris’s campaign said their internal polling never showed her ahead, and the result was consistent with that. In particular, he wiped out two decades of immigration-driven leftward shift in the electorate, which was how Biden was able to win traditionally red states like Arizona and Georgia. Trump won Nevada, which is now under 45% white, by more than Bush did in 2000, when it was 65% white. He lost New Jersey by less than six points, doing better now that the state is only 55% white than Bush did in 2004 when it was 70% white. He won Texas by a similar margin to Bush in 88 and Florida by more than Reagan did in 1980.
culi 2y ago
Trump won the popular vote by 1.5%. That's the 8th closest election in all of US history. Maybe he meant an EC blowout. But that's easier to predict. Most polling had almost all the swing states as extremely close. The outcome was likely to swing in the same direction across all swing states so an EC blowout is likely
- wakawaka28 2y ago
  As I recall none of the big polls the mainstream media was pushing projected Trump to win. They even refused to call the election until the wee hours of the morning, when the results were pretty clear. Just like in 2016, the polls were intended to deceive people into thinking there was no hope for an alternative candidate.
  - culi 2y ago
    Major decisions desks (AP, Edison, and Fox News; plus a recent newcomer called DDHQ) have made about 3 incorrect calls in their entire history (they were house races, not senate or presidential calls). An incorrect call is a HUGE deal and they have an extremely high bar for certainty. Even for Obama, who's wins were basically a landslide compared to the past 3 elections, calls weren't made until around midnight. Historically it's even common for presidential candidates to concede even before decision desks have made an official call (another norm Trump has challenged). Anyways Decision Desks are a very different topic than pollsters and have no overlap. I don't know what "mainstream media" you were consuming but as a bettor, I definitely didn't get the sense that the race was locked in. All major polls had Biden trailing Trump. Harris got a big boost but that only pushed her to being neck and neck with Trump. We can check the Wayback Machine to verify your claim * NYTimes frontpage the day before the election says "turnout is a focus in a closely divided race" https://web.archive.org/web/20241105011526/https://www.nytimes.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20241105011526/https://www.nytim... * Vox frontpage says "5 reasons Harris could win and 4 reasons Trump could" and "Should it really be this hard to beat Trump?" https://web.archive.org/web/20241106000611/https://www.vox.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20241106000611/https://www.vox.c... * CNN frontpage does not include any particular characterization of chances https://web.archive.org/web/20241105000156/https://edition.cnn.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20241105000156/https://edition.c... A cursory look at other "mainstream" media sources will easily verify that the race was clearly represented as a very close tossup.

bitshiftfaced 2y ago

An accurate model can output a 50-50 prediction. Sure, no problem there. But there is a human bias that does tend to make 50% more likely in these cases. It is the maximum percentage you can assign to the uncomfortable possibility without it being higher than the comfortable possibility. 538 systematically magnified this kind of bias when they decided to rate polls, not based on their absolute error, but based on how close their bias was relative to other polls' biases.(https://x.com/andrei__roman/status/1854328028480115144 https://x.com/andrei__roman/status/1854328028480115144) This down-weighted pollsters like Atlas Intel who would've otherwise improved 538's forecast.

culi 2y ago
I'm not sure how to verify your comment since 538 was cut by ABC a month or 2 ago. But Nate Silver's pollster rating methodology is pretty much the same as 538's was during his tenure there and can be found here: https://www.natesilver.net/p/pollster-ratings-silver-bulletin https://www.natesilver.net/p/pollster-ratings-silver-bulleti... It actually explicitly looks for statistical evidence of "herding" (e.g. not publishing poll results that might go against the grain) and penalized those pollsters. In both rating systems, polls that had a long history of going against the grain and being correct, like Ann Seltzer's Iowa poll, were weight very heavily. Seltzer went heavily against the grain 3 elections in a row and was almost completely correct the first 2 times. This year she was off by a massive margin (ultimately costing her her career). Polls that go heavily against the grain but DON'T have a polling history simply aren't weighted heavily in general.
- tantalor 2y ago
  538 was cut by ABC 6 days ago. https://archive.is/E2nre https://archive.is/E2nre
  - culi 2y ago
    Wow thanks. As a former regular reader it's felt a lot longer They've had several major cuts in the past couple of years so maybe that's why it's felt like that

jdoliner 2y ago

I don't know about the framing of "giving up." But I think anyone who's been following election models since the original 538 in 2008 has probably gotten the feeling that they have less alpha in them than they did back then. I think there's some obvious reasons for this that the forecasters would probably agree with. The biggest one seems to be a case of Goodhart's Law, leading to herding. Pollsters care a lot now about what their rating is in forecasting models, so they're reluctant to publish outlier results, those outlier results are very valuable for the models but are likely to get a pollster punished in the ratings next cycle. Lots of changes to polling methods have been made due to polls underestimating Trump. Polls have become like mini models unto themselves. Due to their inability to poll a representative slice of the population they try to correct by adjusting their results to compensate for the difference between who they've polled and the likely makeup of the electorate. This makes sense in theory, but of course introduces a whole bunch of new variables that need to be tuned correctly. On top of all this is the fact that the process is very high stakes and emotional with pollsters and modellers alike bringing their own political biases and only being able to resist pressure from political factions so much. The analogy I kept coming back to watching election models during this last cycle was that it looked like an ML model that didn't have the data it needed to make good predictions and so was making the safest prediction it could make given what it did have. Basically getting stuck in this local minima at 50-50 that was least likely to be off by a lot.

genewitch 2y ago
okay, now change "election prediction models" to "Climate models" and see if you feel like downvoting me merely for pointing out the (slight?) hypocrisy in "excusing" every other model we humans use for being "inaccurate" or "not having the full details" or the "whole slice of"... when none of the models tend to agree... and the IPCC literature published however often they do it is hung upon the framework of models.
- sojournerc 2y ago
  All models are wrong, but some are useful. Climate modeling is way messier than the media portrays, yet even optimistic models show drastic change. I'm not in the catastrophy camp, but it's worth preparing for climate change regardless of origin. It's good for humanity to be resilient to a hostile planet.

lyu07282 2y ago

At the end of the day it was a 312 vs. 226 in the Electoral College. Seems a bit odd that this is supposed to be impossible to be predicted with any useful amount of certaintly. But perhaps that says more about the nature of the Electoral College than it says about pollsters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efforts_to_reform_the_United_States_Electoral_College https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efforts_to_reform_the_United_S...

culi 2y ago
Almost every major model had this outcome as very likely. There was an inordinate amount of very close swing states in 2024. Whichever way the swing was gonna be was likely to apply across the board. If you're going by popular vote, then this was actually the 8th closest election in all of US history.
- stevenwoo 2y ago
  Not that I'm claiming this for this particular discussion, but a lot of people in favor of what is happening in the USA want to justify what's going on by claiming this was some sort of overwhelming political sweep in this country instead of being a close race at all levels (roughly handful of votes in House and Senate to achieve parity). Who would have picked a Arab American protest vote as major factor in swing states in 2024 when asked in 2020?
  - culi 2y ago
    It's beyond the Arab American vote. It's also the youth vote When the George Floyd uprising happened, it was the largest civil rights protest in human history. Over 70 nations held demonstrations. Where I was, the Students for Justice and Peace in Palestine organized most of the protests. Black-Palestinian solidarity has an extremely long history. So does Irish-Palestinian and Palestinian-Native American solidarity. They've been engaged in building a worldwide network of solidarity with oppressed people for decades now. Almost every George Floyd protest included chants about freeing Palestine and it's shocking how little coverage this got I think people continue to radically underestimate how much youth, Black, and other minorities will continue to follow the lead of Palestinian organizers. And the Democratic party needs to take it seriously if they want to win again

alphazard 2y ago

Highly recommend this video by NNT about why prediction markets tend towards 50-50. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRvPF__du9w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRvPF__du9w Prediction markets are usually implemented as binary options. Like vanilla options, their price depends not just on the most likely outcome, but the whole distribution. When uncertainty increases (imagine squishing a mound of clay), you end up pushing lots of probability mass (clay) to the other side of the bet and the expectation of the payoff (used to make a price) tends towards 1/2.

gruez 2y ago
> When uncertainty increases (imagine squishing a mound of clay), you end up pushing lots of probability mass (clay) to the other side of the bet and the expectation of the payoff (used to make a price) tends towards 1/2. This doesn't make any sense. If you think the chances of someone of getting elected is very high (eg. Putin getting re-elected), nobody will be buying shares in him losing. True, the shares of "putin loses" is dirt cheap, but that doesn't mean much if he has a high chance of getting elected.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > the shares of "putin loses" is dirt cheap, but that doesn't mean much if he has a high chance of getting elected This absolutely happens when you can make bets across multiple markets. But it doesn’t lead to every market with two outcomes drifting towards 50/50. The reason election markets in competitive democracies tend towards 50/50 is because the outcome really isn’t that predictable.
- ngriffiths 2y ago
  It matters a lot what the price is of "putin loses." If Putin does in fact lose 5% of the time, but the odds are 3%, you should bet on it. It may feel silly to do that in this instance but consider what happens if you regularly bet in prediction markets. Always betting on the "putin wins" outcome loses money in the long run.
lores 2y ago
It's the same as bookies, right? They are often seen as predicting the odds of an event happening, but that's actually the odds they estimate so that the bets are roughly divided 50/50, to limit their exposure, which is pretty different and depends on their market. English bookies will always overrate the chance of England winning at football, because English people will disproportionately place a bet for their team to win.

a3w 2y ago

[flagged]

genewitch 2y ago
Can you explain what you mean about "democracy in place until recently"?

moduspol 2y ago

Agreed with the points in OP. Though we did have the story that came out shortly after the election that apparently internal polling for the Harris campaign never showed her ahead [1]. Obviously it says in the article that they did eventually fight it to a dead heat, which is in-line with a 50-50 forecast, but I do wonder what, if anything, failed such that this key detail was never reported on publicly until after the election. As the article notes, public polls started appearing in late September showing Harris ahead, which they never saw internally. Are internal polls just that much better than public ones? Is the media just incentivized to report on the most interesting outcome (a dead heat)? [1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/11/27/kamala-harris-advisers-internal-polling/76626278007/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/...

t-3 2y ago
> As the article notes, public polls started appearing in late September showing Harris ahead, which they never saw internally. Are internal polls just that much better than public ones? Is the media just incentivized to report on the most interesting outcome (a dead heat)? Intentional bias for motivational purposes is a thing - it doesn't make any logical sense, but people want to vote for the winner.
- HKH2 2y ago
  Well, trying to have 'safe' opinions is not completely illogical. It's a survival strategy.
- doctorpangloss 2y ago
  People want to vote for whomever. People want to DONATE to winners.
roenxi 2y ago
Don't rule out Harris' internal polling just being bad and the public polling was superior. We're looking at a team whos message was "our opponent is a racist, homophobic, sexist, rapist, felonic avatar of Hitler" and then saw him gain margin which is quite remarkable. What did voters have to see in Harris' team for that to happen? They're clearly doing something wrong. If the team managed that I wouldn't assume their pollsters were a lone beacon of competence. It seems quite plausible they hired bad pollsters and their internal data was off.

delichon 2y ago

There's a pretty clear test of whether a pollster is about reporting or influencing: the partisanship of their errors. Neutral pollsters have differences with the results randomly distributed across parties. Propagandists have errors that favor their patrons. This essay leans on the magnitude of the errors, but that's less probative than their distribution. Does any poll aggregator order by randomness of polling error?

culi 2y ago
This mixes up accuracy with precision and 538 had written at length about this. There's a big difference between pollster bias correction vs rating. There are many pollsters that are pretty consistently +2D/R but are reliably off from the final result in that direction. These polls are actually extremely valuable once you make the correction in your model. Meanwhile, polls that can be off from the final result by a large amount but average out to about correct should not be trusted. This is a yellow flag for herding A pollster can have an A+ rating while having a very consistent bias in one direction or another. The rating is meant to capture consistency/honesty of methodology more than result
- delichon 2y ago
  A fair scale does not favor the grocer.
  - culi 2y ago
    In this case it does. What pollsters sell is their reputations
ForTheKidz 2y ago
This doesn't account for poll bias that biases both parties, of course. Not all polling is designed to wage parties against each other: some is designed to pit parties against populace.
aredox 2y ago
Except the methodology biases the response: phone-only vs. in-person for example.

notfried 2y ago

For each of the 2024 7 swing states, the winner was <1% ahead on average, so what good are these polls if the results are going to be within their margin of error? They need to either find a more accurate way, or... give up!

culi 2y ago
We had a pretty weird year in general. Harris did bad across most safe states but seemed to do much better than her average in swing states (not enough to win them, but much better than she did in non-competitive states) Many election models rely heavily on historical correlation. States like OH and IN might vote quite differently but their swings tend to be in the same direction. The weirdness this year (possibly caused by the Harris campaign having a particularly strong ground game in swing states) definitely challenged a lot of baked in assumptions of forecasts.
rachofsunshine 2y ago
What they're good for is telling you that things are close. A tied poll or a 50-50 model can tell you that if your beliefs think it's 99% to go one way, you're probably overconfident, and should be more prepared for it to go the other way. I cared about the result, because it was going to decide whether I settled down in the US or whether I wanted to find a different place to live. And because I paid attention to those polls, I knew that what happened was not particularly unlikely. I prepared early. A lot of people I know thought it couldn't happen. They ignored the evidence in front of them, because it was distasteful to them (just as it was to me). And they were caught flat-footed in a way that I wasn't. That's not the benefit of hindsight: I brought receipts. You can see the 5,000 equally-likely outcomes I had at the start of the night (and how they evolved as I added the vote coming in) here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11nn9y9fusd-6LQKCof3_ynImgRHMic2a86B7OTspsX4/ https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11nn9y9fusd-6LQKCof3_... .
dionian 2y ago
The changes in the polls over time are useful and the campaigns often change based on the changes in the polling.

randomNumber7 2y ago

Tell me you don't know the difference between bias and variance. The longest article/comment wins.

deleted 2y ago

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jmyeet 2y ago

It is insufficient to make a prediction like 50-50 in a US election unless you also can explain turnout. Anyone can throw out numbers like "51-49" or "55-45" but how did you get to those numbers? How are different demographics voting? How is there turnout changing? I've seen people laud their own accuracy in 2020 while being off by about 30 million in predicted turnout. The way different demographics vote in US elections doesn't change much from election to election. What does change is turnout and turnout is a function of many things: enthusiasm for the candidate, voter suppression, ease of access to voting and so on. 2020 was unprecedented because of the pandemic. We greatly expanded early voting and mail-in ballots, which greatly increased participation. A perfect example of this is Arizona. In 2020, Native Americans were crucial to flipping the state to Biden. Arizona state lawmakers responded to this by essentially punishing them and making it way more difficult to vote. Voter ID requirements, birth certificates and even having a physical address are all impediments to people who were born on and/or reside on reservations. There were fewer voting places and voting options. A rural voting place might randomly close early too after being an hours long drive. Some looked at this and said Native Americans in Arizona swung hard to Trump. No, they were simply largely prevented from voting such that the only Native Americans who could reliably vote were more affluent and thus more likely to be Trump voters. My point is: what polling model captured this prior to the 2024 election? I guarantee you it's none. What really happened in 2024 was: 1. Biden voters swung to the couch in the millions; 2. Trump basically didn't lose white women, despite the abortion issue; and 3. Trump activated a previously low-propensity voter demographic: angry, young, terminally online white males, basically the Andrew Tate and 4chan crowd. Any model has a difficulty with low-propensity demographics. Did any model capture this? I think it only started to become apparent with early voting exit polls. I don't think the 2024 polls were particularly accurate. I do think they threw their hands up and simply converged to 50-50. Small differences in turnout predictions for different demographics can massively impact the result.

deleted 2y ago

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asdf6969 2y ago

more cope from the “experts”

atoav 2y ago

My pet conspiracy theory is that the monetary influence in US politics is a deciding factor in keeping it close to 50/50 as this allows for the biggest footballification of politics and thus allows politicans/donors to extract the most from people who vote against their interest just to see the other side lose. The only thing I am unsure about is whether this needs coordination (a conspiracy) or is just a systemic dynamic that emerges from the rules of the system.

darkerside 2y ago
Per Occam's Razor, it's usually the systemic dynamic

anovikov 2y ago

I think polling these days is all but useless just because a very small proportion of people actually respond to pollsters and it's next to impossible to statistically account for "what would the other 80% say if they did't tell the pollster to fuck off". There's no way to build a "representative sample" to account for that. People are way more likely to respond to a "friendly" pollster and if they don't know whether pollster is "friendly" (works for the organisation aligned with their party), they assume they are from the other camp. It's a mess.

arrrg 2y ago
But the surveys were pretty accurate this election. So I’m not sure why you say they are useless.

antman 2y ago

There is the statisticians aphorism often attributed to George Box that "All models are wrong but some are useful". This goes against the core argument of this essay that pretty much says that "The models were mostly right, but not useful" which not a useful argument itself, even if its right

1970-01-01 2y ago
Predict 100 fair coin flips.. My result didn't match yours. The model isn't useful?

jdietrich 2y ago

The odds on Polymarket (and other betting markets) started diverging at the start of October; by the end of the month, the odds were 65/35 in favour of Trump. At the time, many commentators were arguing that this was obvious market manipulation. It turned out that the trader who had supposedly manipulated the market had in fact commissioned private polls using an alternative methodology - rather than asking people how they would vote, it asked how they expected their neighbours to vote. https://polymarket.com/event/presidential-election-winner-2024 https://polymarket.com/event/presidential-election-winner-20... https://www.ft.com/content/e8b2ff85-a4dd-40cd-a4c1-e3d70686917f https://www.ft.com/content/e8b2ff85-a4dd-40cd-a4c1-e3d706869... https://www.ft.com/content/4b302ab8-7e40-4d1a-bbe6-3d46f6811d85 https://www.ft.com/content/4b302ab8-7e40-4d1a-bbe6-3d46f6811...

thierrydamiba 2y ago
Was this a new development in polling?
- DrillShopper 2y ago
  Can't wait to check the DraftKings odds on the presidential election before I head to the polls to see if it's worth bothering to vote./s
- Izkata 2y ago
  No, it was fairly well known a decade or more ago as a very good way to remove bias for how low-effort it is. We were using a variation of it at work back then for an unrelated subject. How much it's used in political polling I can't say.
  - thierrydamiba 2y ago
    It just seems so obvious-I would have been surprised if it was only discovered in the last election.
AnimalMuppet 2y ago
Interesting. If you think about it, that's how the stock market works. It's not how much you think a stock is worth; it's really how much you think everyone else thinks the stock is worth.

Uehreka 2y ago

I’m gonna take this opportunity to clarify a comment I wrote earlier this week: Sure, polling may be difficult to interpret when uncertainty is high and margins are small, but there are many elections every year that are easily predictable blowouts, but which are often not portrayed that way depending on your information diet. Like, I can’t count the number of times someone will show me an awesome political ad for an awesome person who’s going up against an awful politician I hate, and there’ll be all this hope and the person showing me the ad will be thinking this person has a chance of winning. And then I’ll look at the polling and realize they’re down by 20 points in a state Trump carried by 30 and the error bars are only 3 points in each direction. So even if polling close races can get messy, polling overall provides an extremely powerful antidote to a lot of propaganda and echo-chamber thinking.

aaron695 2y ago

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hoseja 2y ago

In fact it is the result of much effort to keep the people as perfectly divided as possible.

throwway120385 2y ago
I think it's fascinating that the colorized maps of each voting precinct are always almost perfect population maps where high-population centers are blue and low-population areas are red.

sannysanoff 2y ago

It seems to be a matter of indifference to many that a persistent societal division of fifty-fifty is symptomatic of a profound societal schism. This is because such a division, in any configuration, maximizes the number of those who are discontented. As it is written, "A house divided against itself cannot stand." To my mind, this matter is of far greater significance than any secondary, tangible processes that may be occurring in consequence. Furthermore, the mechanisms that ensure the mathematical expectation of electoral outcomes to hover around a fifty-fifty split — a phenomenon observable in many nations — are fundamentally economic in nature. Both factions commit resources to the electoral contest to secure a mere one percent advantage, as such is the foundational principle of democracy: a majority of fifty-one percent prevails. Thus, economic factors — for an electoral campaign is, in essence, a contest of capital—having, in effect, subverted the very system of democratic elections, inevitably lead to the decay of nations that religiously adhere to the mathematics of a single percentage point as the sole criterion of legitimacy. In optimizing for democratic representation, social stability and equilibrium have been forfeited. It is akin to the psychological paradox: "I am correct, and all acknowledge it, yet why do I not experience contentment?" It is because one has optimized for correctness — or in the context of elections, for fairness and representativeness — rather than for overall well-being. Such is the predicament inherent in the pursuit of a mere fifty-one percent majority.

Tuna-Fish 2y ago
> Furthermore, the mechanisms that ensure the mathematical expectation of electoral outcomes to hover around a fifty-fifty split — a phenomenon observable in many nations — are fundamentally economic in nature. What? No they are not. This is 100% created by the FPTP voting system. It is the single cause that leads to this, everywhere where it's used. FPTP means that if your party cannot hoover up a base that gets 50%+1 of the votes, you change your platform until it can. The stable equilibrium is two parties at very nearly 50% split. Then both parties have to cater to their 50%, can ignore the other 50%, and do not benefit from co-operation across party lines. This equilibrium is not visible in democratic countries that use some kind of proportional representation. In such systems, parties tend to be smaller, and necessarily have to co-operate to form government.

827a 2y ago

Rambling about why a 50-50 forecast on a blowout election is "fine" and actually, like, totally cool and actually you're the dumb one for thinking it isn't, holds no water in my book. Election forecasters are not scientists discovering the nature of the universe, where it might be ok to say "yeah there's nothing to discover here" / "we don't know what we don't know". They're businesspeople selling a product. If AWS says "well, actually, hosting servers is just really really hard and its totally normal that 10% of your requests are failing!" they'd go out of business, full stop. No one is going to buy your product. Trump did not win by a little bit. They missed something about the 2016 election, and it is wild that they missed it again EIGHT years later. Don't let them hide behind the veil of "we said it was 50-50!"

rexpop 2y ago
> blowout Trump won 49.8% of the popular vote, compared to Harris's 48.2%, giving him a margin of 1.6% (approximately 2.3 million votes). This margin ranks as one of the smallest in modern history, smaller than Joe Biden's 4.45% margin in 2020 and smaller even than George W. Bush's narrow win in 2004 (2.46%). Trump won 312 Electoral College votes to Harris's 226, marking a margin of 86 votes. This is larger than his 2016 victory (304-227) and Biden's 2020 win (306-232), but it does not approach historical landslides like Reagan's 1984 victory (525-13) or Lyndon B. Johnson's in 1964 (486-52). Trump's popular vote margin is the fifth smallest since 1960, ie #12 in the last 17 largest, #13 by vote % margin. > Trump did not win by a little bit. Yeah, he did. 0. https://infogram.com/untitled-1hnq41on3mjwp23 https://infogram.com/untitled-1hnq41on3mjwp23 1. https://infogram.com/untitled-1h0n25oz3rxjz4p https://infogram.com/untitled-1h0n25oz3rxjz4p
- sigzero 2y ago
  It was who he won that mattered. Democrats are using 1.5% to justify a "we didn't do that badly" attitude and yes, they did do badly. Trump won demographics he had no reasonable right to win and He took all of the swing States. He won the popular vote that no Republican has been able to do since 2004.His Electoral College win was resounding. That and the Republicans winning the House and Senate. The Democrats really really need to rethink things.

skybrian 2y ago

Suppose you want to know whether it will rain on your wedding day. Without any forecast, there are two scenarios you need to prepare for: it will rain, or it won't. A 50-50 forecast doesn't change anything. You still need to prepare for both scenarios. There's a sense in which it's "useless" even though it's a valid forecast. Forecasts are most useful when they allow you to eliminate a possibility, so you don't need to prepare for it. This means even something like an 80% chance might be of limited use, if you still need to prepare for the 20% case. (Gambling and investing are different, because you can accept losses and make up for them with repeated bets. You still need to be prepared for losses, but that's a matter of not betting too much compared to your bankroll.) Even if the forecasters don't do anything wrong, for many people, presidential election forecasts are of limited use. Either they don't have anything they need to do to prepare, or they still have to prepare for either candidate to win.

CJefferson 2y ago
50-50 forecasts can be massive depending on your priors. If someone (who I trusted) told me there was a 50-50 chance I would get shot tomorrow if I went outside, you couldn’t pay me enough to go leave the house.
- skybrian 2y ago
  Absolutely! It didn't work that way for recent presidential elections, though. The prior odds weren't always 50:50, but they were well within the range of "both sides could win" and didn't go outside that.
  - mannykannot 2y ago
    In the case of an election, a 50:50 forecast is a clear reminder to the wise of the importance of voting, no matter how certain the outcome might seem from the necessarily limited perspective of your acquaintances and your consumption of possibly (or likely) biased news media.
  - wenwolf 2y ago
    If a modern US election went far outside that that would just mean some fool was burning a huge amount of money and probably to no purpose as it would cause a response from donors on the other side who would like an outcome but also aren't going to throw money away.

SirMaster 2y ago

>Trump and Harris are both a normal polling error away from a blowout If this is the conclusion from all the data gathering and analysis then what's even the point? If the conclusion is: it could be a blowout either way, we have no idea. Seems like a waste of a lot of time and resources, for what gain exactly?

1970-01-01 2y ago

Seems like there is a hidden function when 50-50 polls exist: 100% uncertainty with 100% certainty. This is the equivalent to having no data at all. Maybe we should just start saying "This is the equivalent scenario/situation to having no data at all." instead of 50-50.

geysersam 2y ago
Having no data at all is better than having the wrong information. If you were previously pretty sure one side would win you gain information from a study that says it's 50-50. If you already though it was even then the new study is pointless.
ttctciyf 2y ago
I think the lack of signal from the electorate does represent an entropic state and is likely because available information channels are saturated with noise.
swid 2y ago
Lets says I have a coin. I have no data on it. I do not know if it will come up heads or tails or if it is a fair coin. I throw the coin N number of times and determine the coin is fair. I still do not know which side the coin will come up. But this isn't the same as having no data on the coin. I've determined the coin is fair by gathering data, which otherwise I would not know. Often this added piece of information is crucial to making good decisions and not at all equivalent to the first case. For instance, I might want to bet you that the next 10 throws in a row will all be heads. If you know the coin is fair, this is a good bet - but without data on the coin, it could be a trap.
- 1970-01-01 2y ago
  The goal of polls is not to determine if an election is or is not a fair election. The goal of polls is to predict the final outcome of the election.
  - swid 2y ago

ThinkBeat 2y ago

A close race, creates more excitement and more cash for the media. If you get on a horses and your horse keep losing and losing ground, watching the race becomes quite boring. If the horses are neck on neck you will be captivated watching it till the very end. The media has a strong incentive to sell the elections as close to keep more people seeing their ads and buying subscriptions.

ThinkBeat 2y ago

I guess the article says that election polling in the US given the current landscape, or rather the landscape during the past election, is useless. Today Biden is up 2%, please remember that the polls have a +-3% uncertainty built in, so we have nothing to report

joshdavham 2y ago

I always get annoyed when people look at election outcomes and say “the polls were wrong” when the most likely outcome didn’t happen. It’d be like saying there’s a 5/6 chance that a 6-sided dice will not roll a 4, rolling a 4, and then concluding that the initial proposed probability was wrong.

afavour 2y ago
I came away from 2016 wondering if any of the electoral outcome stuff is worth doing given how much it gets misunderstood. “They said Hillary had a 90% but Trump won! They’re idiots!” No! They said Trump had a 10% chance and he won. It was a predicted outcome!
- knightfall21 2y ago
  The problem is using statistical models at all for predicting the probability of one time events. (elections are every 4 years, but those future models will be different). You can't validate such a model, and it's not useful since any upset victory was "accounted for" simply because its possibility was named.
- jefftk 2y ago
  538 had Trump at 30.7% the night before, FWIW: https://web.archive.org/web/20161107224336/https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/ https://web.archive.org/web/20161107224336/https://projects....
- staticman2 2y ago
  But is your 10% chance of Trump winning model a better model than one that gave Trump a 40%, 50%, 60%, 70%, 80%, or 90% chance of winning? If you can't show that why should anyone listen to you?
- oersted 2y ago
  It is a rational behavior to question a prediction if an event that was deemed to have low probability actually happened, I don’t like the implication that it is stupid to do so. In fact, after thorough investigation, most polling agencies did identify significant factors that let to bias, and almost all major pollsters have adapted their methods in later elections as a result: education weighting, compensating for nonresponse bias, diversified polling channels beyond phone calls (online surveys, text messages, in-app polling), likely-voter modeling… I don’t think any professional pollster will tell you that the prediction you mentioned was reasonably accurate in retrospect, regardless of affiliation. I don’t attribute malice or incompetence, it’s clear that the game changed suddenly and new confounding factors became significant. People that would previously vote together diverged significantly, lots of politically inactive people became involved, people were afraid to be honest, and people that were harder to reach were voting much differently to those that were more accessible to pollsters. That will really mess with any sampling strategy that proved reliable for many years before.

James_K 2y ago

The whole question of using probability here is philosophically fraught. If you are saying "this has a probability of 50%" then you're saying "this will happen half of the time if you repeat the test". I don't think Harris would win 5 times if you ran that election 10 more times. From that regard, the 50% guess is quite inaccurate, and does just seem to be the pollsters "giving up" in the sense that they're pretty clueless and so ended up going with an even split. This is speculation on my part, but I think that election was decided in Trump's favor pretty decisively long before the publishing date of the last 50/50 poll. Edit: to elucidate, suppose it rains on 50% of days. One forecaster gives a 50% chance of rain every day. Another gives a 90% chance of rain/not rain and is "wrong" 10% of of time. Both stations are giving you accurate information from a probability perspective (when station A says a 50% chance, you know there's a 50% chance of rain tomorrow, when station B says 90%, you know there's a 90% chance of rain tomorrow) but the 50% chance station is less useful as the number is lower. They have effectively given up in the same way pollsters have given up; they're saying there is no information that could give them a higher probability. The reason a single event can have many different probabilities is because probability is about repeated events. Both stations are predictions accurately reflect the distribution of rain/not rain days.

AtlasBarfed 2y ago

Hyperaccurate voter profiling and predictions is a tool of oppression in democracy. It highlights precise means for the rich to use targeted propaganda to maximum effect for wedge issues and electioneering to serve their ends, both in forming the winning coalition, and it neutering the opposition.