Thank you Nevada, Iowa, Ohio, Florida and North Carolina - your support is greatly appreciated.
I’ll hand it to Nate on one thing. He’s sticking to his methodology, even if he doesn’t like the results.
He is at about 55% in the now cast. He still hasn’t flipped the final state to be winning on the “snake” (states lined up graphically in order of probability) but everything on his side of the line in the now cast is at 67% plus, and Hillary has four (Colorado, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and Michigan) that she has only a week hold on that she has to sweep—with the odds being that she won’t do that the majority of the time, and won’t pull in anything else to compensate.
actually, Silver’s Nowcast projetion has Trump winning 55-45, with 276 EV’s; yet the coloration map he provides shows Clinton with 273...something wacky in his methodology...
I don't have that luxury in my forecasting model. Based on the polls as they are reported, I showed Trump at 43% as of Saturday. Late Sunday polls have pushed that number up slightly to 44%.
We will see after the debate whether or not Silver's poll adjustment forecasts come true or not. For me, I expect some will but I choose not to get ahead of the data. I prefer to report what the data actually is, and let the reader draw conclusions on whethe the model is wrong on the data is rigged.
-PJ
Thank you Nevada, Iowa, Ohio, Florida and North Carolina - your support is greatly appreciated.
In the meantime, he'll do his best to preserve the "horse race" as long as possible.
People over at The_Donald have pretty good info about Nate changing the methodology by changing his “house effect” to keep Hillary ahead.
https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/54kkhs/pathetic_nate_plastic_from_538_btfo_caught/
Libs are giving the guy a lot of grief on Twitter
HRC over 50% though? That’s scary to me
I love it when a plan comes to together.
MSM is panicking and the Washington Post’s wheeling out an editorial blasting Trump ahead of tonight’s debate tells you the election is over.
I’ve never seen liberals as panicked as they are now. What a beautiful sight! Things are looking up.
Nate Silver’s model is nothing more than a weighted average of all available poll data. The data is adjusted in two ways, but the adjustments are intended to promote increased accuracy, not favor either outcome. One adjustment is for house effect. There are some polls that historically have shown results more favorable to Republican candidates than the actual vote totals and some that are historically more favorable to Democrats. Silver computes an average value of this effect for each poll and adjusts the poll number accordingly.
The other adjustment is for the quality and track record of the poll. Even after adjusting for house effect, some polls have been more accurate than others historically. Since the average is a weighted one, Silver assigns weights to each poll. Those historically more accurate are assigned higher weights. Historically less accurate polls, new polls with no track record, and polls that use questionable methodologies are assigned lower weights. Polls done more recently also get higher weights than older ones.
The end result is that Silver’s opinions don’t factor in at all during the course of the campaign. Certainly the weights assigned to polls are subjective and do reflect Silver’s opinion regarding the quality of the poll, but these weights are set based on a polling company’s track record and methodology. This is done prior to the campaign, and the weights are set indepemdently of the poll result.
We may not have liked Silver’s predictions the past two Presidential campaigns, but the truth is that his predictions were just about dead on. Blame Obama and a couple of weak GOP-e candidates for that - it’s certainly not Nate Silver’s fault we lost. Given his record the past two Presidential elections, I am certainly taking his forecasts seriously. There’s no guarantee he’s right, but there’s also no evidence that he’s biased either.
Never seen thisPING
These numbers are a win for Hillary. Trump needs to be higher by at least 5% just to beat the dead voters.
I now have Trump with an expected value of 259 Electoral College votes, with a 46% chance of winning. This is 3% higher than the weekend.
-PJ