Posted on 06/29/2016 12:14:30 PM PDT by detective
Nate Silver has spoken: Hillary Clinton will be the next President.
The famed political pollster — whose past presidential predictions have been freakishly accurate — said Wednesday he gives the presumptive Democratic candidate a 79% chance of winning the White House come November.
Her loud-mouthed Republican rival, Donald Trump, has only a 20% chance of winning, Silver said.
“We're kind of at halftime of the election right now, and she's taking a 7-point, maybe 10-point lead into halftime,” Silver, founder of the political analysis website FiveThirtyEight, said on “Good Morning America.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nydailynews.com ...
didn’t Silver admit that he was all wrong about Trump during the primaries and that he had let his anti-Trump bias color his predictions?
7-10% half-time lead? yeah right. Hillary might indeed win but it has less to do with real voters and more to do with fraud. Presidential elections are usually determined by a handful of states. Dems usually run the big cities in those key states.
Wonder if Nate is willing to put his wallet where his mouth is?
Nate Silver was wrong about North Carolina in 2008. He had McCain winning the state, but it went to Obama.
Nate Silver lost any credibility he had by being wrong on North Carolina.
Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.
A few weeks ago, as Donald Trump became the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Nate Silver admitted that his data-driven site, FiveThirtyEight, “got the Republican race wrong.”
Silver’s post, which was discussed here, was something of a mea culpa. But it pointed to a slew of external factors ostensibly out of Silver’s control and which he rationally could not have predicted. (The short of it, according to Silver, was that three assumptions had gone wrong.)
But in a new post on FiveThirtyEight on Wednesday, Silver seemed to admit that — despite the fact that Trump’s rise to the Republican nomination was a highly unprecedented event — something did, in fact, go wrong.
“We didn’t just get unlucky,” Silver writes. “We made a big mistake, along with a couple of marginal ones.”
The mistake? Here’s what Silver said (emphasis added):
The big mistake is a curious one for a website that focuses on statistics. Unlike virtually every other forecast we publish at FiveThirtyEight — including the primary and caucus projections I just mentioned — our early estimates of Trump’s chances weren’t based on a statistical model. Instead, they were what we sometimes called ”subjective odds” — which is to say, educated guesses. In other words, we were basically acting like pundits, but attaching numbers to our estimates. And we succumbed to some of the same biases that pundits often suffer, such as not changing our minds quickly enough in the face of new evidence. Without a model as a fortification, we found ourselves rambling around the countryside like all the other pundit-barbarians, randomly setting fire to things.
Silver proceeded to break down the issue into five parts, in his words:
Our early forecasts of Trump’s nomination chances weren’t based on a statistical model, which may have been most of the problem.
Trump’s nomination is just one event, and that makes it hard to judge the accuracy of a probabilistic forecast.
The historical evidence clearly suggested that Trump was an underdog, but the sample size probably wasn’t large enough to assign him quite so low a probability of winning.
Trump’s nomination is potentially a point in favor of “polls-only” as opposed to “fundamentals” models.
There’s a danger in hindsight bias, and in overcorrecting after an unexpected event such as Trump’s nomination.
The post is long (and worth reading) and goes into depth on each of the above facets of the story.
In the first three points, Silver outlined what he suggested may have been his biggest mistake (failing to build a statistical model earlier and instead relying on what he calls “educated guesses”). He also ruminated on the difficulty of assessing the scale of the predictive failure of misreading the Trump phenomenon and reanalyzed Trump’s electability in terms of the admittedly small historical precedent.
In the second of those points, Silver remained a bit defensive of the process. He discussed the notion of a model’s calibration — effectively, is the model correct about as often as it thinks it should be? — and the difficulty of assessing a true predictive failure for a single event.
But he concluded on the side of self-critique: “Still, I think our early forecasts were overconfident ...”
In the fourth section, Silver discussed how the case of Trump could be an argument for adjusting the methodology of FiveThirtyEight’s analyses. And in the fifth, he cautioned against overcorrecting too much just because so many people got Trump wrong.
Herman Cain, one of the candidates for the Republican nomination in the 2012 presidential race.
Silver wrote about how he criticized “experts” for being so sour on Herman Cain in the 2012 election.
At the time, he wrote (emphasis Silver’s): “Experts have a poor understanding of uncertainty. Usually, this manifests itself in the form of overconfidence: experts underestimate the likelihood that their predictions might be wrong.” A month later, Cain dropped out amid accusations of sexual harassment.
When Trump came along in 2015, Silver said he “over-learned” his lesson.
“I’d turn out to be the overconfident expert, making pretty much exactly the mistakes I’d accused my critics of four years earlier,” he wrote.
Looking forward, he said there is a risk that the political commentariat might make the same mistake again, thinking that the next “Trumpian” candidate has better-than-realistic chances simply because Trump succeeded.
“Still,” he concluded, “it’s probably helpful to have a case like Trump in our collective memories. It’s a reminder that we live in an uncertain world and that both rigor and humility are needed when trying to make sense of it.”
I wish it was just Silver.
The betting houses, prediction markets and polls all predict a Hillary win.
If he was the only one saying that, you’d be right about the bias.
CW this year favors her.
Freakishly accurate?
He gave Trump a 5% chance of winning the nomination. Not exactly “freakishly accurate”.
I hear this doof had access to Obama’s internal polling in 2008 and 2012.
That’s why he was so “accurate”.
Also note that he gave Trump a 0% chance of getting the nomination.
This guy is so overrated.
It was a joke - Democrat election fraud is a given at this point...
didn’t those same betting houses etc, predict that Remain would win? It seems to me that they were predicting that 80 or 90 percent chance of them winning.
Just because the news tends to be bad does not mean it is false. What I think is false is that the election can be called today. There I think Silver is taking a leap of faith.
Oh...I see...I was a little thrown by your comment...:o))
Dear Nate person,
a genuine question....
can a candidate serve as President from her prison cell?
just wondering...
If the election was held today, Hillary would win for sure.
That said, its arrogant of Silver to guarantee a Hillary win four months down the road.
We’re not even half way through the general election season and the conventions, presidential debates and external events that could affect people’s votes are still in the future.
What happens today might not be true tomorrow. Its a little premature of Silver to say Hillary has it in the bag. Not so fast.
“Her loud-mouthed Republican rival” Well at least they don’t show any bias in their article.
I want to place a bet. Where can I do that?
Exactly. No statistics that Silver can produce can back up his prediction at this point.
I was hoping it would be more difficult than that.
Cannot agree with this. I think Trump would win comfortably even now.
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