rojects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/?ex_cid=rrpromo
I think he “gets it”, but he is slightly blinded by his liberal bias. Plus, his models are made to smooth out sudden shifts in the polls. Which most of the time works well to smooth out outliers which do happen. BUT, when something fundamental happens rather quickly his model will lag. Which is why he said in his most recent post that Hillary is in BIG trouble IF her numbers are they way they are now still next week. BECAUSE that will be long enough for his model to finally start showing the shift toward Trump.
I’ve been following fivethirtyeight and trying to give Silver a bit of credit. As the polls have tightened, he has bumped up trumps win probably to the point where he had Trump with around 45% chance of winning yesterday morning.
However, this morning he bumped all his predictions back to showing Hillary with an above 60% chance of winning, with no new data in Hillary’s favor to support the change. Accompany the change, Silver himself wrote an article entitled “If the polls look like this a week from now, Democrats should start panicking”. In it, he postulated the theory that the latest shift in the polls is just a blip and the ‘true equilibrium’ point of the race is Hillary Clinton ahead by 3-4%. Apparently, his overnight mystical vision of the ‘true equilibrium’ was his basis for bumping up his prediction percentages for Hillary by 5-8% with no new favorable data.
So much for Nate being a numbers guy.