Why I don’t buy 538’s new election model
It barely pays attention to the polls. And its results just don’t make a lot of sense.
By NATE SILVER, Silver Bulletin
When the Silver Bulletin presidential forecast launched last month, I said I wasn’t interested in prosecuting the “model wars”, meaning having big public debates about forecasting methodology. One reason is that I find these arguments tiresome: I first published an election model in 2008, and it’s been the same debates pretty much ever since. But there’s also a more pragmatic consideration. If I think a model is unsound, I worry about elevating it by giving it even more attention. Because I do believe in probabilities, after all. Joe Biden’s chance of winning another term is hard to forecast because (1) he might still drop out and (2) he’s probably not capable of running the sort of normal campaign the model implicitly assumes he can. Biden’s chances are probably lower than the current 28 percent in the Silver Bulletin forecast, in other words. But they’re certainly not zero. I worry about a news cycle on Nov. 6 when an unsound model is validated because it “won” the model wars based on a sample size of one election.
What also makes this awkward is that the model I’m going to criticize comes from the site I used to work for, 538. I’m sure newsletter readers will know this, but what was formerly the FiveThirtyEight model from 2008-2022 is now the Silver Bulletin model — I retained the IP when I left Disney. But, I’m not sure the rest of the world knows that. (I still sometimes run into people who think FiveThirtyEight is affiliated with the New York Times, which it hasn’t been since 2013.)…
