Nate Silver’s essay discusses the limitations of gut instincts in election predictions, emphasizing that while polls in battleground states show a tight race, no one should trust their “gut” predictions. Silver’s “gut” leans toward Trump, but he stresses that polls are complex and often subject to errors like nonresponse bias. Both Trump and Harris could overperform based on various polling dynamics. He also warns of potential polling herding, which could lead to a larger-than-expected victory for either candidate. Ultimately, the outcome remains highly uncertain.
There isn’t much new in this essay, which makes sense since Silver typically avoids getting too far away from the data and the data right now is “toss-up.” (Electoral college swing states, obviously - Harris will win the popular vote for sure, but who cares what the majority of Americans think, right?)
But I agree with the core thesis - my gut says Trump. My brain says Harris, but it was wrong in 2016. I committed an extreme sampling error and had too much faith in my fellow Americans’ ability to spot and not vote for the obvious conman.
Now that he is a convicted felon, with the accumulated data from his first administration confirming him as a fascist, J6, two impeachments, racist comments, stolen documents, civil fraud, increased evidence of Russian connections, and so on, certainly people haven’t gotten dumber fast enough to keep up with how low he’s pulled the bar? Yes, they most definitely have. And reading anecdotal swing voter info suggests the Trump Show re-runs are still enough to make it close, and he’s also winning the “not being a black woman” race with enough voters to push him over the edge. So shut up brain, you should know better by now.
The bottom line is that I know I’m a pessimist, but I think the last 8 years have merged that Venn diagram with the one for “realist.” I wish America was smarter, better, and more worthy, but it’s probably not. I hope so hard that I’m wrong, and that everyone votes.
If it makes you feel better, Harris is now well within the margin of error for the popular vote as well, so she could even possibly lose that.
Ah, that’s a relief!
😊
Huh? Which pollster is claiming that? This article from 3 days ago seems to indicate the opposite - Harris is highly unlikely to lose the popular vote but the EC is very much still up in the air.
California has a lot of people who vote, it’s tough to make up that margin.
Nate Silver’s model, which is literally the first linked model in the article you shared, has Harris up by 1.5% in national polling. The margin of error is 3%. That’s called being “well within the margin of error.”
The same model has Trump with a 5.9% higher chance than Harris of winning the electoral college.
National polling isn’t the same as a poll designed to predict the popular vote. Biden won in 2020 by 7 MILLION votes. Even Clinton beat Trump by nearly 3 million votes. The popular vote and the election results are decided by completely different factors, pollsters aren’t soliciting people outside of swing states right now because nobody gives a fuck what a random Californian or Missourian thinks at the moment.
What are you even talking about? Yes, Biden led in the popular vote by seven million, by over 4%. He actually win, i.e. in the EC, by about 80,000 votes. Harris is currently polling significantly worse than Biden across both categories.