People keep asking if I think the forecasts are right or wrong. But you cannot ask that question of them. They can't be right or wrong. They weren't wrong in 2016. They won't be wrong now. That's their nature. But focus on prediction *can* affect the outcome. That's the danger.
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Look, if I were betting, I'd bet Biden would win, probably comfortably. He might still win, but narrowly. But I was *uncertain*. I don't think we can model rare events well. We can't poll well anymore, let alone during a pandemic. But uncertainty isn't what forecasts communicate.
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Yes. I know electoral forecasts are one thing among many things, but it's part of a broader pattern where we focus too much on the wrong things. We just need to do better acknowledging when we honestly don't know, and when predicting is besides the point.https://twitter.com/spicerjason/status/1324036088177004544 …
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Updated my pre-election op-ed on the case for ignoring forecasts. I know, I know. But there's the future. We can't poll with enough certainty and precision; we can't do good models of events that happen only once every four years; it distorts the process https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/01/opinion/election-forecasts-modeling-flaws.html …pic.twitter.com/ylgVjF1UYW
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Now people are telling me that the problem isn't the model, it's that polls are off (again). Well, yeah. I wrote that in the piece. Why then are we so focused on forecasts that don't have reliable data and whose models can only be evaluated once every four years—i.e not really?
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So it’s now: okay the polls were off but we will weight the polls better next time. Next time!!! The undercount weren’t “shy” or necessarily suffering from social desirability. Some of them think of the pollsters as the cultural enemy. Good luck modeling that void with weights.
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The problems outlined here, especially non-random low trust of pollsters, are not fixable by demographic weights. Or any method I can think of—besides already knowing the answer. Not amount of talent or effort can model this. Sometimes one can guess right. Sometimes not.https://twitter.com/sgurman/status/1324150511323500546 …
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Nice denominator except that you barely need polls to call about 40 of those states. Of the remaining 10, the polls are off by large numbers systematically in practically all of them. (Some got the coin toss right! Very reassuring!)https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1324379322740867073 …
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Empirical proof for a possibility I had mentioned in my articles. The increasing certainty people felt over Biden's presidency might well have been one of the factors that cost Democrats the Senate.https://twitter.com/Robillard/status/1325823456680808450 …
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Cunningham just conceded the NC Senate. Look, the things wrong with our polls are not fixable by any known method. Pollsters may guess the post-hoc weights right here and there, but the uncertainty is giant and structural. What then is another question. First, let’s face reality.pic.twitter.com/FyOnafGMbL
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Collins won ME by almost 10%. The most damning part of these misses is they’re in the same systematic direction as the 2016 misses—so you know the pollsters tried to correct for it. They still missed big. We can’t model and weight dark matter electorate with these response rates.pic.twitter.com/9F93mdYvDY
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I like all the "why were the polls were so systematically wrong *again*" stories coming out, but here's the part that keeps getting skipped. The problems people are identifying are all plausible AND not fixable by any known method like weighting. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/10/upshot/polls-what-went-wrong.html …pic.twitter.com/CgA65TFg1V
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I'm just going to put an excerpt here from my NYT piece on why polls and forecasts were even less trustworthy in 2020 I published *before* the election. I'm not making post-hoc claims here. (Current text updated a bit now to reflect that's what happened) https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/01/opinion/election-forecasts-modeling-flaws.html …pic.twitter.com/txR41T6G7I
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I think we have a lot of this going on. Also it’s hard for people who think of themselves as quants to admit they are now more in pundit category—feeding the horserace but without a superior empirical basis. The polls aren’t fixable by any known method. Let’s talk about that.https://twitter.com/nathanjurgenson/status/1326564758795870209 …
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End of conversation
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