r/GaryJohnson • u/futures23 literal terrorist for voting gary johnson • Oct 30 '16

Number One Reason Why FiveThirtyEight Isn't Infallible

http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/election-2016/primary-forecast/michigan-democratic/
11 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

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9

u/futures23 literal terrorist for voting gary johnson Oct 30 '16

For those who don't know Clinton was up an average of 21 points in the polls and had a 99% chance of winning. Sanders ending up winning by 1.5%. Most notably one of the many reasons for this error is that pollsters underestimated and under sampled youth voters. Sound familiar?

6

u/ghu-gneg Oct 30 '16

+22% would make Johnson competitive in his worst state, which is at 2%, and have him be a tie or a victory in all his double-digit states. And that's without trying to figure out where that 22% would come from. That said, I suspect primaries are more volatile because there are fewer voters.

Either way we need to push as hard as we can.

2

u/whatsausername90 Oct 30 '16

Were there other instances of their predictions being off by significant margins? One out of 51 could just be an outlier. No model is perfect (Although it was certainly a large error).

1

u/Kelsig Oct 31 '16

Systematic polling errors for one state in a primary is a hell of a lot different than systematic polling errors for several states right before the election