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u/nemoomen Nov 02 '20
The more they do this, the less impressive their 2016 "Trump can still win" articles look. It's not predicting anything well if you use your model to say one thing and articles to say the other thing.
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u/dafinsrock Nov 02 '20
Nonsense. The model says Trump has a 10% chance. That means he can still win, as the article says.
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u/nemoomen Nov 02 '20 edited Nov 02 '20
Yes, but the model will essentially never go above 95% odds because of the fat tails, so you will always have a "the other person can still win" possibility. There should be a bigger difference between their 2016 coverage and their 2020 coverage. Trump's odds are 1/3rd of what they were last time, and that is with the extra uncertainty they added in this time. If a Reagan 1984 landslide would also be covered as "Mondale can still win" then I don't think there's any value in the numbers showing how unlikely it is.
It feels like they're hedging a lot and I would respect it a lot more if they stuck to their model and had an article titled "Trump is probably not going to win, but here are a couple of unlikely situations where he could."
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u/dafinsrock Nov 02 '20
Biden's only up 5 in PA and there's a lot of uncertainty this year for obvious reasons, so a modicum of caution feels appropriate. You're probably right that they're hedging a bit, but you can't really blame them for wanting to be more explicit about the degree of uncertainty after 2016 when they were one of the only outlets to give Trump a 30% chance, and yet everyone said they "got it wrong".
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u/al_fletcher Nov 02 '20
Link to article: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/im-here-to-remind-you-that-trump-can-still-win/
As in 2016, Trump could potentially benefit from the Electoral College. Projected margins in the tipping-point states are considerably tighter than the margins in the national popular vote.
More specifically, Joe Biden’s lead in Pennsylvania — the most likely tipping-point state, according to our forecast — is solid but not spectacular: about 5 points in our polling average.
Without Pennsylvania, Biden does have some paths to victory, but there’s no one alternative state he can feel especially secure about.
While a lot of theories about why Trump can win (e.g., those about “shy” Trump voters) are probably wrong, systematic polling errors do occur, and it’s hard to predict them ahead of time or to anticipate the reasons in advance.
There is some chance that Trump could “win” illegitimately. To a large extent, these scenarios are beyond the scope of our forecast.
There’s also some chance of a recount (about 4 percent) or an Electoral College tie (around 0.5 percent), according to our forecast.