On average, the D less R margin in the early vote mispredicted the final Clinton/Trump margin by 14 points! Pollsters get yelled at when their polls are off by even 3 points, and anything more than that is considered an absolute disaster. Imagine if a poll was off by 14 points: no one would ever listen to it again! And yet we get the same frankly amateurish analysis of the early vote in every election.

  • geekwithsoul@lemm.eeOP
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    10
    arrow-down
    13
    ·
    1 day ago

    Weirdly antagonistic tone and not sure when Silver pissed in your Wheaties, but you obviously have a hang up about him. No desire to go tit for tat, other than to say he’s been more reliably accurate over time than anyone else when it comes to politics. It’s like baseball - if you lifetime hit for .300, everyone is going to know your name.

    Also, the whole point of the article is that early voting patterns are not indicative of final results. That’s not polling analysis or data modeling, that’s just historical fact. I don’t think Silver is perfect, and he’s got problematic issues, but on this point he’s just pointing out the thing the media ignores because it gives them headlines galore for the last two weeks before the election.

    • flicker@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      10
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      17 hours ago

      I gotta weigh in on that “weirdly antagonistic tone,” too. You literally said you’d list more but you doubted that person would read it? Just antagonistic all over.

      You started it!