Getting a representative sample is extremely difficult. I don't know anybody my age who even picks up the phone if they don't know the number that's calling them or aren't expecting a call.
Nate Silver is the king of quantitative bullshit. A journalist who sells quantitative bullshit to suckers. The king of "if you want to make things more accurate just add a decimal point". A 54% chance of anything that happens once with a binary outcome is basically what your dog would handicap the odds at . May as well just put two food dishes down and whatever one your dog picks is the one they are giving a 54% chance of happening. The whole society is basically clueless when it comes to probability and stats. A 54% chance of an event that happens once with a binary outcome isn't even really a Bayesian prior. It is nothing. The posterior is just going to update to 100% or 0% either way. 54% is no different than 99.99% or .000001% or any value in between as a prior. If you say a one time event with a binary outcome has a 99.99% chance of happening you can still claim to be correct when the event goes the other way because you gave it a .01% chance and it is just a rare event that happened to have happened. This is standard probability abuse. People bullshit this way all the time. I listened to Jamie Diamond give the probability of a recession next year as 60 or 70%. One time event with a binary outcome. He is spot on because it is a statement that can't be falsified as long as you don't handicap the odds at 0 or 1.
I wonder what the sample size is of the 101 possible outcomes (0-100). If it's large enough you can see how accurate his probabilities have been. However, his data is based on the polls available and finding historical trends in polling I believe. The betting markets tend to be more accurate than the polls, but they also rely primarily on polling.
%% LOL. Mr Silver has made so many errors\ looks like he is mostly right on state govs. PA win forecast favors the stroke dem, by about 1%\ not likely@ all. But with the extreme unpopular Mr Biden trying to help the stroke dem, could be possible!! He has been wrong for so long, wrong for so long, his 54 red [R]wins in Senate; +255 to 225 reds in house maybe right. DONT know about his favoring H Walker by 56 in 100, then he calls it a'' toss up'' + puts a blue box on that state/LOL. So watch that race . He doesnt know the price of silver election week also.
The same trend continues. Wildchild posts about something, then it takes the media some time to catch up. Wildchild was on the spear tip of this one. https://newcriterion.com/blogs/dispatch/who-needs-polls Public opinion polls have been back and forth over the summer and into the fall in regard to voter preferences in this year’s midterm elections. Early in the summer, Republicans led Democrats in the national generic vote for Congress, but by September the same polls gave Democrats a slight edge, according to a running average of polls collected by Real Clear Politics. The polls then shifted again in the first week of October as Republicans accumulated a lead in the generic ballot, leading some to forecast a “red wave” in November’s congressional elections. As of October 22, roughly two weeks in advance of the election, Republicans led Democrats 48 to 45 percent in the Real Clear Politics average of thirteen separate polls taken over the previous two weeks. Yet that three-point advantage was still within the margin of error of most of these polls, and not yet large enough to forecast a Republican sweep. In looking at these polls, it is not altogether clear if they are picking up a newly developing trend in favor of Republicans, or if the pollsters merely revamped their polling techniques to measure a Republican advantage that was there all along. Many observers have a sneaking suspicion that some pollsters rig their surveys to favor one or the other political party in the hope of shaping the eventual election outcome. That might be accomplished by publishing results that discourage some candidates while encouraging others such that candidates with the lead can appeal to donors for funds and newspapers can publish articles with the narrative that one party is destined to come out on top. There has been a clear pattern in recent elections for some polls to overstate the strength of Democratic candidates in pre-election forecasts. For example, most polls forecasted an eight- or ten-point victory for Biden over Trump in the 2020 presidential election, though Biden’s margin in the actual election was just four points. One prominent pre-election poll had Biden winning in Wisconsin by seventeen points when the actual margin was less than one point—a result that is unlikely to have happened by chance. In the 2020 election for the Senate in Maine, pre-election polls gave the Democratic candidate a lead of between five and ten points when in fact Republican Susan Collins won the election comfortably by nine points. In that case, the pre-election polls were off by as much as fifteen or twenty points. Those examples might be multiplied many times over in recent election cycles. In view of those systematic errors, many voters, especially Republican voters, are understandably skeptical these days about the results published by major polling organizations.
Well, we have this... Pollsters Have ‘No F*cking Idea What’s Going to Happen’ This Election https://www.thedailybeast.com/polls...oing-to-happen-during-2022-midterm-elections?
Well...they can thank the endless amount of robocalls Americans get with minimal consequences to the offenders.
Hey Trump2020, another round of bad predictions eh? Time to quit your prediction hat and start spouting vaccine conspiracies where you can make shit up without having to face reality like an actual election result.