7 ms·

Because they said trump only had a 30% chance to win? What if they had said 49%? Would that have made their prediction worthless?

bellowsgulch 4mo ago
I mean everyone said he had a snowball’s chance in hell and then we ended up with him for two terms because the Democrats can’t stop fighting over the worse possible candidates to back that no one is asking for.
- palata 4mo ago
  I find it interesting to blame it on the democrats. We ended up with him because enough people voted for him.
  - kjkjadksj 4mo ago
    The blame is put on democrats because when they lose its because they don’t turn out and when they win its because they do. It is quite simple really. Republicans are far more reliable voters. You can look at vote totals and see this pattern. Massive delta for democrats election over election and usually half that delta for republicans.
  - dwoldrich 4mo ago
    And he won the popular vote if you believe that all U.S. elections are secure and sacrosanct. He is diabolical at getting people to talk about him and think about him constantly. Joe Biden on the other hand was a senile wrecker for Build Back Better and the party finally made "the switch" to unelected Harris far too late in the process. Even if she was a great candidate, with her odd laughter and fascination with buses, there was not enough time to shape her candidacy. Her VP candidate choice was hobbled by rising anti-semitism in the party against Shapiro and perhaps concerns of being outshined by him. No, the Democrats did not do themselves any favors in the '24 election. Carter, Clinton and Obama were media creations, vaulting to national prominence out of nowhere. It helped that Clinton and Obama were great, charismatic choices. Now the traditional media is fragmented and weak. You're not seeing furtive vaulting attempts for potential phenoms like Newsome gain any traction. Who is the media going to be stuck with next time? Will it be take-two for Harris? WHEN, not if, Harris loses bigly to Vance, then the Democrats will absolutely be to blame. Where are their all new shiny, beautiful, erudite candidates that would need all four years to gestate and promote? Shouldn't we be getting acquainted with them now? I wager they're not going to appear, and we'll get more flunkies. My theory as to why is that those currently in power in the party do not share; they're aging out and hollowing out the party in the process. We're to the point now of collapse. I'm surprised a third party on the left hasn't yet formed.
    - palata 4mo ago
      Yeah I think the presidential election system may be the one to blame. Only two parties, both very much "to the right", doesn't feel like a sane system anymore. IMO the better way is to have the government represent the people, and representing the people generally means enough politicians and having to go for a consensus.
      - dwoldrich 4mo ago
        Somehow "centrist" has taken on a negative connotation in Democratic circles, but I don't understand it. Far left politics are wrecker politics that have their moments and then (hopefully) get sent back to the political desert for a generation. Governing in a sustainable way usually means big tent politics with give and take on the small stuff. Bill Clinton epitomized that style.
        palata 4mo ago
        > Far left politics are wrecker politics that have their moments and then (hopefully) get sent back to the political desert for a generation. Are you talking about US politics here? I don't see anything that would get close to "left", so "far left"... unless they reach the far left by going enough to the right I guess?
        dwoldrich 4mo ago
        1619 project is Jacobin-style, revisionist history politics. Defund the Police, Jacobin. To flood drugs, homeless and immigrants into sanctuary cities is intentional Jacobin tactics to cause normal people to become fed up and to overturn the system. Revolutionaries are gonna revolt. Too bad everyone is too tired and distracted to give a crap about their utopian visions. In rare and extreme circumstances it makes sense to have a revolution because the people are oppressed. For the rest of history, revolutionary fervor always comes from power hungry psychopaths who'd jail and kill everyone that stands in their way and then rule perpetually over everyone that's left if they could. Thankfully, their time is usually short. They had a good run this time, very sneaky and devilish, but back to the political desert they go.
  - xmcp123 4mo ago
    The Democrats reliably back the color "beige" as a candidate. Obama was different, and he won back to back. Biden succeeded, barely, because Trump was fresh in everyone's mind. But for some reason the Democrats have been allergic to charisma for far too long. Voting in the US, it feels like I am forced to choose between evil and incompetence.
    - macintux 4mo ago
      Your description sounds more like evil vs boring, which is an easy choice for me. And frankly I’ll vote for incompetence over evil too. Because, y’know, evil.
      - amalcon 4mo ago
        Hell, when it comes to government, I easily prefer boring to not-boring in an executive all else being equal. Which it wasn't here, but still. I want the firebrands with big ideas to improve things in the legislature, and steady hands on the tiller in the executive. Unfortunately it seems that my compatriots want firebrands in both places.
        xmcp123 4mo ago
        I don’t think the choice is necessarily boring vs firebrands. Obama is a great example. He was not a firebrand, not boring, and was elected twice in a row. Charisma matters.
        amalcon 4mo ago
        Obama is a very unique case. I wouldn't exactly call him a firebrand, but his public persona managed to give the perception of being a steady hand on the tiller who also had big ideas. The only other presidential candidate in my lifetime to give a similar impression was Al Gore, but he leaned more into the "steady hand" thing to his detriment. He also, as you note, had far less charisma than Obama.
        4mo ago
  - jojobas 4mo ago
    Every politician is to blame for their losses, just as every politician own their wins. The people voted for Trump because the Dems failed to get the people to vote for them.
  - lmm 4mo ago
    Yes and no. It's a two-party system and a lot of people vote for candidate X to stop candidate Y getting in. Indeed IIRC a lot of democrat messaging around the previous election was explicitly about stopping Trump rather than the merits of whoever their guy was.
    - palata 4mo ago
      Enough people did not vote against Trump is my point. "The democrats" voted against Trump, otherwise they don't really count as part of "the democrats" for this election, right?
      - lmm 4mo ago
        > Enough people did not vote against Trump is my point. The argument is that there were enough people who voted against Biden-Harris, or against the DNC process, to swing it.
- doctorpangloss 4mo ago
  do you think nate silver is part of the problem or part of the solution? the turnout-of-demographic-groups-based election model is surely the underlying intelligence failure here.
- ntonozzi 4mo ago
  Everyone said that except for 538. That's why 538 was worth reading.
- coliveira 4mo ago
  Democrats will not let people choose candidates because that may be too dangerous for their interests. We'll never get good candidates as long as the current leadership is in control.
  - amanaplanacanal 4mo ago
    Do you not have primaries where you are?
    - oceanplexian 4mo ago
      What position was Kamala Harris in the DNC Primaries before she was appointed as the General Election Candidate? First place? Second Place? Surely she must have been in the top 3?
      - amanaplanacanal 4mo ago
        Not sure what you think they should have done? There is no way to reorganize primaries that late in the year. It totally sucks that nobody tried to convince Biden not to run again before the primaries started though.
        adamors 4mo ago
        Plenty tried, old Joe thought he’ll clutch it out again. People were trying to dissuade him from running in 2023 already.
    - bombcar 4mo ago
      Denying that the democrats had two high-profile situations where the “wrong” candidate ended up running is denying the obvious. It’s manifest that Obama wasn’t to win the primary, and that the superdelegates exist for reasons.
bachmeier 4mo ago
When pressed before the election, Silver did not explain where Trump's much higher probability of winning came from. He predicted a Trump loss, Trump won, and he claimed victory because he gave Trump a better chance of winning. There's no way that strategy could have failed.
- hungryhobbit 4mo ago
  Nate Silver is not a magician! He can't magically make polls reliable! All he (or anyone) can do is interpret or analyse poll results, and then surface their findings in a way a larger audience can understand. 538 did that better than any other poll analyst ... but they all got it wrong because the polls themselves were faulty. TLDR; You can't get water from a stone, and no one (not even Nate Silver) can get perfectly accurate predictions from (inherently flawed) polls!
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - bachmeier 4mo ago
    > All he (or anyone) can do is interpret or analyse poll results, and then surface their findings in a way a larger audience can understand. He (or anybody) can make adjustments to the data. He was challenged to explain why his predictions were so different, but he wouldn't do it. > 538 did that better than any other poll analyst He made a binary prediction, and it was wrong. There's no such thing as "better" when you only have one outcome. Your prediction is either right or wrong. If by "better" you mean he was wrong but assigned a higher probability to a Trump victory, the best forecaster would have been someone that mechanically changed the probability of a Trump victory to slightly less than 50% no matter what the data said.
- bonzini 4mo ago
  Silver claimed that his model was better because it predicted a high correlation between PA/MI/WI. A model that predicts a 30% chance of winning the election will be wrong 1 out of 3 times, which is not quite a coin flip but close enough.

bellowsgulch 4mo ago

I mean everyone said he had a snowball’s chance in hell and then we ended up with him for two terms because the Democrats can’t stop fighting over the worse possible candidates to back that no one is asking for.

palata 4mo ago
I find it interesting to blame it on the democrats. We ended up with him because enough people voted for him.
- kjkjadksj 4mo ago
  The blame is put on democrats because when they lose its because they don’t turn out and when they win its because they do. It is quite simple really. Republicans are far more reliable voters. You can look at vote totals and see this pattern. Massive delta for democrats election over election and usually half that delta for republicans.
- dwoldrich 4mo ago
  And he won the popular vote if you believe that all U.S. elections are secure and sacrosanct. He is diabolical at getting people to talk about him and think about him constantly. Joe Biden on the other hand was a senile wrecker for Build Back Better and the party finally made "the switch" to unelected Harris far too late in the process. Even if she was a great candidate, with her odd laughter and fascination with buses, there was not enough time to shape her candidacy. Her VP candidate choice was hobbled by rising anti-semitism in the party against Shapiro and perhaps concerns of being outshined by him. No, the Democrats did not do themselves any favors in the '24 election. Carter, Clinton and Obama were media creations, vaulting to national prominence out of nowhere. It helped that Clinton and Obama were great, charismatic choices. Now the traditional media is fragmented and weak. You're not seeing furtive vaulting attempts for potential phenoms like Newsome gain any traction. Who is the media going to be stuck with next time? Will it be take-two for Harris? WHEN, not if, Harris loses bigly to Vance, then the Democrats will absolutely be to blame. Where are their all new shiny, beautiful, erudite candidates that would need all four years to gestate and promote? Shouldn't we be getting acquainted with them now? I wager they're not going to appear, and we'll get more flunkies. My theory as to why is that those currently in power in the party do not share; they're aging out and hollowing out the party in the process. We're to the point now of collapse. I'm surprised a third party on the left hasn't yet formed.
  - palata 4mo ago
    Yeah I think the presidential election system may be the one to blame. Only two parties, both very much "to the right", doesn't feel like a sane system anymore. IMO the better way is to have the government represent the people, and representing the people generally means enough politicians and having to go for a consensus.
    - dwoldrich 4mo ago
      Somehow "centrist" has taken on a negative connotation in Democratic circles, but I don't understand it. Far left politics are wrecker politics that have their moments and then (hopefully) get sent back to the political desert for a generation. Governing in a sustainable way usually means big tent politics with give and take on the small stuff. Bill Clinton epitomized that style.
      - palata 4mo ago
        > Far left politics are wrecker politics that have their moments and then (hopefully) get sent back to the political desert for a generation. Are you talking about US politics here? I don't see anything that would get close to "left", so "far left"... unless they reach the far left by going enough to the right I guess?
        dwoldrich 4mo ago
        1619 project is Jacobin-style, revisionist history politics. Defund the Police, Jacobin. To flood drugs, homeless and immigrants into sanctuary cities is intentional Jacobin tactics to cause normal people to become fed up and to overturn the system. Revolutionaries are gonna revolt. Too bad everyone is too tired and distracted to give a crap about their utopian visions. In rare and extreme circumstances it makes sense to have a revolution because the people are oppressed. For the rest of history, revolutionary fervor always comes from power hungry psychopaths who'd jail and kill everyone that stands in their way and then rule perpetually over everyone that's left if they could. Thankfully, their time is usually short. They had a good run this time, very sneaky and devilish, but back to the political desert they go.
- xmcp123 4mo ago
  The Democrats reliably back the color "beige" as a candidate. Obama was different, and he won back to back. Biden succeeded, barely, because Trump was fresh in everyone's mind. But for some reason the Democrats have been allergic to charisma for far too long. Voting in the US, it feels like I am forced to choose between evil and incompetence.
  - macintux 4mo ago
    Your description sounds more like evil vs boring, which is an easy choice for me. And frankly I’ll vote for incompetence over evil too. Because, y’know, evil.
    - amalcon 4mo ago
      Hell, when it comes to government, I easily prefer boring to not-boring in an executive all else being equal. Which it wasn't here, but still. I want the firebrands with big ideas to improve things in the legislature, and steady hands on the tiller in the executive. Unfortunately it seems that my compatriots want firebrands in both places.
      - xmcp123 4mo ago
        I don’t think the choice is necessarily boring vs firebrands. Obama is a great example. He was not a firebrand, not boring, and was elected twice in a row. Charisma matters.
        amalcon 4mo ago
        Obama is a very unique case. I wouldn't exactly call him a firebrand, but his public persona managed to give the perception of being a steady hand on the tiller who also had big ideas. The only other presidential candidate in my lifetime to give a similar impression was Al Gore, but he leaned more into the "steady hand" thing to his detriment. He also, as you note, had far less charisma than Obama.
        4mo ago
- jojobas 4mo ago
  Every politician is to blame for their losses, just as every politician own their wins. The people voted for Trump because the Dems failed to get the people to vote for them.
- lmm 4mo ago
  Yes and no. It's a two-party system and a lot of people vote for candidate X to stop candidate Y getting in. Indeed IIRC a lot of democrat messaging around the previous election was explicitly about stopping Trump rather than the merits of whoever their guy was.
  - palata 4mo ago
    Enough people did not vote against Trump is my point. "The democrats" voted against Trump, otherwise they don't really count as part of "the democrats" for this election, right?
    - lmm 4mo ago
      > Enough people did not vote against Trump is my point. The argument is that there were enough people who voted against Biden-Harris, or against the DNC process, to swing it.
doctorpangloss 4mo ago
do you think nate silver is part of the problem or part of the solution? the turnout-of-demographic-groups-based election model is surely the underlying intelligence failure here.
ntonozzi 4mo ago
Everyone said that except for 538. That's why 538 was worth reading.
coliveira 4mo ago
Democrats will not let people choose candidates because that may be too dangerous for their interests. We'll never get good candidates as long as the current leadership is in control.
- amanaplanacanal 4mo ago
  Do you not have primaries where you are?
  - oceanplexian 4mo ago
    What position was Kamala Harris in the DNC Primaries before she was appointed as the General Election Candidate? First place? Second Place? Surely she must have been in the top 3?
    - amanaplanacanal 4mo ago
      Not sure what you think they should have done? There is no way to reorganize primaries that late in the year. It totally sucks that nobody tried to convince Biden not to run again before the primaries started though.
      - adamors 4mo ago
        Plenty tried, old Joe thought he’ll clutch it out again. People were trying to dissuade him from running in 2023 already.
  - bombcar 4mo ago
    Denying that the democrats had two high-profile situations where the “wrong” candidate ended up running is denying the obvious. It’s manifest that Obama wasn’t to win the primary, and that the superdelegates exist for reasons.

bachmeier 4mo ago

When pressed before the election, Silver did not explain where Trump's much higher probability of winning came from. He predicted a Trump loss, Trump won, and he claimed victory because he gave Trump a better chance of winning. There's no way that strategy could have failed.

hungryhobbit 4mo ago
Nate Silver is not a magician! He can't magically make polls reliable! All he (or anyone) can do is interpret or analyse poll results, and then surface their findings in a way a larger audience can understand. 538 did that better than any other poll analyst ... but they all got it wrong because the polls themselves were faulty. TLDR; You can't get water from a stone, and no one (not even Nate Silver) can get perfectly accurate predictions from (inherently flawed) polls!
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- bachmeier 4mo ago
  > All he (or anyone) can do is interpret or analyse poll results, and then surface their findings in a way a larger audience can understand. He (or anybody) can make adjustments to the data. He was challenged to explain why his predictions were so different, but he wouldn't do it. > 538 did that better than any other poll analyst He made a binary prediction, and it was wrong. There's no such thing as "better" when you only have one outcome. Your prediction is either right or wrong. If by "better" you mean he was wrong but assigned a higher probability to a Trump victory, the best forecaster would have been someone that mechanically changed the probability of a Trump victory to slightly less than 50% no matter what the data said.
bonzini 4mo ago
Silver claimed that his model was better because it predicted a high correlation between PA/MI/WI. A model that predicts a 30% chance of winning the election will be wrong 1 out of 3 times, which is not quite a coin flip but close enough.