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.
Silver's final 2008 presidential election forecast accurately predicted the winner of 49 of the 50 states and the District of Columbia, missing only the prediction for Indiana.
2010
His 2010 congressional mid-term predictions were not as accurate as those made in 2008, but were still within the reported confidence interval. Silver predicted a Republican pickup of 54 seats in the House of Representatives; the GOP won 63 seats. Of the 37 gubernatorial races, FiveThirtyEight correctly predicted the winner of 36.[71]
2012
At the conclusion of that day, when Mitt Romney had conceded to Barack Obama, Silver's model had correctly predicted the winner of every one of the 50 states and the District of Columbia.[79][80] Silver, along with at least three[81] academic-based analysts—Drew Linzer,[82] Simon Jackman,[83] and Josh Putnam[84]—who also aggregated pollsfrom multiple pollsters—thus was not only broadly correct about the election outcome, but also specifically predicted the outcomes for the nine swing states.[85]
I think the youth call what you're doing "glizzy" or something?
Nate Silver’s Political Prediction Misses:
2008 Democratic Primaries – Miscalculated early on, adjusted projections as race continued.
2016 Republican Primaries – Low initial odds for Trump’s nomination.
2016 Presidential Election – Predicted Clinton over Trump with 71.4%.
2020 Presidential Election – Projected Biden 89% to win; closer in swing states.
2018 Midterm Senate Races – Overestimated Democratic chances in key states.
2014 Midterms – Underrated Republican gains, particularly in the Senate.
Nate Silver’s Sports Prediction Successes:
PECOTA Model – Accurate MLB player performance forecasting.
2008 MLB Playoff Predictions – Success with playoff team forecasts.
March Madness – Generally accurate bracket predictions for early rounds.
2012 MLB Season – High accuracy in team win predictions.
NBA Forecasts – Reliable win projections using Elo ratings.
You wanna keep going tit for tat, homie? It won't shake out in your favor. Let's see you show me some sports failures. I'll keep showing you successes.
You keep showing me political successes. I'll keep showing you failures.
Let's see who burns out first.
Ask his wife or kids. Or just check their social media.
He literally talks about that at several points. 2020 is a horrible baseline for looking at anything analytically because it was such an outlier because of COVID. Too many other variables in 2020 for it to be applicable for anything
Not just COVID, Trump's main strategy in 2020 was to turn "taking the pandemic seriously" into a partisan issue in order to make it so early and mail voting become disproportionately blue (there was no significant correlation in the past) while poisoning the well on those ballots' legitimacy.
Yeah, but have we really returned to what 2016 was like? This is the issue with a lot of analysis like this, lots of internal bias in the underlying approach.
He could very well be right, but it's just as likely we're closer to 2020 than 2016. I know a lot of people that have gone to full mail-in-ballot (since covid) and I know others concerned the mail-is will be tampered with (given some have been set on fire). Not sure either of those things were in play back in 2016.