I do not understand how 28.6% is "problematic," if that's roughly a 1/3 chance. That means, every third election, Trump would win with those odds - far from impossible, and it happened.
Re:Electoral College Decision Tree
by bryanlarsen on Friday October 23, 2020 @12:28PM
(#24871177)
Yes, they screwed up the primary, then acknowledged and fixed their mistake. It's a large part of the reason they did much better than everyone else on the election.
> They gave Trump 28.6 which was beyond problematic.
I don't see where you've said anything that comes close to supporting such a strong assertion.
2016 was FiveThirtyEight's third time forecasting a presidential election. Getting one of those three "wrong" when they gave themselves slightly less than one in three chances of getting the 2016 election "wrong" doesn't seem at all surprising. It sounds like you're demanding that FiveThirtyEight make their forecasts deliberately underconfident but still expecting them to call the correct winner every time.
I get that 538 is an HN favorite, but they are too damn politically biased for their own good.
1) https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-i-acted-like-a-pund...