> Whose models are better? There have been years where Nate Silver's model has called every single one of the 50 states correct as far as which POTUS candidate they'd vote for.

Well, this certainly isn't how you'd go about evaluating model quality. Calling which candidate a state will vote for is not a good task; it's too discrete to be a good evaluator. For the same reason, no political model produces this output. You predict the vote share given to each candidate -- a nice continuous variable -- you don't predict who will win. Calling the state is a gimmick on top of that (since victory is a function of vote share, it's easy to degrade your model's output into victory predictions) which serves only to make the statistics worse.

Nate's probabilities are based on the electoral college, not the popular vote, so calling which way individual states goes is by definition necessary for a good evaluation.

Consider states like Maine who specifically allocate their electors by vote share rather than in a block to the winner.

Again, calling individual states is neither necessary for a good evaluation nor even helpful to it. It is a further processing step that runs on top of a finished prediction. If you have a vote share distribution, you can convert that into victor probabilities with basic algebra. You cannot operate in the reverse direction, and you cannot develop a good model that directly produces victor probabilities as its output.

Nates model calls the individual electors in maine and nebraska.

As we saw in 2016, trying to predict vote share is actually a bad idea for a presidential model, and predicting states is more useful.

To be perfectly honest, I think the Obama elections were a unique point in politics where models like Nate's worked a lot better. Realistically there weren't many up for grabs states, which means you could guess 8-12 states right and run the table. A lot has a evolved since then, especially in the social media landscape and the accelerated death of answering phones, which live polls rely so heavily on. Maybe Silver will hit this election out of the park, I don't know, but I would err on the side that he gets a number of states wrong.

It’s worth pointing out that Nate was mad at this result because it meant his implied uncertainty for each state was wrong. It meant his model was sandbagged to some degree.