Even if you're building your own model you'll likely be turning to FTE for the latest data.
In addition they're data driven journalism is often paired with amazing data sets that they open-source for free.
It's generally not understood to have positive connotations. In part because there is indeed some evidence to suggest that your concerns about it harming the democratic process are valid. For example: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/708682
On top of that, while 538 initially provided good and solid insights, it has recently been successfully gamed by right-wing players by standing up bogus polling organizations and getting their bogus results into the aggregator's (like 538) results. The goal of course was to make their candidates seem more popular, and the "reliability" scores did not work, as the aggregators results were significantly off in that direction.
Safe to ignore NS and any of his output (and more reliable). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_silence
[Citation needed]
Lots of people raised that concern at the time, predicting the effort would bias aggregators, but for 538 at least, I’ve seen no analysis indicating a significant swing to a right bias in 2020, and overall the 2020 results were quite accurate.
I was watching it in real time. The effect was mostly in 2022 (they hadn't really gotten it going in 2020)
Here's the 538 headline before election day about how the Republicans were in very good shape, even potentially a blowout win [0]
In fact, it was the exact opposite.
Yes, there was a lot of statistical handwaving about how they were really right, but, not really. BTW, this was just the top result from a DDG search, and is only one of the things I remember.
[0] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/2022-polling-error/
True. But millions of them will hear a radio announcer, or TV person, or tiktok video or whatever else say something like "In the latest polling, <X> has pulled ahead of <Y> ..." where "the latest polls" will mean (among other things) 538.
I do believe that this has some effect (if small) on patterns of voting (particular by encouraging or discouraging turnout).
No, it won’t; 538 doesn’t produce polls.
In an election, the vote is the measure of popular support for a candidate/policy/platform. Democracy doesn't necessarily need polls.
I've found interesting some related essays by Jill Lepore, an American historian, on the advent of polling earlier in the 20th century:
- https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/16/politics-and-t... - https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/03/09/the-problems-i...
Nate silver didn't exactly invent political polling either. That's doing a disservice to the enormous time and money invested in polling over several decades of elections (and the learnings when things didn't go correctly). Polling will be around regardless.
That's fair. I was responding to ways I've heard Nate Silver talk about the model and polling in general in e.g. podcasts, which is why I've had the question floating around in my mind. But you're right, that's not quite what he wrote here.
> And in fact, even if there's a net negative societal value that doesn't mean it shouldn't be around.
To be clear: I don't mean to imply that FiveThirtyEight shouldn't exist. There's lots of things which serve a human desire but aren't necessarily a social good. Slot machines for example.
> I sometimes think they may be harmful, decreasing voter turnout by convincing people (correctly or incorrectly) that the result is preordained.
This is an old tactic that is used to the hilt by both sides whenever it serves them, and media outlets already make forecasts, often without 538's scrupulous emphasis on how often they're wrong. I don't think 538 makes this worse.
They’re just the guy who went to the stables before to see who was eating the most hay.
I honestly mostly follow the sports odds and I’d argue that Nate’s models are some of the most biased out there for that.
It's really not, which is why quantitative models have real value. You don't have to argue that he's biased, you just have to point to the evidence. But your whole comment is indistinguishable from someone with sour grapes who is simply casting aspersions on his track record without being willing to analyze it properly. At the very least, you ought to specifically identify what kind of biases his predictions have shown; he leaves himself wide open to being proven wrong, so it's only fair for you to do the same.
He makes bad models.
Nate put 2021/22 warriors at 0.5% to win, Vegas was +900. Nate put 2020/21 bucks at 10% to win, Vegas was +550. If you can’t even come close to beating the line, you’re not a good model. He’s just transparent about his variables.
Edit: To be clear I don’t gamble, I just follow sports and like data analysis, so this isn’t a bank account thing.
EDIT: (cause I can't reply to the below comment) my question was what model beats 538, not which betting market beats 538. yeah, duh, the Vegas line beats 538, because it beats literally all publicly available models. It'd take a really disastrous gambling market failure for anything else to happen.
Nate put 2021/22 warriors at 0.5% to win, Vegas was +900.
Nate put 2020/21 bucks at 10% to win, Vegas was +550.
If you can’t even come close to beating the line, you’re not a good model. He’s just transparent about his variables.
> EDIT: (cause I can't reply to the below comment) my question was what model beats 538, not which betting market beats 538. yeah, duh, the Vegas line beats 538, because it beats literally all publicly available models. It'd take a really disastrous gambling
Lines aren’t built that way. They’re set by books to offset their risk. They’re based on a bunch of (usually drunk) wetware computers with huge biases (don’t believe me, look at any Dodgers line when they have an obviously bad pitcher matchup).
If your model is worse than that, then what’s the point of a model?
They're initially set by bookies based on their models, but then pretty quickly evolve to a market-based mechanism.
1. People want to know who is winning. It doesn’t matter whether you like it or not. People want to know, and thus there will always be a market for it.
2. Polling is imperfect and it’s a lot of work to understand how to interpret the various polls out or to forecast in lieu of polls. Political journalism before FiveThirtyEight was filled with even more crooks and charlatans coming up with nonsensical ways to forecast elections or interpret polls. There was a lot more noise in the system. FiveThirtyEight shut that stuff down to an incredible degree.
3. FiveThirtyEight has introduced more folks to probability theory than I think any other journalistic collective. What has always made them different is that they provide probabilities, not certainties.
As in, there is no way that polling or analysis of polls will ever be stopped, so why even debate its societal value?
It’s like saying “the world would be a better place if everyone started/stopped doing this one thing”. Okay?
A lot of public discourse is creeping on several layers of meta, to where we are constantly reacting to how people react to other reactions.
Sometimes I wish we would just let ideas stand on their face instead of constantly engaging in acts of national navel gazing.
(That said, yes, I think the models clearly have net social value, too.)
Data illiteracy, not the existence of a forecast, is the core problem.
Does it actually work though? I don’t think they were able to predict the past 3 presidential elections, so not sure where they provide value.
> But is it good for people to know who is more likely to win an election? Are these predictions beneficial to society or democracy?
Two points:
1. The model DO NOT tell you who will win the upcoming election.
2. It is absolutely beneficial to society and democracy, having a poll-free & rigorous-analysis-free democratic society means an environment where even the most apolitical citizen can be bamboozled into thinking that an election was "stolen" simply based on their close associates and news sources. Polling and aggregation, when executed with a modicum of accountability, prevents a devolution into a Soviet-style culture of paranoia particularly among the elites. It has tremendous value, that value will be backfilled by rumour and innuendo and that is very bad for society.
It definitely is, I tried to make the same point a week ago :-)
> who doesn't want to know who will an upcoming election?
In particular, politicians want to know. This to me is the interesting upshot. Polls are non binding, so the public could use them to signal to candidates how to tweak their platform.
I’m always curious if there’s any real good data saying turnout patterns change. The thing is, voting because you think your one vote might change the result, is already completely irrational. I always think of voting of being like when you go to a concert and buy the band’s CD even though you already have Spotify: it’s more about find a way to personally participate in an important life moment than practicality.
Especially in a world of liars.
For plurality voting (a.k.a. first-past-the-post[0]) with more than two candidates, voters have to cast their ballots strategically[1]. This is especially common in primary elections and non-partisan positions.
Unless all elections switch to a method that is not subject to the spoiler effect (like approval voting or instant runoff voting), voters need more information about which candidates are most likely to win, not less information. Sometimes candidate competitivness can be inferred from things like endorsements or fundraising numbers, but polls -- and aggregated models based on polls -- are an important tool.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting
...do they, though?
I'm actually not so convinced in the journalistic value of FiveThirtyEight. It's something I've thought about before.
FiveThirtyEight's political forecasts absolutely provide a desirable service! Who doesn't want to know who will win an upcoming election?
But is it good for people to know who is more likely to win an election? Are these predictions beneficial to society or democracy? I sometimes think they may actually be harmful, decreasing voter turnout by convincing people (correctly or incorrectly) that the result is preordained.
That's not to say Nate Silver is doing anything wrong by making FiveThirtyEight available, but he sometimes talks about it as a sort of public good. I'm not sure whether that's accurate.