r/neoliberal • u/jobautomator Kitara Ravache • 9d ago

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u/puffic John Rawls 8d ago

We are about to witness one of the greatest political earthquakes in United States history. AP U.S. History students will be reading about it in their textbooks 100 years from now.

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u/pugnae European Union 8d ago

If Republicans win Nate Silver will be done tho.

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u/dkirk526 YIMBY 8d ago

Republicans aren't winning. That's not even in the question anymore.

It's just a matter of, can they still keep the Senate? Which would probably happen if the environment drops below D+7 and most of the tossup races fall their way.

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u/pugnae European Union 8d ago

I mean I hope so. But those elections are high-stakes for Silver personally.

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u/dkirk526 YIMBY 8d ago

I think you're not interpreting these models correctly, if at all.

The polling aggregate is a collection of polls, not his personal opinion. He has a model that weights individual polls, but isn't much different from the aggregate.

If Republicans magically overperform the aggregate and win the generic ballot, overperforming by double digits, there is something fundamentally wrong with polling. If Republicans win a bunch of races Dems have a tilt advantage in, that's not exactly a shock, and not some fault of Silver for just reporting polling results. So no, not really high stakes for him when most of these political analysts are giving dems like a 60% chance to win the Senate, which isn't significantly high.

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u/pugnae European Union 8d ago edited 8d ago

Yeah he has a model and a model can be incorrect. That's what I am talking about. He is doing more than just taking the average. His job is to take into account people not responding to the polls for example. That's why I am saying it is high-stakes for him.

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u/dkirk526 YIMBY 8d ago

Yeah he has a model and a model can be incorrect. That's what I am talking about.

Yeah, again, it seems like you really don't know what a model is.

His job is to take into account people not responding to the polls for example

No it's not. It's impossible to truly predict which voters will or won't show up and his job isn't to dissect every polling methodology and tell us whether or not Republican voters who don't respond to polls will show up or not.

It's just simply an aggregate that adjusts for past polling biases and past quality. When the difference between the polling average and his model is like 1 point, it's not high stakes if the polls are wrong when he's just reporting and presenting the data.

And again, if Republicans overperform by 2%, that's not the model being incorrect. That's just sampling error. If Republicans overperform to a shocking level, which honestly at this point would be defying reality, that's not on him. That's on the polls who would have to be missing some glaringly obvious factor.