This guy was doing some parade-raining as well, as I recall…
I definitely remember Nate on some podcasts before the election going “hey, wait, Trump could easily win this”, and being pretty roundly ignored (including by me). If we roll a 1 on a 4-sided die this time, Republicans keep the House.
Similar this year:
I think you also have to remember some of the real late game anti-hillary email stuff that happened. I don’t know if that was accurately reflected in the polls.
But, this time that 80% is diffuse over many races, with much less probability of crazy swings.
Yup, at the time 538 was ridiculed when they wrote things like this:
This isn’t a secure map for Clinton at all. In a race where the popular vote is roughly tied nationally, Colorado and New Hampshire are toss-ups, and Clinton’s chances are only 60 to 65 percent in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. She has quite a gauntlet to run through to hold her firewall, and she doesn’t have a lot of good backup options. While she could still hold on to Nevada, it doesn’t have enough electoral votes to make up for the loss of Michigan or Pennsylvania.
I’d love to have a ton of detailed data regarding the past accuracy of these various pollsters.
538 does have thedata, use it to compute scores for how accurate they’ve been in the past and whether there’s a consistent partisan bias, and then use those scores as part of their models. But it’s a tricky subject. For example, how do you rate the accuracy of a poll three months before an election? There’s no ground truth, unlike for a poll taken on the eve of an election. A miss might be a bad poll, bad luck, or just opinions shifting during a long period.
They were more accurate than all the other forecasters:
Upset in MA CD 7 Ayanna Pressly wins the Dem primary defeating 10 term Michael Capuano a progressive incumbent congressman.
So much this.
Capuano, who just conceded, has one of the most progressive voting records in congress.
Ayanna Pressley, an African American woman, still tried to find some daylight to his left, ran, and won.
Eh. It’s still a little surprising, no?
One of the protestors arrested at the SCOTUS hearing today:
Have I mentioned how much of a man-crush I have on Jason Kander recently?
FUCKING FUCK FUCK FUCK
A little … but should we really be surprised that, in 20 years, a district can change enough to want a different rep? Redistricting in 2012 moved a bunch of mostly white 'burbs - including the one I live in - out of the 7th District, making Capuano’s constituency mostly minority-majority Boston. From that perspective, it’s less “it’s remarkable the same district picked a different person,” and more “it’s remarkable a changed district picked the same guy for a few more cycles before changing its choice.”
Fair point. I hadn’t realized that the district demographics had changed under Capuano’s feet, so to speak. Makes more sense in that context.
Shit man, I’m sorry.
Wow. That’s an energized electorate speaking, even in a deep blue district.
I’m gonna so fucking pissed if a bunch of people who bitch about Trump 24/7 online don’t get their ass off the couch and vote this time around (I’m looking very intently at people in their 20s and 30s right now). I mean, if you live in freaking San Francisco you get a pass but otherwise, VOTE FFS.