Nate Silver

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

One does start to wonder, though, if North Carolina has moved ahead of Florida in terms of being more winnable for Biden. It had in our model, even before this poll was added. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Not really anything earth-shattering here. The +7 in PA will help Biden in our averages (though ABC/Post had it +9 before) and the -2 in FL will hurt him (though ABC had Biden down by 4 in FL before). — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

One thing I don't get is the quest to "prove" a poll is an outlier by picking apart the crosstabs. If the topline differs from other polls, the crosstabs necessarily will too! Plus there's always some weird crosstab you can find in any poll since subgroup sample sizes are small. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

In 2016, there was even kind of a dead cat bounce for Clinton when she went to being 2/3 points ahead in national polls after the Comey letter to 3/4 points ahead in the final round. (Yes, she won the popular vote, but she won it by 2 so that was movement in the wrong direction.) https://t.co/a0MRKQXV5T — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Plus, there's usually quite a bit of herding in the final national polls, as people are often reluctant to stray by more than 2-3 points in either direction from whatever consensus develops. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

One thing I *don't* care about too much is the last round of national polls. National polls are basically useful for seeing movement when you don't have a lot of state polls. But we have plenty of state polls and (Selzer aside) no particular reason to think there's much movement. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@jeremybowers Also the World Series and fall foliage. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

There are also some states where Biden is underperforming his prior, such as Nevada, Pennsylvania and to a slightly lesser extent Florida. So in the abstract (no, I haven't gotten a sneak peak at any polls) those might be states with some polling upside for Biden. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

So the Selzer poll, which brought our average there from BIden +0.1 to Trump +1.8, about as big a shift as you'll see, brought the race more in line with the fundamentals there. The same would be true if, say, Biden got a couple of rough polls in Texas tomorrow. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

One thing to keep in mind if you see late polling movement in a state is whether the movement is in line with fundamentals. In Iowa, for instance, our model thought Trump "should" have been ahead by 3 points based on polling in similar states, uniform swing, etc. It's pretty red. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

PA is a state where there's been a fairly big split between live-caller polls and others, with live-caller data tending to show Biden leads in the mid-to-high single digits, whereas online/IVR have more often been in the low-to-mid single digits. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

We're going to be getting, I'm guessing, somewhere along the lines of 5 high-quality live-caller polls of Pennsylvania by Monday night, plus I'd imagine also some of the better online stuff like YouGov. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@yeselson Which is (Harris County) the better reason of the two for Ds to be concerned about, although things are always so dialed up to 11 whenever these subjects are covered that it's been hard to figure out how likely the Rs are to actually succeed. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

We've gotten a lot of data, most of it very recent. 91 million people have already voted. There's no October surprise unless you want to count the latest COVID spike, which isn't good news for Trump. Trump can win but there's not much indication of a last-minute surge toward him. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Man, Democrats' anxiety levels is off the charts. Which, of course. But it's a good night to have a glass of wine or whatever and chill out about the polls. It's pretty unlikely that the overall polling outlook is going to look much different on Tuesday morning than it does now. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@friscojosh @seanjtaylor Probably not enough outstanding polling to move things *that* much. I could imagine Biden dropping into the low/mid 80s or climbing into the mid 90s but outside of that range is pretty unlikely IMO. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@NathanJRobinson I'm sure assholes like you would give "my profession" a hard time in pursuit of whatever vainglorious angle you're trying to play. But 10% things happen 10% of the time and empirically based on our forecasts that's exactly how often they do happen. https://t.co/8oqu1OmvAz — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Now, in practice, pollsters may sit on their outliers or rejigger them rather than publish as in. But *good* pollsters like Selzer or ABC/WaPo *do* go with their numbers. So you'll get the occasional Biden +17 in WI or Trump +7 in IA. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

I do think people overthink things some times. In an 800-person poll, the margin of error for the difference between candidates is ~7 points. And 1 in 20 polls will fall outside that margin of error, i.e. be more than 7 points away from the true number. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Certainly Trump's best result in a high-quality poll in a while. We have gotten/will get lots more high-quality polls though and there haven't been many others with results like this. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Trump can win... but he's more than a normal-sized polling error away. https://t.co/rPNeRYBvQV — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Here's the 538 version of "what the map would look like if polls are exactly as wrong as in 2016". Note, though that a lot of states are close here. The tipping-point state would be Arizona, which Biden would win by 1.9 points. His wins in FL, GA and PA would all be <1 point. https://t.co/ViQCXxA2vK — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Yeah, there's always going to be a market for people who tell politicians what they want to hear. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

RT @FiveThirtyEight: We’re tracking the vote and voting problems around the country → https://t.co/sskwbtmAbm — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

This campaign is in a much different category as Trump is still only 5 or 6 points behind in PA, but I kind of wonder how a 1984-style polling lead (Reagan ahead by 18 to 20 points) in the closing days of the campaign would play out in today's media environment. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@mattyglesias @jbarro @MattZeitlin The thing to remember is that when the polls and the conventional wisdom depart, the polls often err in the opposite direction from what the conventional wisdom expects. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

A COVID record four days before the election is not an October surprise in the sense that things have been trending badly and it was quite predictable. But the more that COVID has been at the forefront of people's concerns, the worse Trump has tended to do. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

To make things more confusing, PA is the only (arguably) Northeastern state in this group, but the other Northeastern states that are sometimes competitive in presidential elections, NH and ME, are pretty similar to WI and MN in various ways. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Yeah. I think it's sort of a spectrum, where PA is quite similar to OH and OH is quite similar to MI and MI is quite similar to WI and WI is extremely similar to MN, but by the time you go through that many links in the chain then PA and MN aren't that much alike. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@awprokop I'm sure. — PolitiTweet.org