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Nate Silver @NateSilver538
One other thought: I think there may have been a missed opportunity for Trump to run on a theme of *recovery*, bolstered by improving economic and COVID-19 numbers. Obviously this is dependent on those #'s continuing to improve—but may be a better choice given his other options. — PolitiTweet.org
Nate Silver @NateSilver538
That is, in the stretch run of a campaigns, voters may treat approval as tantamount to a horse-race question. If nothing else, the RNC may have convinced soft disapprovers of Trump *who were planning to vote for him anyway* that he'd done enough to merit their approval, too. — PolitiTweet.org
Nate Silver @NateSilver538
This is one reason we think it's weird to use approval rating as a "fundamental" input in a predictive model. In the previous election with an incumbent (2012), Obama's approval rating *converged toward the Obama-Romney numbers* & not the other way around. Maybe same this year. — PolitiTweet.org
Nate Silver @NateSilver538
Interestingly, Trump's approval rating is improving more than his horse-race numbers. It's now merely -7.1 in polls of likely/registered voters, essentially identical to his position in head-to-head polls against Biden. https://t.co/9cVjj8v9uN — PolitiTweet.org
Nate Silver @NateSilver538
The Morning Consult numbers (which showed the race tightening to +6 on the day after the RNC but since having reverted back to +8 or +9) is suggestive of that ^^^, although overall there isn't really precise enough data to tease it out. — PolitiTweet.org
Nate Silver @NateSilver538
If you want to get cute, you could argue the RNC—4 days of relatively focused messaging—helped Trump, but then we reverted back to the familiar, zany, news cycles led by the president's Twitter feed (Kenosha! Mini-strokes! "Rigged Election?!") and he stomped on his own bounce. — PolitiTweet.org
Nate Silver @NateSilver538
What doesn't seem to be the case, though, is that either the RNC or the Portland/Kenosha news cycle was some type of turning point for Trump. — PolitiTweet.org
Nate Silver @NateSilver538
The Electoral College component of this just can't be emphasized enough. If Trump's down 4-5 points in the tipping-point states, then just a *little* bit of tightening plus a small-ish polling error cold be enough to give him the win. That's where a lot of his 30% comes from. — PolitiTweet.org
Nate Silver @NateSilver538
Zooming out a bit: being down 7 points nationally after your own convention is generally not a position anyone would want to be in, although with Trump's Electoral College edge, that likely translates to more like a 4-5 point deficit in swing states, awaiting more state polling. — PolitiTweet.org
Nate Silver @NateSilver538
It would also expect Trump to lose ~1 point of that bounce, in which case we'd be back to +8, although with economic data improving it still does expect some tightening down the stretch run. Overall, the outlook hasn't changed much (Trump ~30% to win). https://t.co/ajG88SznSA https://t.co/qsTivJphCS — PolitiTweet.org
Nate Silver @NateSilver538
FWIW this is similar to the educated guesses about convention bounces our model made ahead of time. It would have expected a slightly higher peak for Biden (10-11) although not really a lot of between-convention polls to measure it. But winding up at ~7 post-RNC is right in line. https://t.co/SZHwlMSyTI — PolitiTweet.org
Nate Silver @NateSilver538
So, our national polling average was at Biden +8.4 when the DNC began, peaked at Biden +9.3, and is now at Biden +7.2 after quite a few national polls overnight. You'd still like a couple more live-caller polls, but it should be a decently robust estimate. https://t.co/cy51vc5isJ https://t.co/thejXk0vJ0 — PolitiTweet.org
Nate Silver @NateSilver538
We are *finally* getting at least one live-caller national poll tomorrow... Selzer & Co./Grinnell College. Most likely a couple more before the end of the week, although others may wait until after Labor Day. Selzer & Co. is A+ rated and had the race at Biden +4 in March. — PolitiTweet.org
Nate Silver @NateSilver538
RT @MattGlassman312: @NateSilver538 The joke is really on me, given how long it took me to clean the data for this report. What a waste of… — PolitiTweet.org
Nate Silver @NateSilver538
@MattGlassman312 Here I am going for a lazy snarky tweet and you have to ruin it, Matt! — PolitiTweet.org
Nate Silver @NateSilver538
Wow... it's almost like 97% of incumbents win re-election to Congress or something. — PolitiTweet.org
Nate Silver @NateSilver538
Keep in mind, though, that bounces typically fade a bit. So if Trump got it down to 5 or 6, he'd still need to hold that for a couple of weeks for us to be able to confidently say that his position had improved. — PolitiTweet.org
Nate Silver @NateSilver538
Although it would be much better if we had some high-quality phone polls to worth with, so far from the online stuff looks like we went into the convention with an 8-9 point race, Biden inched that up to 9-10 after the DNC, and now we're back down to ~7. https://t.co/cy51vc5isJ — PolitiTweet.org
Nate Silver @NateSilver538
RT @EricTopol: Very good news on durable IgG antibodies to #SARSCoV2 from the Iceland experience Just published @NEJM https://t.co/0sWKSb2… — PolitiTweet.org
Nate Silver @NateSilver538
I'm convinced that half the reason Team Clinton didn't invest enough resources in WI and MI is because they were worried about dumb pundits saying stuff like "OMG! WHY IS CLINTON SPENDING TIME IN WISCONSIN?!?". Biden seems to be avoiding this mistake. — PolitiTweet.org
Kyle Kondik @kkondik
whatever you think of how Minnesota might vote, it only voted for Clinton by 1.5 points in 2016 and it has a lot of… https://t.co/vEFhw3SZhf
Nate Silver @NateSilver538
So again, there's a balancing act here, but we think it's appropriate to make fairly conservative choices *especially* when it comes to the tails of your distributions. Historically this has led 538 to well-calibrated forecasts (our 20%s really mean 20%). https://t.co/8oqu1OmvAz — PolitiTweet.org
Nate Silver @NateSilver538
When will the next major "realignment" be? Probably not this year. But, maybe! Or there could be some one-off weirdness caused by the economy, by COVID-19, or by an abrupt increase in mail voting. — PolitiTweet.org
Nate Silver @NateSilver538
Further, the map from 2000-2016 was unusually stable by historical standards. There have been SOME shifts (Ohio getting redder, Missouri getting bluer) but these are small in comparison to how much the map would typically change over 16 years. — PolitiTweet.org
Nate Silver @NateSilver538
These assumptions are *highly plausible*, but they are a long way from *proven*. It is easy to forget how little data we have to work with, including only a handful of presidential elections for which we have particularly robust state polling data. https://t.co/C1M0OsfzGz — PolitiTweet.org
Nate Silver @NateSilver538
I'm sure their authors would disagree, but we think some other models are closer to *conditional* predictions. IF certain assumptions about partisanship, how voters respond to economic conditions, etc., hold, then maybe then Biden has a 90% chance of winning instead our ~70%. — PolitiTweet.org
Nate Silver @NateSilver538
(I don't want to overly harp on 2016, but it's not unconcerning. If you think there's a secular trend toward polls/forecasts being more accurate, then 2016 being quite a bit less accurate than 2004/08/12, especially for state-by-state forecasts, is problematic.) — PolitiTweet.org
Nate Silver @NateSilver538
If you're backtesting, you can make highly precise state-by-state predictions (using some combination of polls and priors) in most recent elections (2004, 2008, 2012) but these wouldn't have been especially good in 2016 and many years before 2000 produce big surprises. — PolitiTweet.org
Nate Silver @NateSilver538
But we want our projections to reflect real-world uncertainties as much as possible, including model specification error. There are many gray areas here, and there are certain contingencies we don't account for (e.g. widespread election tampering) but that is the general idea. — PolitiTweet.org
Nate Silver @NateSilver538
We spend a lot of time setting up these mechanics. It's a hard problem. It's tricky because it's hard to distinguish say a 1-in-1,000 chance from a 1-in-100,000 chance given the paucity of data in presidential elections. — PolitiTweet.org
Nate Silver @NateSilver538
In one sim, for example, the model might randomly draw a map where Biden underperforms its projections with college-educated voters but over-performs with Hispanics. In that case, might win AZ but not VA. Or, if Biden happens to win MO in one simulation, he'll often win KS too. — PolitiTweet.org
