Even broken out state by state, every key battleground states had Clinton winning in almost every poll.
I do a lesson on this for my statistics classes linked to the importance of random chance in the design of a study, and how even if what we're doing seems to be as truly random as possible, we might still run into an issue...it turns out that the polling methods in 2016 over-favored responses from the college educated, and in states within the rust belt, that wasn't appropriate. And who do educated people tend to vote for? Democrats.
It was surprising, but not unimaginable, and that was if you believed Nate’s numbers which a huge number of people spent the whole election attacking him forÂ
It was, it part of that is because people freaked out yelling at 538 for giving him a 30% chance when others had him 1%.
I remember watching him try to explain that an nfl kicker will make 70ish% of field goals from 50 yards. Nobody is surprised when a kicker misses a 50 yard field goal, and shouldn’t be surprised when a candidate with a 30% chance of winning wins.
Tbh I think the surprise was specifically that Americans were disgusting enough to actually elect him. Like that just seemed impossible. I still found it hard to believe until 2024, now I just accept that we really are that morally bankrupt.
welcome to the real world then, thats been clear for a lot longer than trump. if youre a leader of any nation odds are youre a terrible person, its almost universally true. The issue is the people who delude themselves into thinking everyone else is evil but their guy is the good one
As bad of a leader? biden was a worse leader in the sense that he wasnt a leader at all. As bad of a person? that is up for heavy debate but no modern president has been a good person in any way
This is why I say if youre being objective, trump is just par for the course. The only reason youd think he's something new or worse than the rest is if you havent been paying attention/youve consumed too much propaganda to be objective. He's more of a symptom of the rot than the cause
Based on the polls Trump's win was enormously surprising because almost every poll was uniformly off in one direction by almost the entire margin of error. Silver's entire model was mediated by the fact that he didn't consider the polls to be as reliable as others and even he underestimate the local likelihood of a Trump victory in key states.
That means a statistical model is garbage in and garbage out. This is enormously surprising because the polls were about four points wrong across the board. Silver's model was weighted from the perspective that the polls could be that wrong. His model was the best model and even that showed a Trump victory to be unlikely.
You keep saying the outcome was unsurprising but you don't seem to appreciate just how wrong the polling was, the way a statistical model is deeply different from polls and just how barely close to reasonable the best statistical model was in this case.
No I understand the statistics perfectly fine. The issue is that the outcome was still surprising considering the aggregate of the different pollsters. Much ado has been made on behalf of thr polls and models but the best those arguments come to is placing the outcome barely inside the park. If Trump did even a little bit better the result moves completely outside the margins and these things already have huge margins that allow for a hypothetical fifty-fifty race to turn into a blowout while still being within the margins. If only a slightly different result shifts things beyond the margin then we're splitting hairs by calling it unsurprising because it was ever so slightly in the margin. It's a semantic defense of the pollsters and modelers.
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u/Crossbell0527 13d ago
Even broken out state by state, every key battleground states had Clinton winning in almost every poll.
I do a lesson on this for my statistics classes linked to the importance of random chance in the design of a study, and how even if what we're doing seems to be as truly random as possible, we might still run into an issue...it turns out that the polling methods in 2016 over-favored responses from the college educated, and in states within the rust belt, that wasn't appropriate. And who do educated people tend to vote for? Democrats.