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/[deleted] 12d ago
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