FiveThirtyEight has had to each so much Crow over the past year. I don't put much stock in Mr. Silver.
To counter FiveThirtyEight. The new Quinnipiac poll has Trump with 33% Latino support. Higher than Romney's 27%. It's all still fluid.
Alright, I'll bite, against my better judgment.
FiveThirtyEight screwed up this year because its commentators acted like pundits in absence of data, but that does not really invalidate this forecast. FiveThirtyEight screwed up by disguising punditry as data journalism, but these models are the real deal.
They saw Trump and, to a lesser degree, Sanders, and they acted extremely dismissive, because they were college-educated politically mainstream semi-elites. They screwed up and used their status as "data journalists" to make the public feel like what they were saying had more value than punditry, when it really was just punditry.
BUT, when FiveThirtyEight had data to work with, they did quite well. No, they weren't 100% correct, but they were about as correct as they claimed to be (e.g. they mispredicted things that they thought were 90% certain about 10% of the time). Their data-based predictions did not underestimate Sanders or Trump, even as the pundits writing about them did.
There is no real reason to expect that their general election models will struggle this year more than in years past, when they were obviously highly successful. I'm not at all saying that this model will be 100% right. I'm saying that the punditry of Nate Silver et al. doesn't invalidate them. Will Arizona go to Clinton? Maybe, but even if she has a 52% chance of winning Arizona, I'd hardly be surprised to see it go the other way. Even this model gives Trump a 20% chance of winning. That's obviously a significant disadvantage, but it's not like the model is saying that Trump *couldn't* win. But it's a useful guide to show that Clinton is in a really good position relative to almost anyone running for POTUS at this stage. And I have no real reason to put Trump's chances at the 50% that some would like to delude themselves into believing.
And everyone knows that Quinnipiac consistently makes overly right-leaning polls. Next time you use them I'll counter with a poll done by MSNBC and MoveOn.Org.
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