Comment by Bratmon
9 hours ago
This embodies what 538 and its defenders miss about 538's appeal:
People didn't come to 538 for explanations on subtle points of statistical literacy (although those were provided). They came because, for whatever reason, they wanted to know who would win the election.
People not trained in statistics treated like the scoreboard at a football game- it's always better to be winning, but score is a near perfect predictor in the last minute.
Once 538 stopped delivering perfect predictions and started delivering "Actually the difference between 1% and 30% are way bigger than you think" lectures, the appeal disappeared. There are better places to learn math from.
Speak for yourself. That's not why I read FiveThirtyEight.
The purpose of FiveThirtyEight was never to be an oracle for the average person. It was always a deliberately wonky site for a wonky audience. They were very clear about that in the articles they published and topics they covered.
If we’re brutally honest the vast majority of 538 readers read it to be assured that the right outcome was outcoming.
They went to the wrong place then.
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Nov. 1, 2016 — Election Update: Yes, Donald Trump Has A Path To Victory — https://archive.is/kwdab
> Tuesday was another pretty good day of polling for Donald Trump.
> Trump remains an underdog, but no longer really a longshot: His Electoral College chances are 29 percent in our polls-only model — his highest probability since Oct. 2 — and 30 percent in polls-plus.
> This isn’t a secure map for Clinton at all. In a race where the popular vote is roughly tied nationally, Colorado and New Hampshire are toss-ups, and Clinton’s chances are only 60 to 65 percent in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
> If you want to debate a campaign’s geographic planning, Hillary Clinton spending time in Arizona is a much worse decision than Trump hanging out in Michigan or Wisconsin.
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Sept. 16, 2016 — How Trump Could Win The White House While Losing The Popular Vote — https://archive.is/rxP5l
> Using a prototype of a demographic election calculator that FiveThirtyEight will be unveiling in the next few weeks, I decided to simulate a few election scenarios.
> The result? Clinton would carry the popular vote by 1.5 percentage points. However, Trump would win the Electoral College with 280 votes by holding all 24 Romney states and flipping Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Iowa and Maine’s 2nd Congressional District from blue to red.
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Jun 29, 2016 — Donald Trump Has A 20 Percent Chance Of Becoming President — https://archive.ph/ryIkP
> A 20 percent or 25 percent chance of Trump winning is an awfully long way from 2 percent, or 0.02 percent. It’s a real chance: about the same chance that the visiting team has when it trails by a run in the top of the eighth inning in a Major League Baseball game. If you’ve been following politics or sports over the past couple of years, I hope it’s been imprinted onto your brain that those purported long shots — sometimes much longer shots than Trump — sometimes come through.
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FiveThirtyEight was probably the worst reputable source to read if you were looking for maximum assurances that Clinton would win.