General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Are any of you all following the election forecast at FiveThirtyEight ? [View all]Awsi Dooger
(14,565 posts)I wish I had seen your sentence before posting earlier in this thread. Nate's approach is markedly superior to other models because he understands that aspect, that polling is only part of the story, and you cannot take polling at face value.
As a political bettor since 1992 I cannot imagine wagering based on the polls alone. That would be incomparably stupid. If all you know is the polling then you don't know much of anything, because all you know is exactly what everyone else knows. How could there possibly be an edge? There are situational variables all over the place that detour the polling in one direction or another.
In my early years on this site I used to post numerical threads included a PAN or Partisan Adjustment Number for each state. It was an analysis of how the polling in each state tended to err toward one side or another, and normally consistently in the same direction. I quickly gave up on posting it because it was a complete waste of time. Nobody cared. Nobody posted in the threads. Or the posters who did take interest and post in the threads, like Jiacinto and Dolstein, were no longer posting here.
Regardless, I still have those numbers and the states Biden is relying on have red PAN, meaning the polling in that state is overly favorable to blue so the PAN adjustment is in the red direction. That type of thing makes Biden's edge more tenuous than it appears at first glance.