Polling averages and political forecasts and what do you really think is gonna happen in November? | Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

tl;dr. People are slagging on the Fivethirtyeight election forecast because it’s at 50/50, but that’s roughly where you’re supposed to be if don’t know what might happen. Last week I posted something, “The election is coming: What forecasts should we trust?,” discussing the incentives of different election forecasters. Political actors and journalists have been forecasting elections for a long time. Oddsmaker and TV personality Jimmy the Greek shared some good stories about election predictions in his entertaining autobiography from 1975. In 1983, political scientist Steven Rosenstone in published an excellent book on forecasting presidential elections; this came around the same time as work by Douglas Hibbs, James Campbell, and others. Gary King and I made use of this work when constructing a hierarchical model to forecast the 1992 election for our paper, Why are American Presidential election campaign polls so variable when votes are so predictable. Those predictions were based on ec

tl;dr. People are slagging on the Fivethirtyeight election forecast because it’s at 50/50, but that’s roughly where you’re supposed to be if don’t know what might happen. Last week I posted something, “The election is coming: What forecasts should we trust?,” discussing the incentives of different election forecasters. Political actors and journalists have been forecasting elections for a long time. Oddsmaker and TV personality Jimmy the Greek shared some good stories about election predictions in his entertaining autobiography from 1975. In 1983, political scientist Steven Rosenstone in publi