I'm trying to understand why Joe Biden is favored to win the election by 538 (52:48 odds). Didn't Nate Silver say that Donald Trump has higher chance of victory than Joe Biden?
The polling average, adjusted polling average, and forecast of polling average on Election Day all favor Donald Trump, but the fundamentals-only forecast and full forecast favor Joe Biden. Do they lean on their fundamentals too much? They say the polling-based forecasts do "not account for the chance that the polls systematically underestimate one candidate." Wasn't Donald Trump underestimated by polls before?
Yeah, I can't understand how their model works to get the probabilities they have. It seems like they just put extremely low weight on the polls. Maybe that's reasonable this far out from a normal election, but it seems less reasonable when both candidates have been president, and have been their party's presumptive nominees for a long time.
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@HankyUSA 538 is simply using a bad model, and many people are quoting it because they're in denial.
I think the fundamentals they're using are basically just "GDP growth is good". But the popular perception of the economy seems to be worse than that, mostly because of inflation. Their fundamentals probably don't include, "candidate too senile to finish a sentence".
The model is either ignoring, underweighting, or miscomputing what the polls say. Biden needs to be up 2-3% in national polls to win, but he's more like down 2%. He needs to win 3 of 6 swing states, but he's polling behind in all of them.
Some people are hoping that the polls are wrong and Trump will do worse than the polls indicate. In the last 2 elections Trump did better than polls indicated. In the last 6 elections, there was only one case where the Democrats did better than polls, and even then I'm not sure if that bias was big enough to flip this election. You can also compare Biden's polling to down ballot candidates, and many of those Democrats are in the lead, so that should rule out "polls are massively wrong in the direction Biden is hoping for".
Even a difference of 5% in polls would still not be nearly enough to justify a <10% chance of winning the election though.
If you really believe that, then I have a much better market for you to bet on your belief: