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I've heard of the claims, but I don't know what the evidence is supposed to be. Unless clear evidence comes out that their polls are fraudulent, 538 isn't going to ban them. All partisan pollsters have bias in favor of their own party, so that fact alone isn't enough to get them excluded.

I have no idea what I’m betting on here. I saw the rendition of the naval battle and put some M down.

@LBeesley 538 is a website that aggregates polls to make accurate election predictions, one of their sources is Trafalgar. Trafalgar has been consistently predicting a red wave and people claim they are paid by the Republican Party to rig the results of their polls. They might get banned (538 has a grading system on pollsters and they ban anyone who gets an F)

@ShadowyZephyr Thanks! I’m familiar with 538, started with the baseball content. As I’ve tried to grow up, I’ve followed more of the political polls, but I didn’t know there’s a polling firm named for one of the most legendary naval engagements in western history.

@LBeesley Okay, saying they have been less reliable is sort of incorrect, they just skew Republican by a lot. Which actually ended up being accurate in 2016. I doubt it was because their methodology is actually better though.

https://gelliottmorris.substack.com/p/the-philosophical-and-empirical-cases

@DanMan314 I think that they should remove Trafalgar's polls, but after listening to Nate Silver's discussion on the Politics Podcast it seems pretty clear that he's intending to keep them around at least through the 2024 elections.

@Gabrielle Nate Silver is leaving 538 (as part of Disney layoffs). The 538 moniker is staying with ABC but Silver's models are are only licensed.

Meanwhile ABC is hiring Morris, where he says he is "rebuilding" the models "from the ground up" and makes explicit references to factoring in pollster bias and qualitative data around pollsters much more heavily. The Substack post I linked was him trashing Trafalgar as recently as Feb 2023.

I don't know the timeline he'll rebuild on, or if he'll still incorporate a heavily down-weighted Trafalgar in some way, but the fact that Silver is out and Morris is in seems like it should be moving this market to me.

What podcast are you referring to? Is it pre-layoffs? I haven't listened in a while.

@DanMan314 Ah, good to know, I hadn't realized that Silver left as part of the layoffs. The podcast episode was pre-layoffs, around when they released the ratings.

@DanMan314 This market might actually need an interesting resolution, since Nate Silver is taking his model with him (it was licensed to Disney).

@Gabrielle I interpreted the market as about 538, not Silver’s models. The distinction does seem fuzzy after a point though, I think I read that ABC might rename it at some point too.

Yeah it's awkward, I had a market about "The 538 model" as well. It's tricky to know what the creator intended without asking.

Trafalgar was downgraded to a B in the recently released ratings, but not any lower - so probably not going to be banned in the next year, especially without any major elections coming up.

In a recent Model Talk podcast, Nate suggested that they will likely be downgraded but he doesn’t see a reason to exclude them.

Will Trafalgar have their polls banned from 538 by the end of 2023?, 8k, beautiful, illustration, trending on art station, picture of the day, epic composition