alt Hacker NewsWas 538 ABC's property during the first Trump election? IIRC they took a pretty big credibility hit after getting that election so wrong and never really recovered.
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I remember that whole election starting off very poorly for Nate Silver.
After reading this book, The Party Decides https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo592160... , he was a big advocate of the idea that the "endorsement race" of state officials and unelected party leaders.
There was a whole "Party Decides: Endorsement Tracker" graphic and everything, but Trump securing the Republican nomination and eventually the presidency pretty conclusively showed that theory to be a relic of the past.
So the 538 election coverage that year was: - Party endorsements matter more than early polling (they didn't) - Hillary's up so big there's no way Trump can win (he did, and yes I know they didn't actually say that but that's what the layman saw)
(ironically the Party Decides thesis seems to have correctly predicted events in the Democratic primary that year)
I remember vaguely the opposite. They were the only major prediction site that thought Trump had any significant chance of winning.
> pretty big credibility hit after getting that election so wrong
That this is the narrative that survived the election is one of the greatest indictments for our society's ability to engage in critical thinking.
The day before the election, the Huffington Post published a hit piece criticising Nate for overrating Trump's odds and inspiring panic. Huffpost predicted a 98.2% chance of Clinton winning, NYT predicted 85%, and Nate's model dared to give her only a 65% chance of winning.
Then the election happens, Trump wins, and the credible figure who gave him the highest odds is now lambasted from the other direction. He was so wrong to give Trump a chance that the mainstream media were publishing articles about it, and he was so wrong to not give Trump a 100% chance that it ruined his reputation. The moral: you literally can't win, because people are too fucking stupid to comprehend probability, period.
538 made thousands of forecasts of events they predicted to happen 30% of the time, and those events happened 29% of the time in actuality. Does that mean they got it wrong every single one of those times a 30% event actually happened? For a forecaster to be 'correct', is it necessary for events forecasted at 30% to never happen?