Much is being made today of the authoritative news and polling site FiveThirtyEight’s prediction of an overwhelming win by the Biden-Harris ticket on Election Day.
Sites like the Drudge Report are highlighting FiveThirtyEight’s current 71% prediction of a Joe Biden victory. “538: BIDEN 71% CHANCE OF WINNING…,” is Drudge’s headline, in red for emphasis.
Certainly, all polls show Biden ahead of President Trump. But they also did on Election Day 2016, when Hillary Rodham Clinton lost in a shocker.
So what was FiveThirtyEight’s prediction back in 2016?
Clinton 71.4%, Trump 28.6%.
The site’s Nate Silver today acknowledged the “deja vu,” but said there are differences.
Under a story headlined “It’s Way Too Soon To Count Trump Out,” he wrote:
If these numbers give you a sense of deja vu, it may be because they’re very similar to our final forecast in 2016 … when Trump also had a 29 percent chance of winning! (And Hillary Clinton had a 71 percent chance.) So if you’re not taking a 29 percent chance as a serious possibility, I’m not sure there’s much we can say at this point, although there’s a Zoom poker game that I’d be happy to invite you to.
One last parallel to 2016 — when some models gave Clinton as high as a 99 percent chance of winning — is that FiveThirtyEight’s forecast tends to be more conservative than others. …
With that said, one shouldn’t get too carried away with the comparisons to four years ago. In 2016, the reason Trump had a pretty decent chance in our final forecast was mostly just because the polls were fairly close (despite the media narrative to the contrary), close enough that even a modest-sized polling error in the right group of states could be enough to give Trump a victory in the Electoral College.
The uncertainty in our current 2020 forecast, conversely, stems mostly from the fact that there’s still a long way to go until the election. Take what happens if we lie to our model and tell it that the election is going to be held today. It spits out that Biden has a 93 percent chance of winning. In other words, a Trump victory would require a much bigger polling error than what we saw in 2016.
