Did Nate Cohn's predictions this election pan out?
“The final polls more or less comport with how we already viewed the race. Mr. Biden ends the race up by more than eight points nationwide — the largest lead a candidate has held in the final polls since Bill Clinton in 1996. He’s up by at least five points in states worth more than 270 electoral votes, the number needed to win. Beyond that, he’s got at least a nominal lead in states worth 350 electoral votes, and he’s just a 2012 polling error away from a sweeping landslide of more than 400 electoral votes.”
Biden underperformed compared to Clinton in most pivot counties and bellweather predictions (which were 90% wrong this year, wow), and most counties in swing states entirely with the except of greaty overperforming in the densest liberal areas, in some of those cases even doing better than Obama as crazy as that seems. Biden underperformed with hispanics and black from exceptions and likewise Trump did better with them than expected overall. And no matter what if you think someone the day of the election saying "Biden Landside" was possible, well...
You do you, but me personally, I'm going to go to someone else for opinions because that was such an exaggeration of reality that it seems like it had to be "for effect".
I disagree. It's FAR too early for him to be writing about "why we got it wrong" because if they knew that now, they would have known that last week.
Look, if it was 2 points in a couple states here or there, I get it! But... if the guy was claiming the possibility of a 400 vote Biden landslide? Nah man, that is either massive incompetence or it's intentionally misleading. Neither scenario do I trust this person.
Which one of Cohn's swing state predictions are within "polling error"? If you can't even consider the possibility that the polls were pushed to demoralize, that's not on me.
Here... Let me give you a source of pollster who explains just how crazy Cohn, Silver, Wasserman's polls were and how drastically they overshot.
This guy is right leaning, but no fan of Republicans, but the view here is that he's pissed about how poorly everyone did this and how it's incompetence or malice.
First, I think you misunderstand poll margins of error. For example, the NYT poll is +-4 for each candidate. Meaning it could swing a total of 8 points.
That isn't anything new.
"In a new paper with Andrew Gelman and Houshmand Shirani-Mehr, we examined 4,221 late-campaign polls — every public poll we could find — for 608 state-level presidential, Senate and governor’s races between 1998 and 2014. Comparing those polls’ results with actual electoral results, we find the historical margin of error is plus or minus six to seven percentage points. (Yes, that’s an error range of 12 to 14 points, not the typically reported 6 or 7.)"
> Which one of Cohn's swing state predictions are within "polling error"? If you can't even consider the possibility that the polls were pushed to demoralize, that's not on me.
A normal polling error is about 5%, so all of them are within that except for Florida and Wisconsin.
