So, I did wanna discuss this one given that I do my own election predictions, but ABC has formally killed 538. Honestly, I always thought 538 was a bit overrated, and it went downhill big time after ABC news took over and Nate Silver left, but they were an important (and free) resource that gave normies a lot of high quality election coverage. I didn't always agree with them. Heck, sometimes I very strongly disagreed with the political commentary side of things, but again, they did good work, and for normies, this is a huge blow.
Thankfully, I use realclearpolitics/realclearpolling for my election predictions, and as both 2020 and 2024 have showed, they tend to do a bit better with poll aggregations anyway. Sometimes RCP misses the mark and doesn't keep up on less competitive races, causing their data to do some funky things in my model that I do not like (D+5 Oregon, R+5 Kansas, anyone?), and often 538 helped me supplement my data allowing me to work out the kinks in my model, but all in all, on the races that mattered, 538 have been wrong in recent years. Their polling aggregations were about 1 point more blue than RCP's were, and the actual results were about 1-2 points more red than RCP's predictions on average. And their 2024 election model under Morris was a joke. Like, what's the point of a model that weighs fundamentals so heavily youre always gonna be 50-50 when the polling data is clearly lopsided in trump's favor?
So idk. Maybe ABC just decided that given they couldn't get it right, they deserved to go. I dont agree with that decision, but it is what it is. My own predictions will continue as they always were, although we're WAAAAY too far out from 2026, let alone 2028, to have any data for reliable predictions in that regard.
No comments:
Post a Comment