Mother Jones
Nate Silver today:
I don’t like to call out other forecasters by name unless I have something positive to say about them….
But he wants to make an exception for one guy: Sam Wang. The guy is so preposterously deluded that something just has to be said:
That model is wrong — not necessarily because it shows Democrats ahead (ours barely shows any Republican advantage), but because it substantially underestimates the uncertainty associated with polling averages….In 2010, for example, Wang’s model made Sharron Angle the favorite in Nevada against Harry Reid; it estimated she was 2 points ahead in the polls, but with a standard error of just 0.5 points. If we drew a graphic based on Wang’s forecast like the ones we drew above,it would have Angle winning the race 99.997 percent of the time, meaning that Reid’s victory was about a 30,000-to-1 long shot. To be clear, the FiveThirtyEight model had Angle favored also, but it provided for much more uncertainty. Reid’s win came as a 5-to-1 underdog in our model instead of a 30,000-to-1 underdog in Wang’s; those are very different forecasts….If you want a “polls only” model that estimates the uncertainty more rigorously, I’d recommend The Huffington Post’s or Drew Linzer’s.
I’m not quite sure how it happened, but Silver has managed to become truly torqued off about Wang. If Wang’s prediction of this year’s Senate race turns out to be more accurate than Silver’s, I almost hate to think what might happen. Silver’s head is going to explode or something. In any case, this is far more fun than you normally get from a couple of geeky poll aggregators.
By the way, Wang is now projecting that Democrats have an 81 percent chance of controlling the Senate after the election. Not by much, mind you: he figures they’re likely to hold exactly 50 seats, which would make Joe Biden the tiebreaker and give Democrats a bare majority. We’ll see.
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