All we have to do is look at historical voting levels to realize these are very fringe numbers.
They can say what they want about Trump, but the idea that he will get only 20 or simply less than 25% of the presidential vote is absurd. And when something is totally absurd, it isn't worth the trouble to post or read about.
This is pure fantasy.
Donald Trump is going to do just fine against Hillary, and the polls are revealing that. He's going to mop the floor with her.
This guy is sooooooooo overrated - back in 2008, Obama was feeding him his internal polls and that’s why he was so accurate. Can’t stand both of these twits.
Nate has a 5% chance of being right.
The guy totally missed in projections of NCAA and NBA tournaments. He’s got a great record for being wrong.
There are several wild cards that could also boost Trump. The first is terrorism. Don’t be surprised if the country is changed completely by horrific attacks or attack by election day. Also the scandals clouding Hillary that is a big if. There is also a thing called justice. The Clintons are evil and maybe they have gone to far and we will have cosmic justice.
I would say there is a 79% chance Nate is wrong.
Rest assured, Nate Silver’s statistical model has been vetted by climate scientists.
(Hillary is doomed!)
I guess today is my day to defend Nate Silver.
As Rush noted, Silver is not a pollster. He analyzes polls. That is a crucial difference. Garbage in, Garbage Out applies. And today’s polls, many that poll nearly twice as many Dems as Pubbies and huge percentage of Independents are simply Hillary Push Polls. Garbage Polls.
Those are the polls that Silver is using to draw his conclusions.
Be patient, the polls will improve because the pollsters need to keep their reputations alive so they will slowly but surely start to utilize reasonable models of the actual voting population. Plus Trump will improve in the polls just like he did in the GOP Primary. And, most importantly, Trump will win the turnout battle and even the Great Nate Silver will have to accommodate that fact.
The best news of all is Trump isn’t Romney.
Anyone making his living by predicting things should be required to explain why any of his predictions that were wrong went the way they did, and how they are improving their methods to get it right next time.
Otherwise they are just charlatans. But we knew that.
Only hostile environment polling - polls of secondary opinions which when properly analyzed reveal real opinions on other issues - can work now. This is vastly expensive, incompatible with phone polling, etc, etc, etc.
This is several orders of magnitude greater than the Bradley Effect.
It is also different from, but related to, systematic bias by the polling industry. Basically the polling industry is a faction of the MSM and political elites in general.
Here all of those factors are working simultaneously.