Nate Silver was both the best and worst thing that happened to these predictions. The modus operandi of people in media (New York and Hollywood) is "gut checks" - Dean Baquet is only going to publish a model, no matter what the math says, that agrees with his "gut" that Clinton was going to win 2016. He was so crazy wrong but like, he's not getting fired. Laypeople and cranks conflate making a mistake that everyone in media made with a conspiracy between Democrats and the media, unable to grasp incompetence. Of course, if Dean Baquet had spent five minutes talking to a political scientist of some merit, asking, "is the voter turnout of traditional demographic groups like women and old people is really as predictive of elections as Nate Silver said it was?" He would have learned that Australia has had compulsory voting for decades and it is as conservative as ever.
Now that "gut checks" have disentangled themselves from New York graphics departments - can you believe its the graphics department, masquerading as a "data science" department, that runs election forecast stories?! - maybe forecasts will be better everywhere.
If I were doing this, I'd frame it as a Kaggle competition built on PyroPL. And I'd require top performance in democratic election forecasting everywhere, not just the US. The Economist is right, it's all about fundamentals, but which fundamentals, and can you prevent the choice of fundamentals from reflecting the publisher's political aspirations? Personally I'm skeptical that the Economist's choice of GDP growth makes any sense, and net approval rating sounds like a poll, so... there must be something better.
https://github.com/TheEconomist/us-potus-model
Nate Silver was both the best and worst thing that happened to these predictions. The modus operandi of people in media (New York and Hollywood) is "gut checks" - Dean Baquet is only going to publish a model, no matter what the math says, that agrees with his "gut" that Clinton was going to win 2016. He was so crazy wrong but like, he's not getting fired. Laypeople and cranks conflate making a mistake that everyone in media made with a conspiracy between Democrats and the media, unable to grasp incompetence. Of course, if Dean Baquet had spent five minutes talking to a political scientist of some merit, asking, "is the voter turnout of traditional demographic groups like women and old people is really as predictive of elections as Nate Silver said it was?" He would have learned that Australia has had compulsory voting for decades and it is as conservative as ever.
Now that "gut checks" have disentangled themselves from New York graphics departments - can you believe its the graphics department, masquerading as a "data science" department, that runs election forecast stories?! - maybe forecasts will be better everywhere.
If I were doing this, I'd frame it as a Kaggle competition built on PyroPL. And I'd require top performance in democratic election forecasting everywhere, not just the US. The Economist is right, it's all about fundamentals, but which fundamentals, and can you prevent the choice of fundamentals from reflecting the publisher's political aspirations? Personally I'm skeptical that the Economist's choice of GDP growth makes any sense, and net approval rating sounds like a poll, so... there must be something better.