538

How did FiveThirtyEight’s model perform over time?

We previously looked at Brier scores for The Economist’s 2020 Presidential model predictions over time, and surprisingly found the scores worsened closer to Election Day.  Given the closeness of their predictions, I assumed FiveThirtyEight’s Brier scores would trend the same way but was wrong again. In the chart below you can see Brier scores for […]

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Who won the 2020 Model Wars?

In the summer of 2020, online trash talking between FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver and The Economist’s G. Elliot Morris sparked the “Model Wars.” Now that the dust has settled, I’m comparing the Brier scores and the number of correctly called states from their final state-level model outputs on November 3, 2020. Please note that the models

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Were gamblers more accurate than the forecasting models in 2020?

Election forecasting models took a hit to their credibility for missing Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 but were generally accurate in 2020.  Because these models are dependent on polling, we can probably expect to see future issues with forecasting elections as pollster response rates drop, households disconnect their landlines, and social trust declines.  At the

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