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Nate Silver revises Democrats’ chances of winning the Senate
(www.newsweek.com)
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this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2026
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Haha, I've seen this shit from Nate before
I have issues with Silver too, but to be fair, an 80% likelihood should be wrong one time in five. If it always predicted the winner, the 80% figure would be inaccurate.
I think people confuse predicted chance of winning with predicted poll results, where 82% would indeed predict an unstoppable landslide.
Due to the Electoral College, predicting the outcome of a Presidential election is effectively predicting the aggregate outcome of multiple state races.
Yeah, I removed that point when I realized the forecast was already an aggregate.
The Electoral College and the popular vote are very strongly correlated. The EC only ever comes into play when the election is very close in terms of popular vote, and then polls can't give a (near) certain answer anyway.
In fact, US elections are much easier to predict using polling than elections in most other places, because a) the US electorate has extremely high voter loyalty compared to typical values elsewhere, especially in functional democracies and b) there is a lot of high-quality polling data available.
Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump by more than 2% of the popular vote, which I would say is not "very close" in this context. So I'm not sure I agree with your premise.
Pretty sure that was the NYT. Silver had her at a 71% chance.
Trump's odds of winning were 19%, similar to the 16% chance of the bad outcome in Russian roulette. I notice people interpret statistics more on the situation than the numbers.
I've played a lot of games with random factors. Sometimes you miss that 99% shot three times in a row. People kind of assume anything above 80% is 100%, which is silly.
X-COM?
I actually never played much XCOM, but I did play a lot of final fantasy tactics. And the original fallout.
I think Baldur's gate 3 cheats though, since with karmic dice off I rolled four natural 1s in a row, twice.
BG3 does do funky things with rolls but I don't recall the details
You really should learn how statistics work. It's a common problem. And not all of it is easy. But let's round that down to 80% to make the numbers easier to understand: It means that if there are five universes where that election took place, four of them should go for Clinton and one should go for Trump. On average. Really, it's more like if there were 5000 universes, not 5.
But assuming the prediction was correct - that's still 20% of the time - one time out of five - that it was predicted to go how it went.
That is not shocking or odd or wrong at all.
Nate said Kamala Harris was 50-50 with Donald Trump in 2024. In reality, Trump won every swing state. It wasn’t neck and neck.
And that again misunderstands statistics going on here.
The prediction was who won, not by how much they won. In fact, his prediction was that it was a 60% chance that one or the other of them would win six out of the seven close races.
This stuff IS difficult to understand. Some of it is pretty intuitive, and some of it really is not.
edit: Fucking go LEARN before you fucking downvote. I am correct. So feel free to try and prove me wrong. But if you're just going to downvote, fuck you and fuck off. Stop being willfully ignorant. Jesus christ.
If Trump wins every swing state there was never a 50-50 chance Kamala could’ve won.
That is not how statistics works.
You're thinking of statistical prediction as divination. That an 80% chance of something happening means it's going to happen.
Statistical predictions are a combination of two statements.
AND
In order to be accurate, event B must occur Y% of the time, event A X%. There may be dozens of ways either even can unfold, but the ultimate outcome should fall in to one of those two possibilities, roughly as often as predicted.
I'm hot being hyperbolic when I say this, saying "60% of the time it works every time" is literally a more accurate way of looking at it than what you're saying.
Incorrect. You can fucking look this stuff up and learn instead of being aggressively ignorant.
Analogy: Flipping a single coin has a 50% chance of "winning". Flip one coin, however, and ONE HUNDRED PERCENT of ALL COINS FLIPPED are HEADS (or TAILS), and yet it was a 50% chance of winning.
Please. Please go fucking learn how this works, or just accept that it is the case. Google it. Talk to an LLM if you want - they are great at explaining this sort of thing. Do something. Please don't continue to make ignorant replies.
Don't talk to an LLM, it will end up telling you what you want to hear.
Do actual research
He also called it for Trump the night before the election.
Yeah; 75% from him sounds pretty worrying.
Polls are unreliable imo
I remember reading the night before the election an article he posted about that. How the odds were similar to that of a game of Russian roulette. Sure, 5 in 6 chance there's no bullet in the chamber. But 1 in 6 that there is.
If it helps, in 2018, Dems had a major victory, and in 2022 the supposed Red Wave was far more of a Red Splash.
Today, the cult is far smaller. Partly due to the price of everything going up, partly because Trump's core demographic have been meeting their life expectancy. The latter especially sooner as they've become so anti-medicine.
You can help tip the scales by voting Dem.
This. He got put on a pedestal there and I think he'd have to do a lot to earn trust again after that colossal fuck-up.
Of course, it's always possible it was not even close to his fault, and the election was just outright stolen.