The Deceptive Poll Punditry of Statistical Noise; or, Why Nate Silver & Co.'s "Silver Bulletin" Is Still the Best Bet

Can one reason with these people? Pundits misinform with overhyped statistical noise, while the truthful message of the “Silver Bulletin” is that little has changed and we still have insufficient...

Can one reason with these people? Pundits misinform with overhyped statistical noise, while the truthful message of the “Silver Bulletin” is that little has changed and we still have insufficient reason to claim any useful knowledge about what is going on in this election…

Hype-driven takes from figures like Dan Pfeiffer and Nate Cohn serve only to muddle the waters. Pfeiffer's claims about Harris's gains in recent polls lack a solid foundation, based on small sample sizes and unreflective voter opinions. Cohn's defenses of his Florida poll data showing Trump leading in that state by an improbably large margin raise even more questions. It is highly likely that both pundits are falsely presenting statistical noise as meaningful information. And so Silver's work as a polling aggregator remains indispensable.

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I am tired of this kind of thing.

It comes from people who do—or ought—or whom I at least think ought—to know much much better. People who ought to know that they are writing on something for which they have zero VAR, and yet write anyway…

And so I am once again confirmed in my view that people should read (and trust) Nate Silver & co.’s Silver Bulletin

Silver Bulletin 2024 presidential election forecast

<https://www.natesilver.net/p/nate-silver-2024-president-election-polls-model>, and nothing else, if they are going to pay any attention at all to polls this fall.

The Silver Bulletin’s conclusions: Harris is highly likely—4-1 odds, given our ignorance—to have a popular-vote edge. The Electoral College is a toss-up—but that what really means is that somebody has it almost in the bag, has 4-1 odds or so, but our polls are sufficiently unreliable that we do not know who. Things have not materially changed since Harris replaced Biden. Full stop.

But there is a hoard of misinformers and multiple tsunamis of misinformation saying different.