"Meanwhile, several statistical models constructed to predict the election winner are still assigning essentially zero probability to any outcome in which the winner is not named Trump or Biden."
I get the concern and agree that historic indicators may end up failing to be as useful in this race, but I still think these models provide some important qualitative information. Conditional on the election coming down to Biden-Trump, Biden is on shaky footing, particularly for an incumbent. Everyone in the social media pissing matches about Biden's chances are lobbing single polls (with lots of variance). No one considers that pretty much all the models, regardless of their result probabilities, started to show the same trend *before* the debate: Biden's chances at winning the Electoral College were falling, precipitously. I doubt that's all noise, even if the probabilities themselves shouldn't be interpreted literally.
Coupled with the signals in the prediction market, I think that all points to Democrats needing to consider seriously whether they can find someone who 1) can beat a coin flip and 2) will reduce the uncertainty somewhat, though #2 may be wishful thinking at this point.
(In the past couple elections, I think the Economist's poll outperformed the 538 models further out, even though they ended up in similar places by the day of the election. I don't have a good feel for how 538's new forecasting approach has changed post Silver's exit.)
On the point of the Intrade bettor who had a $7 Million on Romney, is it possible he was arbitraging with prices on a secondary website? This kind of thing is common in sports betting
"Meanwhile, several statistical models constructed to predict the election winner are still assigning essentially zero probability to any outcome in which the winner is not named Trump or Biden."
I get the concern and agree that historic indicators may end up failing to be as useful in this race, but I still think these models provide some important qualitative information. Conditional on the election coming down to Biden-Trump, Biden is on shaky footing, particularly for an incumbent. Everyone in the social media pissing matches about Biden's chances are lobbing single polls (with lots of variance). No one considers that pretty much all the models, regardless of their result probabilities, started to show the same trend *before* the debate: Biden's chances at winning the Electoral College were falling, precipitously. I doubt that's all noise, even if the probabilities themselves shouldn't be interpreted literally.
Coupled with the signals in the prediction market, I think that all points to Democrats needing to consider seriously whether they can find someone who 1) can beat a coin flip and 2) will reduce the uncertainty somewhat, though #2 may be wishful thinking at this point.
(In the past couple elections, I think the Economist's poll outperformed the 538 models further out, even though they ended up in similar places by the day of the election. I don't have a good feel for how 538's new forecasting approach has changed post Silver's exit.)
On the point of the Intrade bettor who had a $7 Million on Romney, is it possible he was arbitraging with prices on a secondary website? This kind of thing is common in sports betting
We looked at this, see the post on the Romney whale, link above