My editors are forever asking me to take the long Twitter threads I write and turn them into articles here at Genesis Brand. So I’m actually going to give that a try!
What follows are some follow-up thoughts on our election model, which was originally composed in the form of a V E R Y L O N G tweetstorm that I never published. (See if you can guess where the 240-character breaks would have been.)
In this thread … err, article … I’ll try to walk you through my thought process on a few elements of our model and respond to a few thoughtful critiques I’ve seen elsewhere. Before you dive in, it may help to read our summary of the state of the race, or at least skim our very detailed methodology guide.
But the basic starting point for a probabilistic, poll-driven model ought to be this: Is polling in August a highly reliable way to predict the outcome in November?
The short answer is “no.”
Polling in August is somewhat predictive. You’d much rather be ahead than behind. But there can still be some very wild swings.
You can see that in the daily threads that Nathaniel Rakich, one of our elections analysts, puts together. Here is what a national polling average would have looked like in elections dating back to 1976:
OK, I cheated a bit. I’m using a version that Nathaniel published last week, partly because this was the exact moment in the campaign when Michael Dukakis, the 1988 Democratic nominee, started to blow his large lead, which he never regained. Still, there’s some wild stuff there! John Kerry led at this point in 2004. George W. Bush had a 10-point lead at this point in the 2000 race, but, as we know, he did