The chances that the election would be close enough that late-arriving ballots in PA would be enough to change the overall outcome was maybe something like 0.5% or 1%. (There were not many of these ballots.) So if that's what people were concerned about, it was overblown.
When I pointed out though that yes the Supreme Court could determine the result in a *very* close election but it would likely have to be very close indeed under certain specific scenarios, I got yelled at on this platform for not taking the chances seriously enough.
If you want to take the position that the election aftermath went even worse than expected in some ways, but better than expected in other ways—including the Supreme Court—that seems reasonable and prudent! It's imperative to take stock of what happened.
But to deny that there were some bad liberal takes about the Supreme Court is pretty close to gaslighting at this point. And it's not going to help us to see the situation clearly at a time when we need to see the situation clearly because our democracy is under threat.

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More from @NateSilver538

10 Dec
This seems like a fairly realistic set of assumptions for what to expect on the COVID-19 front next year as vaccinations begin to roll out. Things start to get notably better by ~April but it takes until mid-to-late summer before we approach herd immunity.
covid19-projections.com/path-to-herd-i…
The one major downside scenario is if vaccines prevent disease but don't do much to curb *infection*. Otherwise though these seem like pretty middle-of-the-road assumptions. I think he may underplay the role of seasonality a bit, which could help in the summer.
The other thing that seems likely is there will be some pretty fierce debates in that interim period from April-July or so about faster or slower paths to reopening.
Read 5 tweets
9 Dec
I'd also note, in general, that there have been a lot of bad predictions from liberals when it comes to how the Supreme Court would behave. Every court term, including this most recent one, brings a major "surprise" ruling or two. It's been a blind spot for analysis.
Some of it may be that while it may be the Supreme Court has become more partisan, it's not nearly at the same hyperwarp speed at which Congress has become more partisan, so it provides an important constraint overall.
One perhaps-not-terrible heuristic is to think of the current SCOTUS as being.... Mitt Romney. It's certainly quite conservative and doesn't remotely endorse the liberal worldview. But it's not particularly partisan or Trumpist and it cares about its institutional legacy.
Read 4 tweets
9 Dec
There's a lot of "if it were closer or X and Y were different, SCOTUS would have stolen the election for Trump" in response to this, to which I have a few different responses:
a) Maybe! But this election was *pretty* close and the courts were *very* unsympathetic to Trump. What if it was Florida-in-2000 close? So close it wasn't clear who really won? Maybe that's different. But Florida was INCREDIBLY close, a once-in-several-lifetimes occurrence.
b) Here's a litmus test. Suppose on Nov. 2 I'd described the outcome of the election—Biden would win 4 key states by <=1 point, all of which have GOP legislatures and two of which have GOP governors, one of whom is Brian Kemp. Would liberals have been freaking out? (Yes.)
Read 4 tweets
7 Dec
Ossoff 48.7
Purdue 47.9

Warnock 49.2
Loeffler 47.0

projects.fivethirtyeight.com/georgia-senate…
These are just polling averages, FYI. We are not issuing probabilistic forecasts of the Georgia runoffs, not for any philosophical reason—they'll be back in 2022/24—but because our full-fledged Congressional model isn't really designed to handle one-off races like these.
To be honest that's probably for the best, because there are a lot of judgment calls in terms of what the "fundamentals" look like in this election. Is this equivalent to a midterm, in which you might expect a pretty red environment vs. Biden? Maybe not given how Trump is acting.
Read 5 tweets
17 Nov
So basically, Murkowski can live without fear of a Republican primary challenge.
There are actually some pretty interesting incentives here. If you had to guess, you'd think a Top 4 general election in Alaska would consist of Murkowski, a Democrat, a MAGA/Tea Party Republican, and a Libertarian.
Who wins that? IDK, but in theory Murkowski could get squeezed out if say the Democrat gets 30% of the vote, the Libertarian gets 5% and the MAGA R gets 35%, leaving her with 30%. Murkowski doesn't want there to be a strong Democratic nominee, in other words.
Read 4 tweets
11 Nov
So... I've got a take on the polls up, which I think is a lot more equivocal than what you're seeing elsewhere. Here's the nut of it but it's pretty nuanced so you'll probably want to read the whole thing. fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-p…
This is undoubtedly affected by my/538's vantage point, in that we're not pollsters but instead our job is to evaluate and forecast poll accuracy. From that standpoint, the "miss" this year of 3-4 points (for POTUS, maybe more for Congress) was fairly in line with expectations.
A rough analogy: If I were a pollster, I wouldn't consider the miss to be "acceptable", in the same way that you were a parent, you might not consider a C+ grade to be acceptable from your 10th grader. But if he usually got a mix of B's and C's, it also wouldn't be *surprising*.
Read 4 tweets

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