Hi there! Sorry for the delay, I rarely Lemmy on weekends. And made the foolish mistake of posting something that took off towards the end of last week.

Anyhow, I think your analysis is really interesting! Admittedly, I’m a cheapskate and haven’t paid for the Silver Bulletin, so I’m quite curious to see what Silver’s model would have done taking only the same polls as VotHub does.

That being said, I think that even the VoteHub models are showing the same sort of movement in the polls, as recently as Oct 6 VoteHub showed the two candidates seperated by almost 3.5% nationally, which is pretty significant. However, even their model now shows Harris’ lead cut by half, down to 1.7% And this is from a model that only accepts non partisan polling etc! Looking over their recent polls, of the four polls in the 3 Blue Wall states in the last week, none showed Harris ahead. (At least on the 20th, there was one that showed Harris up by 4 in Michigan.)

Now for the part that would fascinate me about the Silver/VoteHub model comparison (I’m not going to lie, this conversation is making me want to drop the $30ish, just to see and of course for election night/week/month) is that even using the exact same inputs, for a race this close, you could easily see different outcomes by different modelers. Some put more weight to the possibility of uncorrelated polling errors between states, others between correlated polling misses by certain demographics (and of course, models might split those demographics differently, e.g., figuring that a Florida Latino may be more likely to be Cuban than of Mexican heritage and thus respond very differently to accusations of socialism etc.) All that to say, you could very easily put the exact same polls into different models and you ought to see somewhat different projections.

Again, I really appreciate you diving into the piece and coming back with solid evidence, you are exactly the type of person making Lemmy a place I want to hang out.