[twelfthnight]

I've worked as a data scientist for political campaigns (but no longer). The elephant in the room is that there are so many forces that make this election different from historical ones, from polls moving online away from phones (making them much much less reliable) to Trump's conviction to a completely unprecedented/fractured media landscape. Even if these forecasts were accurate, their usefulness for anyone other than people spending ad money is absolutely zero. Now that these forecast have so so much bigger error bars, I think public forecasts are actually harmful and just a scummy money grab from the media that posts them.

EDIT:

Why are they harmful? At best they make lots of people angry about something that hasn't happened. At worst they skew the election by making people not vote, or afterward serve to justify election fraud complaints ("my candidate wasn't supposed to lose based on forecasts, so fraud occured").

I think we all need to take a deep breath, accept we have little understanding what will happen, _vote_, and hope for a sane outcome.

[metabagel]

Totally agree. Journalists should be explaining the stakes, not trying to predict the outcome. Predicting the outcome of an election is mostly a fool’s game.