[newfeatureok]

The thing about this election is that what if Trump himself is some sort of wildcard that can't really be properly forecasted in the polls?

Why is there so much fascination with polls to begin with? I understand that there are betting markets, but it seems sort of silly. If you had a 100% accurate poll, for instance, then what would be the purpose of the actual election?

[techsupporter]

> Why is there so much fascination with polls to begin with?

Polling is useful for candidates and gives them ideas on where to target outreach and spending.

For the rest of us, it gives us something to watch. With Presidential campaigns running for almost two years in advance of the actual voting weeks, there’s a huge gap between when the thing starts and when we see results. This way, people have something to fill the time. Even now that voting has started, we are still another 10 days until the voting is done and likely another 7 after that until we have a sufficient count to know who has been elected.

That’s a long time for a populace that’s worried, distracted, and interested, especially since so many of us live in states where—due to the mechanics of a broken election system—we can’t do much to influence the national outcome.

[rsynnott]

> The thing about this election is that what if Trump himself is some sort of wildcard that can't really be properly forecasted in the polls?

The only way that would work is if he made people more likely to lie about their voting intentions. Now, there may be something about Trump that makes polling methodologies less accurate (notably, many pollsters have started to take into account education, which turned out to be unexpectedly important last time round) but that points just to bad methodology, not inherent unpredictability.

[unwoundmouse]

Now that you bring that up, if we had a 100% accurate poll that would be really good for productivity wouldn't it? Perhaps it wouldn't give voters the same feeling of self-determination but it'd save a lot of resources in fundraising, going out to vote, counting votes

[bigbubba]

The sensation of self determination is the entire point of democracy though. We don't use democracy because we think masses of people are particularly wise; we use these systems because they feel more fair than the alternatives and that perception of fairness produces good results (peaceful power transitions.)

[jedberg]

I mean technically the election is a 100% accurate poll. You get data from every voter.

To run a 100% accurate poll would require you to sample every voter, so it would literally be an election.

[lordnacho]

> I mean technically the election is a 100% accurate poll. You get data from every voter.

Actually an election is literally a poll in the sense of a sample, you are counting people at "polling stations" in order to gauge the public mood about who should be president.

When you see it that way, Nate Silver is predicting a sample of an unknown distribution, the "true" distribution of people's preferences.

The fact that you can only make one officially binding sample ("the voters") is a practicality, as is the fact that there's an electoral college that means votes have different values. The fact that turnout matters is another issue, a statistician might call it a sampling problem.

[ceilingcorner]

The soothsayers and fortune tellers never went out of business, they just adopted a new name.