[ceilingcorner]

Nowhere did I say it is. I simply think that, if one were following the right information, his win was not as unexpected as the coastal media presented it as being.

Personally I would have put it about 60-40 Hillary-Trump.

[wtallis]

You started off by calling the 2016 prediction a debacle, but now you're saying you would have put the odds about 12 percentage points differently. That doesn't seem like a big enough disagreement to warrant the kind of vehement criticism you're throwing around.

[ceilingcorner]

I called it a debacle because 99.9% of media sources, pundits, politicians, political figures, or anyone else thought that Hillary had anything less than a guaranteed win. I'm simply suggesting it was actually always a close race, but that the media ignored this because it went against their ideological model / they weren't familiar with places like the Rust Belt.

[wtallis]

You really need to be more clear about which of your criticisms are against FiveThirtyEight specifically vs against the media in general. Because now it's looking like you are complaining about the media in general and using that as justification for mistrusting FiveThirtyEight, in the context of a discussion specifically about FiveThirtyEight being a notable outlier from that general media trend.

[ceilingcorner]

It's still just unclear to me how FiveThirtyEight assigning Trump a ±30% chance of winning can be considered "accurate" or "good".

From my point of view, this is only because said people considered Trump winning so extremely unlikely that 538 getting it sort of right appears exceptional. In reality, they were still quite wrong, just slightly less so. Ergo I don't see much value in their model.

I'm seeing the same exact thing today with Biden at a 90% chance of winning.