[rsynnott]

> If you listen to what they say, they admit they were not able to measure for the no-colllege male demographic in 2016, or in other words, they couldn’t model identity politics. Why couldn’t they do that? I’m not sure, but they are certain they can this time around because they saw the 2016 data and now believe they have more complete data to not make the same mistake again.

I think you possibly misunderstand what 538 _do_ a bit. Their data is based on polling, so they can only work on what the pollsters do. Historically, pollsters didn't pay that much attention to education, beyond using income or class as a proxy for it; one middle-class white man was pretty much like another. This worked quite well historically, but no longer does (and it's not just a US phenomenon; it was also a contributor to polling problems for Brexit, notably).

In their current model, 538 assume a higher rate of uncertainty than last time round; also, some pollsters now model education. But really there's not that much they can do about stuff that pollsters don't ask about.

[runawaybottle]

No, I don’t think so. If you build a model out of pollsters asking stupid questions, you deserve some blame.

I’ve got some basketball statistics to populate 538s model if their interested. Lebron did pretty good this season, hopefully they can correlate that with the black vote.

Their model is not transparent on any level, because if they make it transparent, we’d easily be able to see why it’s ridiculous.