[newaccount670]

Biden got literally 0% of the vote despite 538 predicting him to win.

They chose to pretend Biden's mental decline wasn't happening because that was the Democrat party line at the time. How can you trust predictions from someone who is willing to manipulate his results to prop up his political party?

[amalcon]

What would you have them do in that period? Give Trump a 100% chance of winning? Make up a candidate who wasn't actually running? Arguably the most realistic thing to do would be to give X% Trump, Y% Some Democrat -- but had they done that, they'd have been rightly criticized for making an obvious vibe-driven decision. You can't change a quantitative prediction based on qualitative observations; all you can do is try to find more and better data sources.

The issue the models had in that period was pretty well documented: the models rated fundamentals (like economic indicators) more highly relative to polls when the election was farther in the future. Those were the same economic indicators that famously do not capture the pain average Americans have felt since COVID, and that politicians across the spectrum have tried to use to deny that pain when they are in power.

You can argue that this issue was well known at the time, and that a better group of analysts might have taken action to mitigate it. I'd argue that myself. It turns out that it's kind of hard, but that's a terrible excuse not to try. That is different than deliberately manipulating results for political ends, though. It's unclear what political ends those would even be -- who exactly benefits from an "unclear winner" forecast in that situation?