Nate Silver: observation

Transcript context

…Hi, Tyler O’Neil, a reporter with PJ Media. My question is, you mentioned how difficult it is, the weakness of empirical models when predicting presidential elections. Is it possible to look at congressional elections, House of Representatives races, and draw more information in modeling from those? Yeah, I think we would say that even though it’s less sexy to predict Senate races or congressional races that having larger quasi-independent samples, that would be the better test, ultimately. Although even there, the errors — so we saw in the Senate races last year how the polls were off, on average, by three or four points, which is pretty bad. It’s happened before. The problem is that all those errors were in the same direction, so Republicans won when a lot of races around the country that they were underdogs in — not huge underdogs, except Virginia was almost a major upset. But yeah, it’s a much purer form of the exercise to do data mining on congressional elections and weighing polls versus fundamentals and whatever else. Next question.…

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