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I'm going to bed but I'm going to make a prediction first.

My prediction:

PRESIDENT: Trump with 277 or 273 (PA and MI can trade out, but I think he'll win one of them. If he loses both though, which I find unlikely, Biden wins.)

SENATE: R, but barely

HOUSE: R by a lot.

I could be wrong though. There are a lot of games being played with the numbers right now so it's difficult to get reliable information from anywhere.

One thing is true regardless though: The polls were once again, COMPLETELY wrong.

I'm never trusting polls again.

Also, Jo Jorgensen taking over 1% of the vote (1.5 million votes so far) as a third party is spectacular. Huge kudos to her! More third parties please!

@aminewatcher I would probably agree with your predictions.

Love the Jo thing to...

Though one thing.. the polls werent wrong. According to the data from polls Trump stood about a 14% chance of winning, so him winning does not suggest the data was wrong, 14% isnt 0%.

@freemo
Most of the polls that I saw, at least up until yesterday, were saying that Trump had a 5% or less chance to win. They can't say 0% even if they want to, because, well, 2016 where they tried to say almost 0% and were wrong.

It was only yesterday that the polls started to tighten to something like 14% or even 30% in some polls, probably to save face when the election actually happens.

Polls are just unreliable at this point, and trying to predict elections on them is about as accurate as predicting the weather based on tea leaves.

Regardless, it doesn't matter. Nobody is going to trust polls anymore, and it's possible that nobody is going to trust the election process anymore either.

That latter thought is the scary one.

@aminewatcher
None of that suggests their wrong though. Percentages can and do change.

The question is how often is how often do the polls say 10% and the candidate wins? More than one out of 10?

@aminewatcher
Btw if we look at us exit polls for the past 50 years they have a 4% error rate, so they are actually pretty good at predicting

@freemo
I guess "wrong" is the incorrect word to use. "Unreliable" or "inaccurate" would work better here.

Let's say that the average poll said a 10% chance for Trump winning in both elections (in 2016 they said 5% even up to election night).

That's a 1% chance, according to the polls, that Trump would win two elections.

And yet, Trump still comes out on top in both.

So sure, the polls weren't wrong, but I'm going to see their "10% chance" and know that the chances are most likely much higher than that.

So yeah. Not that it matters that much, but in short, I'm not gonna trust polls again and there is no reason to.

@aminewatchehe was given a 28.6% chance of winning in the forecast the night before election day, see here: projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2

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