Examining Nate Silver’s predictions for 2020

Nate Silver (of fivethirtyeight.com) actually did a pretty good job. Keep in mind that he is not a pollster; he just takes the polls, weighs them based on the pollster’s history of accuracy, averages them with math I don’t understand, and then makes his prediction.

Trump was undercounted in all the polls by about 2%, so the predictions for Florida and North Carolina going Biden’s way were wrong, but the others were around that 2% difference.

His prediction for some of the “swing states” is on the left and the actual percentage is on the right. The two he got wrong have asterisks.

AZ: 50.7 / 49.4

FL: 50.9 / 47.8 *

GA: 50.1 / 49.5

MI: 53.5 / 50.6

MN: 53.7 / 52.6

NC: 50.5 / 48.7 *

NV: 52.3 / 50.1

PA: 52.0 / 49.9

WI: 53.7 / 49.6

These are the swing states he predicted would be in Trump’s column (and they were):

IA: 48.5 / 45.0

OH: 49.2 / 45.2

TX: 48.8 / 46.4

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