If Nate Silver took the predictions for "if the event were to happen today" and pretended it was a prediction for the future event, he'd be wrong, but that's how most people interpret his predictions anyway so that makes him effectively wrong anyway.
Exit polls are of course asking for voting preference today, because no person in their right mind would ever answer differently for "who would you vote for today?" versus "who will you vote for on November 4?" so it doesn't matter.
The problem is, we don't care about what would happen if the election were to be run today. We care about what will happen when the election actually occurs. What we want is a prediction that takes the polls into account but also factors in all the other information we have that could be used to try and predict the future election (e.g. trying to identify whether changes in a candidates polling numbers are likely to be temporary or reflect a permanent shift, identifying historical trends that can be used to predict future behavior, etc). I realize that predicting the future is much harder than predicting the hypothetical of what would happen today, but predicting the future is the whole point of forecasting.
There is value in being able to tease out the "accurate" voter sentiments today from the various polls and accounting for uncertainty and error, but that value is primarily in how we can then turn around and use that information to aid in future forecasting, and how candidates can use that data to gauge the effects of what they're doing. But without an attempt at forecasting the future, this is largely useless to the general population.
> that's how most people interpret his predictions anyway so that makes him effectively wrong anyway.
The only thing these people need is to learn what he's really doing, and then he will be immediately correct again! To me this seems like the simple and obvious solution to this debate.
Exit polls are of course asking for voting preference today, because no person in their right mind would ever answer differently for "who would you vote for today?" versus "who will you vote for on November 4?" so it doesn't matter.
The problem is, we don't care about what would happen if the election were to be run today. We care about what will happen when the election actually occurs. What we want is a prediction that takes the polls into account but also factors in all the other information we have that could be used to try and predict the future election (e.g. trying to identify whether changes in a candidates polling numbers are likely to be temporary or reflect a permanent shift, identifying historical trends that can be used to predict future behavior, etc). I realize that predicting the future is much harder than predicting the hypothetical of what would happen today, but predicting the future is the whole point of forecasting.
There is value in being able to tease out the "accurate" voter sentiments today from the various polls and accounting for uncertainty and error, but that value is primarily in how we can then turn around and use that information to aid in future forecasting, and how candidates can use that data to gauge the effects of what they're doing. But without an attempt at forecasting the future, this is largely useless to the general population.