FiveThirtyEight's final 2016 forecast, issued early on election Tuesday evening, gave Trump a 29 percent chance of winning the Electoral College.
Resolved true The record shows it happened or was so.
Factual: Statements about the present or the past, checked against the record: did they hold up?
Said for an organisation they lead or work for; it counts on both records.
What would count as true or false
True if FiveThirtyEight's final 2016 general-election forecast, published on or about the evening of Tuesday 8 November 2016 (the headline model, polls-only), gave Trump a chance of winning the Electoral College that rounds to 29 percent (28.5–29.4%). Mostly true if the figure is 28 or 30 percent, or the timing detail (early Tuesday evening rather than Tuesday morning or late Monday) is slightly off. Mixed if the figure is 27 or 31 percent, or if 29% applies only to a different model version (e.g. polls-plus) and the headline figure differs by 1–2 points. Mostly false if the headline final figure differs by 3–5 points. False if it differs by more than 5 points or no such final forecast existed.
Set before the research began.
Evidence (3)
-
E1 Grading The 2016 Election Forecasts BuzzFeed News · 29 November 2016
“FiveThirtyEight — “polls-only” and “polls-plus” (29% and 28%, respectively)”
-
E2 Strengthening Our Democracy: Harris and the Power of Election Prediction University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy · 26 March 2019
“Their final forecast, issued the evening of the 2016 election, had Trump with a 29 percent chance of winning the Electoral College (just below the 30 percent chance Trump’s own campaign predicted he had, as reported by FiveThirtyEight).”
-
E3 U.S. Presidential Election Coverage Drives FiveThirtyEight to Record-Breaking Month in October ESPN Press Room · 18 November 2016
“In the most uncertain U.S. election in modern history, FiveThirtyEight’s model put the probability of a Donald Trump win at 28.4 percent leading into the election”
Reasoning
E1, an independent post-election grading piece, gives FiveThirtyEight's final 2016 forecasts as 29% for Trump in the polls-only model (the headline model) and 28% in polls-plus. E2 independently says the final forecast was issued on the evening of the election and gave Trump a 29 percent chance. E3's 28.4 percent does not name a model variant, and it fits the 28% polls-plus figure in E1, so it does not contradict the 29% polls-only figure.
Cite this claim
Nate Silver, “FiveThirtyEight's final 2016 forecast, issued early on election Tuesday evening, gave Trump a 29 percent chance of winning the Electoral College.” (said November 2016). Verdict: resolved true. Reliability API, claim c_34bfeae1c3f8, method 0.1.0+28da144b, dataset release v1.1.2. https://epistacklabs.com/claims/c_34bfeae1c3f8
This claim is in dataset release v1.1.2, with the same verdict.
Reply to this claim
More factual claims by Nate Silver
-
Resolved true
“It’s not hard, for instance, to find polls from this point in 2015 showing Hillary Clinton with double-digit leads over Trump.”
-
Mostly true
“There was never any spike in Biden's approval rating.”
-
Resolved true
“This is the pollster that had shown a big bounce for Garcia before, so either that previous poll was an outlier or her momentum has been usurped by Wiley.”
-
Mixed
“Instead, there was a modest polling error, well in line with historical polling errors, but even a modest error was enough to provide for plenty of paths to victory for Trump.”
-
Mostly true
“The single most important reason that our model gave Trump a better chance than others is because of our assumption that polling errors are correlated.”
Verdicts are made automatically; how verdicts are made.