Political Pundits

   Fair warning: talking politics is like pulling teeth for me so please excuse any sports or pop culture references that I am sure to make. 

  Predictive journalism has been a around essentially as long as modern journalism itself. People take it upon themselves to create predictions about numerous things from technology, to sports, to the economy. There seems to be one that comes into full swing during certain times every four years. Yes, I'm referring to the political side of predictive journalism. Honestly I would rather pull my own teeth than try to make election predications especially for the current situation or even last election. I would have been able to predict the Miami Heat potentially going to the finals this year before I'd have guessed we'd be stuck with such inept candidates. Never the less some people get their kicks out of making either wild claims or running algorithms on computers to try to tell the future. Let's take a look at implications of this facet of journalism. 

  Let's take a look back at the election predictions from 2016. Specifically we'll be looking at FiveThirtyEight and their data for this election. They did in depth graphs using voter survey and statistics. In these graphics we see that Hillary Clinton had a predicted chance of winning of over 70% the entire election for a majority of the time this data follows. This seems like a pretty sure number but as we know that wasn't the case. They had her winning in the popular vote by around 4% and have around 65 more votes than Donald Trump from the electoral college. So what happened to make these carefully made predictions so irrelevant? It seems they did ample research? At one point at his lowest they predicted Trump to only have a 10.8% chance of winning whereas at her highest Clinton was set for an 89.2% chance of victory. Some claim voter fraud, Russian collusion, the possibility that we are all living in a simulation, or the world slipping into an alternate reality. Personally I disliked both candidates and wasn't old enough to vote so I didn't give these skewed predictions much thought. But I believe the 2016 election teaches us that even with extensive research and algorithms crunching the endless numbers away there is always a chance for an upset or randomized result. This isn't to say that no one trying to predict this election got it correctly, but to be fair it's essentially only a 50/50 guess to begin with excluding all other data. The chances of a third party member winning are slim to none so if you closed your eyes and pointed at either the Democrat or Republican candidate there's a decent chance you'd be correct. You want to talk about something impressive? If someone could have predicted that the Nuggets would have made it to their conference finals this year after overcoming two 3-1 deficits, that would have been more impressive.

  What effects could someone wielding potentially accurate empirical or numerical evidence have on society? If you see enough evidence provided that your opinion may not matter then you might be less inclined to give it. Say there's an election that seems like a foregone conclusion based on data presented so  you decide not to vote, and in turn others feel the same and end up actually giving the election away more easily. But as the Covid-19 pandemic has taught us, many Americans could care less about data and other people's opinions. I personally believe that the information provided by these studies is useful for people directly involved in the political campaigns of the specific candidates but for the average joe? I don't think potentially inaccurate predictions should be what sways your opinion. You may as well vote, there's a chance it may actually matter and it really doesn't take very long. Just do your due diligence on your candidate through multiple verified sources and formulate an opinion. Predictive journalism seems more fitting for events like sports anyways. If a writer and his trusty program can tell you who to hit the money line on in the NBA finals maybe you'd be better off gambling than wasting your time reading about predictive politics.

  

Now if you are determined to follow this branch of "journalism" I'll include this years predictions as well. Based on the data shown here Joe Biden should take the election. Out of 40,000 simulations Biden is shown to win 77 in 100 times. It should be kept in mind that FiveThirtyEight also had Hillary winning by similar margins. The only person who might be able to tell us how this shakes out accurately would be Doctor Strange. Out of the 14,000,605 scenarios he sees he's still disappointed with who becomes president.......that is except for the timeline where everyone writes in Dwayne "The Rock' Johnson.