They don't choose the weightings personally, the computer model does. You can continue believing, as you did in 2008 and 2012, that 538 biases their model to "make it favor their preferred candidate." Or intervenes when their robot buddy goes off message.
This cycle, unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be a good site for unskewed polls. You can try this
Twitter feed, though.
Since you like 538.com so much:
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polls-were-skewed-toward-democrats/
And:
http://thewire.in/47165/renowned-po...hillary-clinton-in-us-presidential-elections/
However, despite Silver’s successes in the last two elections, many – such as
New York Magazine‘s
Ed Kilgore – are skeptical about his predictions. This is in large part because of a slew of huge misses in the last two years.
Salon reportedsome “high-profile” upsets for Silver after the 2014 midterm elections, both in senate and gubernatorial results. He had abjectly failed to anticipate the decisive influx of Republicans, and his models consistently
portrayed an uncertainty driven by an assumed close race. In response, Silver
published a piece in his defence that detailed ways in which the polls on which he based his models were skewed towards Democrats.
Even more damningly, Silver severely underestimated the allure of Trump, and in August 2015
gave him a 2% chance to win the Republican nomination. It was only by mid-February that his
FiveThirtyEight foretold a
45-50% likelihood of a Trump nomination. In a piece titled ‘
How I Acted Like a Pundit and Screwed Up on Donald Trump‘, Silver attempts to explain the miss by citing a lack of statistical models to track Trump due to there being no precedent for his rise, and an over-reliance on gut feelings and pundit-esque “subjective odds”. “When Trump came around, I’d turn out to be the overconfident expert,” he said, “making pretty much exactly the mistakes I’d accused my critics of four years earlier”.
But this professed ‘unforeseeability’ of the Trump phenomenon doesn’t explain why, this primary season, he
predicted a 99% chance of Clinton winning the North Carolina Democratic primary, which senator Bernie Sanders won by half a point, or
a 90% chance of winning Indiana which, again, Sanders won. Clinton is the archetypal establishment candidate for the democratic party and there should have been no dearth of data to build an analysis model on.
