Nate Silver is the founding, or one of the original founders, of 538 - which has, I see, been acquired by ABC News. He's a statistician of some repute, and competent; he's pretty good at explaining and summarizing stats to non-math types. He's gotten a lot of heat for forecasting results that were wrong, starting with the Clinton/Trump election in 2016, but if much of that is because people are terrible at understanding probability, and if you tell the average person something has an 80% chance of happening, they take it at a guarantee.
The issue is that 538 was pretty reliable at the start, but then something happened with polling and things started to go against predictions frequently enough that they sort of became just another voice - instead of a source you might use to bet on. The ABC acquisition probably didn't help.
Anyway, I digress. Nate was the statistician face behind 538. I don't know what he's doing now.
Has it corrected? He mentions in TFA that polling started to get really wrong as early voting for more popular, and wasn't properly accounted for. I admit, I was one of the ones that lost faith in 538 because of the repeated dissonance. They knew something was off, but seemed unable to adjust their models to account for it. I still appreciate his analysis, but I'd love it if he's addressed the issues in the modeling.
Anytime there's a story with the slightest criticism of Biden (or Dems in general) I've noticed people just downvote the hell out of it, lol. Trump agreed to all of Bidens crazy demands just so he would have a chance to debate him even though CNN just happens to be network that was caught giving Hillary the heads up on the questions being asked during her debate with Trump. Hopefully it'll be different this time but I've got my doubts
By moving the first debate to before the Democratic convention in August, Democrats increase their option value. Here’s what I mean by that. If Biden totally and irrecoverably screws up in the June debate — he’s just obviously no longer ready for prime time — then he can step down and Democrats can pull the Ezra Klein break-glass-in-case-of-emergency plan and hold a contested convention. It’s not ideal — that’s an understatement — but it’s much less bad than going into the final months of the campaign certain to lose.
