well it simply comes down to they aren't much better than other groups and its most likely because they stopped being really objective. for those who have followed that site its not been fun to watch
Not true. Fivethirtyeight said repeatedly that Clinton's lead was within a standard polling error and that hence a Clinton defeat was about as likely as a Clinton landslide. They also pointed out over and over again, that the uncertainty in this election was higher than e.g. 4 years ago (Romney was given a 9% chance).
"To be honest, I’m kind of confused as to why people think it’s heretical for our model to give Trump a 1-in-3 chance — which does make him a fairly significant underdog, after all. There are a lot of ways to build models, and there are lots of factors that a model based on public polling, like ours, doesn’t consider.3 But the public polls — specifically including the highest-quality public polls — show a tight race in which turnout and late-deciding voters will determine the difference between a clear Clinton win, a narrow Clinton win and Trump finding his way to 270 electoral votes."
The number of electoral college votes is not a good measure of how close an election is. Like getting 50.5% of the vote in Florida rather than 49.5% increases your number of electoral college votes by 58.
A better measure of closeness might be how many votes would have to change to change the winner. I think by that measure this election is incredibly tight.
Right, but the prediction isn't about the "closeness" of the election in some ideal sense, it's about the distribution of electoral votes. That's why the site is called fivethirtyeight.
The electoral college system means most elections are pretty close if you consider how many votes could theoretically flip the result. About 70,000 votes would flip Florida this time, for example, and about 35,000 votes would flip Pennsylvania.
Of course, nothing is likely to come close to 2000, where changing a mere 269 votes would have changed the outcome.
In what way do you feel their so called lack of objectivity has leaked into their model?
Even ignoring the model they basically called out this exact possibility at least twice in very recent articles. One saying that people where underestimating the likelihood of Trump winning the electoral college, despite losing the popular vote. And another pointing out that Trumps was within one standard polling error of winning the presidency and people where shouldn't ignore error margins on the published polls.
