FiveThirtyEight: Biden's chances to win the Primaries moved from 15% to 88% in less than a week!

[tandem5]

9. I think you can model a primary.

It's just that 538 did an extremely poor job. I mean consider the hurricane path projection analogy. A week out it could make landfall practically anywhere, the uncertainty cone is huge. As it gets closer and you get more information the cone narrows. That's how it should work here. 538 can't control the speed at which the cone narrows because it can't control when meaningful information comes in so it's not a failure on their part to create a model that keeps a wide cone over a seemingly long period. People seeking instant gratification may not like that, but you cant make something out of nothing -- It's arbitrary to say after three or four primaries that they had enough information to make specific probability claim when the information just wasn't there. They operated their model like a static band and not a narrowing cone. In other words they traded accuracy for precision and ended up with neither.