Are the forecasters herding?

You hear a bunch of talk about how pollsters will "herd" the results to become more similar, but is that what the forecasters are doing with their forecasting?

So the various forecasters seem to be stuck right around a 55% chance of Trump winning. Currently:

• 538 is at 54% for Trump

• Nate Silver is at 54% for Trump

• Hill/DDHQ is at 54% for Trump

• The Economist is at 56% for Trump.

These numbers have been stagnant for the past two or three weeks or ever since Trump has sort of flipped the script and the forecasts went from a Harris lead to a Trump lead. Perhaps they moved two or three percent for Trump over the past two weeks or so, but they seem stubbornly stuck at where they are. Meanwhile the betting odds are moving and continue to move. Even this morning, the number on Trump in the RCP averages has bumped up to almost 63%. You can see from the chart that unlike our forecasters, there has been consistent movement here.

Now getting back to the herding aspect. Silver and others seem to be complaining that there are not as many outliers, or that the outliers are now "herding" themselves back into the crowd. I suspect that the 538 crew and people like Silver don't like this, because the herding generally consolidates towards the Republicans at the end.

My personal believe has always been that too many pollsters are just telling their fans what they want to hear early on in the cycle hoping to create momentum, then get more serious towards the end about getting an accurate number. That seems to make mores sense than the idea that somehow there is a polling conspiracy for everyone to come up with a similar result. I think the similar result should be a given if polling is done consistently and well. Why should we see one pollster showing Trump up three points and other showing Harris up seven? That is a ten point swing between two pollsters who are supposedly asking the same questions of similar people.

At the end of the day I expect herding and I expect that the herding results are more (and not less) accurate than when we see a wide range of outliers. Now we just have to wonder if any of the projectionists are willing to start moving their numbers at all, or if we are stuck at the so called 50/50 coin flip rhetoric that we are hearing over and over and over from the prognosticators.