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The Art of Elections Forecasting
ideonexus writes "Years ago Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com, a blog seeking to educate the public about elections forecasting, established his model as one of the most accurate in existence, rising from a fairly unknown statistician working in baseball to one of the most respected names in election forecasting. In this article he describes all the factors that go into his predictions. A fascinating overview of the process of modeling a chaotic system."
I hope that includes "don't vote according to forecasts". I mean, it'd be nice if more people voted for the candidate they actually want instead of the one they think will win.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
Ever since the Republican members of the supreme court overturned our campaign finance laws, elections have become an epic bribe-fest where money almost always wins.
You tell me which side is outspending the other 10-1 and I'll tell you who is most likely to win the election.
Let's just save ourselves alot of time and aggravation, and ask the America's 10 most bigoted and bribe-happy billionaires who they would like to win.
Perhaps, instead of educating people to understand forecasts, we should be interested in educating people so they can make well informed and educated choices. The great majority of people have little or no education (And I do not mean literacy here). They are unable to analyse, research or investigate in a critical way. They become emotional about things are not possibly capable of understanding and allow those emotions to tell them to whom they should be giving a vote. En educated person, reads between the lines and can see why a candidate is making some promises and can tell which promises will not be fulfilled (Like closing the concentration camp in Guantanamo bay). The only problem, is that politicians that have been elected so far are against the idea of educating people as this will destroy the system as exist today and they will have to get real jobs.
88% of voters made their call when the spending was completely one-sided. Only after the Democratic primary put forth a candidate did they have targeted supportive advertising.
88% of people didn't vote for Governor Walker. So that "one-sided" spending didn't have a one-sided result.
The Governor and friendly PACs had been advertising since before January when they knew the recall was coming.
There are two things to note here. First, if the Democrat side really was that short-sighted, then they deserved to lose. That's more a criticism of your erroneous viewpoint than a criticism of the Democrats. For the second thing to note is that the Democrats have run a heavy campaign against Walker since he started his controversial tactics against the public unions. This wasn't a one-sided fight by any means.
I don't think it was lies with Obama, I think it was something i consider worse: naivete. Obama came in promising everything to everyone and their mother, because that's what populists do. But when he got into office he realized that he couldn't actually do all that he set out to do, and that Bush's policies in many cases were the best choice of a series of bad options. Case in point: he promised on the campaign trail to close Guantanamo Bay prison, and when he came into office he wrote an Executive Order closing it. It hasn't happened. Turns out that those guys over there really were terrorists captured on the battlefield, and that having them in an isolated location with 3 square and free time was a whole lot better than trying them stateside and keeping them in a SuperMax, especially when no state wanted them in their prisons.
My biggest problem is not that Obama is a liar, I really don't think he is. I just think he's a moron who sounds intelligent and is a good speaker. He believes in symbols and high ideals that sound great in a speech, like having no lobbyists in his administration, or trying Khalid Shiek Mohammad in New York, getting justice where the crime was committed. Yet when he tries to implement those ideals and symbols, he always seems surprised by the fact that his lofty ideals and symbolism doesn't work in reality, like the cost of the massive security required to host a civilian trial of KSM in New York, the massive protests and unrest, and potential plots to try and free or martyr KSM would come with that, or the fact despite how people hate lobbyists, they're also the best way to communicate to the interests of large segments of the population. Just about everything associated iwth Obama can be viewed in this context.
Lieberman is no democrat. He sabotaged the public option for the republicans by joining the threatened filibuster. Thus no majority. Thus your point is moot, coward.