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Poll-Based System Predicts U.S. Election Results For President, Senate
An anonymous reader writes "Election Analytics is a website developed by Dr. Sheldon Jacobson at the University of Illinois designed to predict the outcomes of the U.S. presidential and senatorial elections, based on reported polling data. From the site: 'The mathematical model employs Bayesian estimators that use available state poll results (at present, this is being taken from Rasmussen, Survey USA, and Quinnipiac, among others) to determine the probability that each presidential candidate will win each of the states (or the probability that each political party will win the Senate race in each state). These state-by-state probabilities are then used in a dynamic programming algorithm to determine a probability distribution for the number of Electoral College votes that each candidate will win in the 2012 presidential election. In the case of the Senate races, the individual state probabilities are used to determine the number of seats that each party will control.'" You can tweak the site by selecting a skew toward the Republican or Democratic tickets, and whether it's mild or strong. Right now, this tool shows the odds favor another four years for Obama, even with a strong swing for the Republicans.
Fox news tells me that Romney will win 59 states and sweep Obama and his extreme socialism away forever.
Meanwhile, 13 out of 10 slashdotters are supporting Ron Paul, so clearly he is the only possible winner.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Then again there is this one http://dailycaller.com/2012/08/23/university-of-colorado-prediction-model-points-to-big-romney-win/ that has been correct every time since 1980 that says Romney will win big.
Instead, consider "wasting" your vote in a different way: By voting for someone who isn't running on a major party ticket.
Maybe if enough people realize that their vote in their state isn't actually important when it comes to choosing the next president, they can cast a vote that says "the next next president shouldn't be a Republicrat". Only 6 states in the country aren't 90% in favor of one party or the other, and with the exception of florida, none of them really have much in the way of population. If you live in a 90% state, and were going to vote for the "lesser of two evils", why note vote for "neither of two evils". It'll make no more difference, but a much stronger statement.
It's worth noting that this analysis includes data from Rasmussen, a pollster whose track record at predicting election outcomes is marred by a persistent, consistent bias. Not that they're faking the results (as some overtly partisan pollsters do), but their methodology appears to over-represent demographics that are more likely to vote Republican. According to one analysis, they overestimated votes for Republicans by 3.9%. Andrew Tanenbam's web site has a concise explanation of what's wrong with Rasmussen's numbers, and why he maintains a separate map that omits them from his own Electoral College projections. So if a system that includes Rasmussen data projects that a Democrat is going to win the presidency... that's a pretty strong indicator of which way the wind is blowing.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
It's an interesting model, but feeding a poll aggregate into a statistical prediction algorithm has been standard practice for years now. On the internet, fivethirtyeight is probably the first prominent site to have done so (originally as an independent site, before the NYTimes bought them).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I predict that our next president will be an asshole.
And the one after that, too.
And the one after that.
So aside from being a visual disaster and not providing all of the background numbers, how is this different from what Nate Silver has been doing for the last four years? Okay, it allows you to assign a swing, but it's a lot more opaque and seems a lot less robust than what Silver has been doing over at fivethirtyeight.
My Slashdot account is old enough to drink...
"We"?
Who's there with you? Or is this the royal "we" as in, "My maid was cleaning the silver with a paper towel and I had to explain to the wretched girl that we don't use paper towels on the silver here at the Romney house. I'm seriously thinking of sending her back to Ecuador."
You are welcome on my lawn.
You may not be able to vote if you live in a Republican state and your photo ID is older than 9 months or if your voter registration shows a middle initial but your ID card doesn't or your photo ID happened to expire yesterday, or you have the same name or a similarly spelled name or your photo ID is issued by one of the state universities or is a Veteran's Administration ID or if you're darker than a paper bag.
They take democracy seriously in those states and they want to protect it at all costs, even if it means several million legitimate citizens are unintentionally deprived of the right to vote.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Using intrade properly looks like it would take bookie skills. I never have bothered to learn those.
I like the electoral vote predictor. Its comments show a definite blue bias, but there is no bias in its handling of poll data. It uses the last polls taken in each state for data.
At the moment what it shows is not necessarily representative of the country, since there have been very few polls done in the last week. But now that the conventions are over, I expect that there will be a lot of polling done, and electoral-vote.com will be as accurate as anyone can get.
Will
is that he just said he doesn't think the troops are important and somehow he's still in the running. That's the kinda gaff that should've broke him. It's amazing what unlimited funds can do. Thanks Citizens United.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Ron Paul is a better Republican candidate. They're saving him for 2016, when he'll defeat Biden in a landslide.
Meg Whitman lost even though she spent $177 million to Jerry Brown's $36 million.
Jon Huntsman turned out to be incredibly bad at campaigning. Not a little bad, like "What on earth are you thinking" bad.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
That would be the definitive poll.
The idea of something like this is to illustrate how different shifts would effect the result.
If you're a campaign for example, and you're trying to figure out how to win usually, tools like this will tell you which areas are still 'in play' and might be worth fighting in (spending your advertising dollars). The campaigns themselves almost certainly have huge amounts of data about what potential voters in each area care about, and how they're going to vote, but that analysis requires a large team of people to manage. This is more for people to play with relatively easily.
In that sense I'm not hugely fond of the tool, it's still a bit too complex for easy casual fiddling, and if I was a serious campaigner I'd likely have much more data to work from - the question becomes how easy is it to flip a particular state (the obvious ones from the charts are Iowa, Ohio, Florida, and Wisconsin ) rather than which would it be nice to flip. The democrats would like to pick up texas, the republicans California, but that doesn't seem likely.
I'm in canada, so it's a little different here, but in our last federal election the NDP managed to take themselves from 3rd party to official opposition essentially from one issue, in one province (French language stuff in quebec), in one stroke they pulled the rug out from one party (the bloc quebecois) - and picked up a lot of seats putting themselves ahead of one of our two big parties (the liberals). A real GOP strategist is looking at probably 4 -6 states and wondering if there's a major issue they can take a stance on an flip the whole state. The rest of us are just playing with sliders to wonder about what could happen.
Ron Paul is a better Republican candidate. They're saving him for 2016, when he'll defeat Biden in a landslide.
I for one welcome our new geriatric overlords.
Can we get Bob Dole and John Glenn as VP candidates too?
Plot summary
In the future, the United States has converted to an "electronic democracy" where the computer Multivac selects a single person to answer a number of questions. Multivac will then use the answers and other data to determine what the results of an election would be, avoiding the need for an actual election to be held.
The story centers around Norman Muller, the man chosen as "Voter of the Year" in 2008. Although the law requires him to accept the dubious honour, he is not sure that he wants the responsibility of representing the entire electorate, worrying that the result will be unfavorable and he will be blamed.
However, after 'voting', he is very proud that the citizens of the United States had, through him, "exercised once again their free, untrammeled franchise" - a statement that is somewhat ironic as the citizens didn't actually get to vote.
The idea of a computer predicting whom the electorate would vote for instead of actually holding an election was probably inspired by the UNIVAC I's correct prediction of the result of the 1952 election.
Did they predict all of those elections ahead of time? I'm guessing not, otherwise we would have heard about it sometime around 1992. If not, the fact that it produced the correct output for every election is actually a huge red flag. Elections are complicated things with many factors that are unique to a given election. You'd expect any model that can be written down on paper to be wrong at least some of the time because there's no way to account for everything.
Likely they just went data-dredging until they found a set of variables that correlate with the election winner. Problem is, there's usually *some* set of variables that correlate with the outcome for spurious reasons. The meal preferences of an octopus, for example.
May you live long enough to be ridiculed for your age.
A quote from Ronald Reagan: "I want you to know that also I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's youth and inexperience."
Just because someone is elderly does not mean that they are senile or ready to kick the bucket. Listen to Ron Paul speak about monetary policy sometime and just try to keep up with him. He's also physically very fit, going on long bike rides in the heat of Texas. Whether you otherwise think about a candidate and their positions, ignoring or laughing at them because of their age is just silly.
All in all it's very hard not to think that the RNC must *really* want Obama to win his second term.
I've seen plausible arguments from serious (mostly liberal) commentators suggesting that a number of Republicans - especially the possible 2016 candidates - would prefer that Obama win, because they know that the economy is going to continue limping for the next four years, and continuing to blame Obama is much easier (and puts them in a much better position for 2016) than actually governing.
Polls are usually wrong by enough to matter in a close election. This is a close election and the margin of error is too great for the polls to predict anything except that we get to choose between a douche bag and a turd sandwich. That being said, I'm going with the turd sandwich who hasn't had a chance to mess things up yet.
2+2 does not equal 4 factorial.
I don't see how you can claim Obama is a clear winner. Look between the conventions - Obama gave a re-run, with no plan at all on how he plans to help anyone do anything. Just a lot of vague numbers like he has always given.
Romney meanwhile, actually laid out a five point plan:
Do you understand the irony of your own post?
You start by saying Obama has no plan, then list Romney's plan and write in brackets how Obama's plan sucks in comparison.
THEN, you turn around and point out that folks here may not like Romney's plan but at least he has a plan. However, you don't apply the same standard to yourself.
Bravo.
Nate Silver predicted Obama's win as far back as September in 2008 to within a few electoral votes. I am keeping an eye on him again this year....if he is accurate again then his model will have some strong validation.
I don't think a bad plan is necessarily better than no plan. Furthermore, I think it's better that Obama has plans rather than a simplistic list of bullet points that can be reduced to the size of a /. comment. Also, the more specific things a candidate insists they will do the less I believe them: the president rarely has the power to do the things most candidates claim they will do and their agenda should be fluid and open to compromise. So a presidential candidate with an impractical five point plan strikes me as a fool, a liar, or both.
Just for the sake of argument, since you accuse Obama of being vague:
1) What does promoting domestic energy entail? Giving large subsidies to oil companies so they can 'research' domestic energy opportunities? That's what it sounds like to me. Nice and vague.
2) Standing up to China . . . oh dear, he must be a fool. How does he intend on doing this? Very vague.
3a) What job training programs? Are they actually even worth a damn? Even if, is this something the government should be subsidizing?
3b) Stand up to teacher unions? Because those damn teachers are leaching all our tax money by making as much as factory workers. I guess they stand in the way of 'student choice' by politically opposing government subsidizing private and charter schools. Why, for a conservative, does Romney want to subsidize so many things? Also, how exactly does one blame teachers for the country's educational woes when statistics clearly show that the biggest deterrent one can have from receiving a quality education is simply being poor? In the same classroom, with the same teacher, the wealthier children will consistently outperform the poor children. But let's not look at 'vague numbers' - let's make vague accusations that imply that teachers in general are incompetent and greedy (make sure you ignore that unlike the majority of Americans, they're college educated and most could make more doing something else).
4) The deficit is hardly the scary monster everyone pretends it is. It's like college loans. You can't make them go away, they're a big scary negative number, but even if your wages get garnished they'll never really drive you to being destitute. So, even though on paper you really have less money (a large negative number) than the bum you pass everyday walking into the office (probably a smaller negative number - or maybe a positive one consisting of the sum of his change cup), you never envy the bum and you never consider him better off than you. In this case, Greece is the bum. Our debt is an inconvenience, their debt ruined them. That's because the number on paper is pretty irrelevant - it doesn't account for one's resources, it's not the be all, end all of one's worth. But it's easy to be vague and scary and behave like the graduate who's freaking out b/c they're a hundred grand in debt.
5) This is a vague way of saying: dog-eat-dog. Washington's regulatory climate does little to stifle small businesses. It's local regulation that stifles small businesses. Hell, the economy in general stifles small business. National regulation prevents banks from doing things like fraud. It prevents dirty industries from polluting the way Chinese factories do. Want more small businesses? Provide universal healthcare so people can afford to take the risk of starting a small business: As it stands, once a person gets a decent job with good benefits, he becomes scared to quit for the sake of a risk. Healthcare's like taxes: The middle class pays for most of it and it takes a huge chunk of their income. The rich pay more than anyone else, but a smaller percentage of their income than the middle class (basically, it's an inconvenience, the house isn't being put up for mortgage). The poor pay nothing. So, economically, it makes more sense to be a bartender that doesn't report most of his tips and receives welfare than to be a teacher. Make too much money, and all of a sudden you have to pay for health insurance (and co-pays) and now you technically
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
So lets look at jobs. How many jobs were created from 1/1/90 to 1/1/00? 22 million. How many jobs were created from 1/1/00 to 1/1/10? less than 0. How many jobs were created from 1/1/10 to the present day? 4.5 million. Even though the republicans gave away trillions of dollars to the rich and started two wars they could not conclude they had 0 jobs growth. Obama and Clinton started and concluded wars during their time with no loss of American life. Bush started two wars with over 5,000 American deaths and over a trillion dollars and failed to conclude either one. Bush had more time in Afghanistan to conclude that war than the amount of time Obama will have if reelected and his plan is carried out. Now lets talk about debt. Bush was responsible for over 6 trillion dollars in debt. When he left office the country was in the worst recession since the depression. So how much of Obama debt can the directly attributed to Bush. First he has to pay the interest for the 6 trillion dollars of Bush's debt. Second he has to pay for the unemployment insurance caused by Bush. Third he has to conclude both of Bush's wars. Fourth he has to do this with reduced income caused by Bush's great recession. Now lets go back 50 years to 1962. How many Americans have lost their life in foreign wars under republicans and how many under democrats? The republicans are so far in front of the democrats and yet you want another republican to be president.(hint over 16,000 dead in 1969 under Nixon).
I don't have any problem with requiring an ID, but if you're going to create a new requirement, you better have the infrastructure in place and do it in an orderly enough fashion that it doesn't disenfranchise millions of voters.
The case in Pennsylvania showed evidence of the better part of a million disenfranchised voters just in one state.
If they care about election fraud, why does it matter if the photo ID is expired? If it's my picture and my name and one doesn't have a period after the middle initial, should that disqualify me? If my ID is over 9 months old, why would that disqualify me if all they're trying to do is verify identity? And if the states that are putting these laws in place are serious, why the massive purging of voter lists? Why the closing of state offices where IDs can be obtained in poor neighborhoods? Why the limiting of hours of operation for those offices just before the election?
Sorry, pal, but this is going to be one big black mark on the political soul of the Republican Party. We have blatant voter suppression for the expressed purpose of keeping Democrats from voting (a state's atty in Pennsylvania actually admitted it on camera). You think that's OK?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Allow me to translate:
1. Screw job-creating clean energy technologies and drill, baby, drill.
2. Gut what little worker protection we have; outsource to the lowest bidder.
3a. Save $$ by shifting responsibility to states that we all know can't pay.
3b. Turn education over to private companies who are only interested in
increasing profits.
4. Cut the programs that aid people in need but don't touch defense that
fund megacorps and generate kick-backs.
5. Screw clean water, clean air, safe food, safe medicine, safe work
environments, safe vehicles, safe bridges, protection of civil rights,
a free and open internet, private property rights* or anything else
that might reduce profits.
The entire plan can be summarized: Maximise profits by socializing the risks
and costs. It's the Bush III plan.
* like granting unsupervised emminent domain power to a foreign corp
(TransCanada) to take land so they can move highly toxic sludge that no
one knows how to clean up (see "Enbridge") through the entire middle of our
country so they can ship it to other, foreign companies.