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Nate Silver's Numbers Indicate Probable Obama Win, World Agrees
An anonymous reader writes "The state-by-state election outcome probabilities today on Nate Silver's 538 imply a 97.7% probability for Obama to win 270 or more electoral college votes this coming Tuesday. A site that allows anyone but U.S. citizens vote seems to indicate that the rest of the world hopes these numbers are accurate. "
What's in it for the rest of the world if Obama wins?
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
But liars figure.
Now does anyone have data on whether the forecasting of a win discourages the supporters or opponents of the projected winner from actually voting?
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
The link to FiveThirtyEight says Silver predicts an 86.3% chance of an Obama victory. The "97%" link is to an anonymous python script and output at a different site. Could we get some context here?
The combination of the headline and TFS might be construed as "Nate Silver says that Obama's got a 97.7% chance of winning the election," which isn't quite true.
I think it's more accurate to say that Nate Silver predicts an 86.3% chance of Obama winning 270 electoral votes.
3D Printing Tips and Tricks at Zheng3.com
Bwah? 97.7%? I'm only seeing an 86.3% chance.
Or is the "Chance of winning" sidebar item incorrect?
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Taking a hint from the last election, if the news outlets all say that Obama will win, then everybody will vote for Obama because everybody loves to vote for the winner. They got him in last time and they are doing their best to get him in this time. Not that I think Romney is great either, but Obama has just been awful for our country, for international relations, and for me personally.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Compared to Romney, Obama is likely to be somewhat less friendly to hedge funds and private equity companies, since they drive up prices and reduce jobs and wages for the profit of individuals. Full employment in the US, more middle class spending power, and lower commodity prices are better for everybody. More money in the hands of the very few is bad for everybody else. Romney is a representative of exactly those very few.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Nate Silver puts the odds at around 87%, largely based on the chance of there being a systematic offset in the polling data. Still looks pretty good for Obama, though. Fingers crossed.
Visit the
A site that allows anyone but U.S. citizens vote seems to indicate that the rest of the world hopes these numbers are accurate.
Okay so you're talking about roughly six and a half billion people. As of the writing of this post, votevotevote.net's page says:
1050 VOTES have been received
Furthermore can someone point me to, say, a Chinese version of votevotevote.net's page? I mean, surely you'd want to represent the largest population of the world or are you simply relying on the rest of the world to speak English? And you're going to then utilize that as evidence that the rest of the world hopes that Obama wins? Surely this site isn't even worth mentioning in a news context.
My work here is dung.
Nate Silver's use of statistics is geeky. Really. That's about all he talks about -- not politics, but statistics. (Well, and sports, but even there, he's all about the statistics.)
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Vote for the Mormon or you'll get the Muslim. Communism is NOT THE ANSWER.
As a Brit, I honestly have no idea whether this is parody or not.
According to today's actual posting from Nate Silver, the same data leads him to conclude an 86.3% chance of an Obama win in the electoral college. Still high, but your "Nate Silver's Numbers Project..." headline is true if parsed carefully, but very misleading. If you want to say "I conclude from Nate Silver's numbers...", well fine.
Silver's Nov. 4 post is at: http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/05/nov-4-did-hurricane-sandy-blow-romney-off-course/ (paywall :-( )
He ate his dog.
I can only hope that Nate is correct.
I'm not saying that Obama has done a great job. I think he squandered a lot of the extreme level of public goodwill that he had coming into office. However, he did drag the US kicking and screaming into the first world by passing healthcare reform (even if it didn't end up single payer thanks to campaign contributions to even his own party) and he did manage to blunt some of the economic disaster he was left with.. on the other hand he definitely should have thrown a ton of the wall streeters into jail instead of inviting them right back into the White House, but that is how the game is played now. It is the golden rule. Those with the gold make the rules.
Romney on the other hand is hard to pin down. He has taken every stance available on every issue. For the slashdot crowd, the fact that his numbers just don't add up should be a big red flag as well. In his desperation to get elected he just tells whatever crowd he is in front of exactly what they want to hear.. facts be damned.
The polarization, name calling, and divisiveness in politics is at an obscene level in the USA right now and unfortunately Canada isn't far behind. Truth seems to have gone right out the window.
The spending on elections is disgusting.
I'm so glad it will be over either way..
Is this based on polling data where everyone assumes
-they will not be told they lack sufficient ID to exercise their right to vote
-they will not be told they failed to register through the proper procedure
-the polling location was open during normal business hours
-their eligibility to vote has not been challenged by "Americans for Happy Fun Love" funded by conservative activists to accuse voters of being felons and therefore unable to vote
-they have not been notified via a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard' that they weren't able to vote for some other reason
-the electronic voting machine will register their vote for someone who is not closely associated with the owner of the machine and software
-other reasonable-sounding assumptions that may not be safe assumptions?
But winning the battle won't win the war. Mr. Obama will be weakened by the divisive campaign; the electorate is bitterly split, and he will find Congress harder to work with. The members of Congress will be acutely aware that 48 or 49% of the popular vote went to his opponent (and he may even lose the popular vote). They will be less willing to go out on a limb to support his policies unless they are from strongly pro-Obama districts, and the average district will be closer to a 49-51 split.
This year's elections reflect a very divided country that is uncertain how to proceed. As the wars wind down, the economy will be the foremost topic on most people's minds, and Mr. Obama has only a minority of the people's support on economic issues. Probably, we will have four years of deadlock and uncertainty followed by the 2016 presidential elections which will either vindicate Mr. Obama's big government approach, or relegate him to the history books.
Just my humble opinions :)
I hope that everyone votes tomorrow, regardless of your choice. The best possible outcome is that everyone votes; that way, the elections more fully reflect the will of the people, so that we can put this nastiness behind us, let bygones be bygones, and move on. Democracy -- gotta love it! The worst possible form of government, except for all the other forms of government (Winston Churchill).
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
...is a shining example of nonpartisan analysis, sound statistics, and rational thought.
That's a pretty good description of Nate Silver and why people pay attention to him.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
I'm pretty sure the second post on /. was something like this.
Why is it we need to be told over and over who will win the election before the voting even takes place?
It is worth noting (as the summary currently does not) that the 97.7% is an interpretation of the results found in the 538 blog(*). The 538 blog itself only mentions a 86 overall predicted chance according to its author's models in the latest entry.
As I have read Nate Silver's 538 blog over the past few months, he seems to be going out of his way to state that he only predicting the statistical likelyhood of who may win, and the election may go to the other candidate regardless of the odds (or if his model is wrong). Meanwhile many other news sources seem to shove definite answers down his throat.
Let's not try to make the same mistake here.
(*) 538 = number of votes in the Electoral College
better the devil you know than the devil who won't tell you anything substantial about his devious plans, if they even exist.
Does this model account for any direct or indirect vote tampering?
giggity
Vote for the Mormon or you'll get the Muslim. Communism is NOT THE ANSWER.
As a Brit, I honestly have no idea whether this is parody or not.
As a foreigner having been living legally in a Southern American State for quiet a few years, I can inform you that it is sadly not a parody. It is frankly a very scary belief by many.
As a Brit, I honestly have no idea whether this is parody or not.
It's a reference to a church sign seen in rural Texas:
http://gawker.com/5953608/quaint-texas-church-tells-people-to-vote-for-the-mormon-not-the-muslimyou-should-stop-by-and-pray-sometime
Whether the commenter was taking it seriously, I have no idea.
Visit the
For a long while I thought Mitt's official twitter account was a parody account.
This shit is ridiculous. In this age of modern speed-of-light communications, it takes TWO YEARS to choose a president. In George Washington's time, it took less time to visit every town on horseback and make his case.
Oh, and thanks to Florida's genius governor, Rick Scott, cutting early voting short, you've got a good chance of another six weeks of court battles an recounts.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
If the US were Europe, the world will be a far worse place.
Certainly. Then you'd have Texas instead of Spain. Then YOU ALL would have had to deal with George Bush.
You know, you folks really owe us a debt of gratitude.....
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Not funny enough to be sarcasm. Not insightful enough to be irony. Logically inconsistent.
87.83% chance this represents somebody's reality.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
PLEASE VOTE!!!!!!
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
I identified the things that, if they happened to the US economy, would be a net benefit to the rest of the world. I do not expect that they will necessarily happen if Obama returns. But I can be fairly sure that under Romney the corporate rape of the American middle class would get worse, not better.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
The article shows exactly why statistics are best left to the statisticians. As several posters have already noted, Nate Silver's prediction is 86.3%. It looks like the 97.7% number comes from running a variety of simulations that assume that state-by-state votes are independent random variables. Except they aren't--doing well in one state is likely correlated with doing well in a neighbouring state. There's a covariance term that will reduce the probability to Nate Silver's lower number.
the Electoral College, but loses the popular vote --- for bonus points, it'd be funny if Romney manages to beat him in the popular vote while still losing the election. Hopefully Gary Johnson will pull enough votes from both candidates to make people take the Libertarians seriously.
Best debate interaction ever:
``The person who wins the popular vote should win the Presidency.''
``Do you know what mechanism the Founding Fathers placed in the Constitution to defend us from demagoguery?'' ::blank stare::
``Well, that explains your unfounded, ill-informed opinion.''
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Many people don't have a clue what Mormons are like.
This is not just another religion, folks, it is a CULT and there are
some very sinister aspects to it.
Even if you disregard the above, how can you think that a man who thought
it was "OK" to drive on the highway with the family dog on the roof of the car ?
No decent human being does something like this. And decency is what the US
and the world need most right now.
.
The Republican primaries showed massive statistically provable voter fraud. The geeks will be there crunching those Florida and Ohio numbers, but the President needs to stick with it and not let Romney & the Republicans steal the election.
It's not over till the fraudsters who rigged the Primaries against Ron Paul and Santorum, and presumably will try to rig the voting machines again against Obama, are in jail.
http://www.themoneyparty.org/main/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Republican-Primary-Election-Results-Amazing-Statistical-Anomalies_V2.0.pdf
I've even heard that Canada's actually intending to tighten border security if Romney wins.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Seeing as younger voters tend to vote democrat, and the fact that younger voters are also more likely to be on slashdot (and this voting site) than older voters, combined with the fact that his total vote count is only about 1200, I would hardly consider this a good sampling.
Supplies!
Enjoy your back-patting based on "informed guesses" that rest atop an eight percent response rate.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
What he did when he was governor, what he told the Republican base to get nominated, or what he told people after being nominated?
What's really funny is these Tea Party nut jobs are going to vote for a Mormon. If it wasn't election season they would all be passing around anti-Mormon propaganda videos.
You gotta wonder if their racial bigotry is overriding their religious bigotry and if they would vote for the Democrat if he were white.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Not-for-profits are not supposed to be able to endorse a candidate. Are religious organizations exempt from this?
A country that's not ruled by someone who believes in a crazy religion?
Given the degree of failure we see each and every time Keynesian economics is tried through history, I'd say we very much have a country ruled by a group with a crazy religion.
The difference between Mormonism and Keynesian is that at times Mormons have actually helped people.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's hard to win a war you're not fighting. If anything, both parties are deeply enmeshed in the resistance movement. There's no white horse waiting to gallop over the horizon to rescue America from two-party gridlock politics. It's not an accident that the equilibrium is carefully titrated to minor victories. How much does it cost to achieve a landslide? An extra half billion dollars? What's the marginal return of a landslide victory over squeaking into office?
The trailing candidate can usually find a divisive issue to rally support from some hard-line group or another. It will keep the polls close enough that a major stumble by your adversary down the stretch could propel you over the bar (at which point you'll regret your small constituency hard-line allies and will immediately busy yourself with the unctuous politics of handing out Associate Producer credits to your purported entourage to mollify and distract). In short, if you aren't getting any, you can always sleep with the fat girl, then hope like hell to shake her loose if your fortunes improve. When image matters, nobody goes without.
The hardest promises to keep are the mutually incompatible promises to hard-line cliques you're ass kissing to remain respectable in the polls. Centrist candidates chew off fewer arms the morning after.
Rootstrikers is one of a number of organizations actually fighting this war against divisive, bitterly-split government. It begins with campaign finance reform, and continues with the diminishment of lobbyism.
If you think the current electoral process is about making America governable, you're smoking a crack pipe.
I mean honestly, why would we?
On a pure geopolitical level, one would expect "other countries" citizens to hope that the guy will win who'll weaken the US as an international competitor.
So like Chavez, Castro, and Putin all rooting for Obama, this "world vote" should be a negative indicator of who Americans vote for, no?
On a further note, Americans rarely care who the leadership will be in any other country, why should we care what foreign citizens hope for our leadership?
Seriously - for 8 years of the Bush2 administration, we heard about nothing but the evils of 'cowboy' diplomacy and US unilateralism. Yet the last 4 years have been nothing if not the "US Apologia World Tour 2012" in which our president has repeatedly apologized for US conduct and stressed multilateralism - and I don't see that anything's really improved.
-Styopa
What's his official account? Not @mittromney, because that's a joke for sure.
Yeah, it can matter, because even if 90% of what two candidates will do is identical (and you believe it's all a bad idea), the remaining 10% can have an impact. People were saying "Bush vs. Gore, does it really matter?" back in 2000. In retrospect, don't you think that certain things would have turned out rather differently--enough so to matter?
The Republican primaries showed massive statistically provable voter fraud.
Thus showing they are behind the Democrats who specialize in massive undetectable voter fraud.
It's funny how liberals claim Republicans are cheating, but the only evidence of cheating anyone actually finds is from Democrats.
At the very least, stop pretending the party you care so much for is a paragon of virtue. Chicago Democrats practically invented fake votes.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Quite a few things, for example less sword rattling in the Iran/Israel region
Totally agree, far better the sword rattling is replaced by the screams of millions perishing in nuclear fire.
Oh wait.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
No, actually, I don't think things would have been different under Gore. I have zero faith in either of the two major candidates. I had zero faith in both Bush and Gore, as well. We know how Bush turned out. Speculating on how Gore would have behaved is irrelevant, but I don't believe he would have been any different. It doesn't matter who the President is, every year we lose one or more of the three things I mentioned in my OP. Is that a cynical and pessimistic attitude to take? Of course. But it's one born of long experience. The joke about lying politicians is as old as politics. Politicians will say absolutely anything to get elected and none of it has the slightest bearing on how they will perform their job. The new role of government in the 21st Century is to feed itself and to keep itself in power. Serving the People comes in at a distant 20th or 50th or 100th.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Dude, they're electing the leader of the free world. Taking an interest is not unreasonable.
[FUCK BETA]
An American President who isn't xenophobic and war-crazy.
Well that would obviously be Romney.
Because Obama has:
Kept Gitmo open.
Greatly accelerated drone killings
is the president who used assassination openly against a leader of an opposing military force.
Used U.S. military forces to liberate Libya without asking Congress for permission (wow if only Bush had thought of that first imagine what he would have gotten done!)
Put a huge surge of troops into Afghanistan
No, Obama is TOTALLY DIFFERENT. He's worse...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
you get voted down because you are in a group that thinks. there's a difference.
No, religious organization are definitely not exempt. But enforcement is... somewhat lax.
Visit the
No, they are not exempt. But above and beyond innumerable loopholes, the government has simply declined to even try to enforce existing regulations.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_IRS_CHURCH_POLITICS?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME
any different from the last 4 years? when one side considers their main goal to make the other sides guy a one term president, you are about as divisive as you can get. At least this time, everyone know up front what they are trying to do. whether or not they can do anything about it, I don't know.
It is already in the bag
every time I refresh the page everything changes.
of your tag line along with your spew of a post is undoubtedly lost on you.
This U.S. citizen would be happy with even a real two-party system, instead of the one-party pretending to be two we have now.
A quick read of the source code suggests that the author is assuming each state's outcome is independent of the other states, which is highly suspect. There's a reason Nate's prediction is much lower than 97.7%. Romney's chances are better than 2.3% because if he wins (for example) Ohio, then he is likely to have also won Florida and Virginia.
So you're telling me there's a chance. Yeah! I read ya.
Our choice this year is either John Jackson or Jack Johnson. Two right-wingers who won't do anything substantial except work to erode more of our freedom, privacy, and wallets.
FTFY.
Vote for the Mormon or you'll get the Muslim. Communism is NOT THE ANSWER.
As a Brit, I honestly have no idea whether this is parody or not.
I think he means that conversion to Mormonism is easier than conversion to Islam because Mormonism does not require you to, umm.... drop your Doogie Howsers and have a bit off of your Hampton Wick sliced off, also, on an unrelated note, movie and music piracy is wrong (strange tangent to go off on given where he started but sometimes these Yanks just do weird things).
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Nope. But the IRS isn't willing to take up the case until they're sure they can get a Supreme Court majority. So churches, pastors, etc. take every opportunity to endorse whomever they want, even organizing events like Pulpit Freedom Sunday and sending taped copies of their speeches to the IRS as a deliberate taunt.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
Not-for-profits are not supposed to be able to endorse a candidate. Are religious organizations exempt from this?
They aren't supposed to be exempt, but apparently enforcement of this is basically non-existent.
Don't you mean, Y'ALL?
He has the correct explanation.
Yeah, I view Obama as a slightly more liberal Bush, kind of like how Romney would have been a slightly more conservative Obama.
liberals crumbs like repealing DADT
Not gay. However, I've gotten the briefings on the effects of ending DADT. The end of DADT means one, and only one thing - you can no longer be tossed out of the military for declaring yourself gay.
However, because of the continued presence of DOMA and other laws, said gay military member can get a state recognized marriage yet the best treatment they can hope for their spouse from the military would be the same as for a friend - IE 'nadda'. No dependency status, no base housing, no married rate BAH, family seperation pay, medical, etc... Especially if the gay member is junior, they can be assigned unaccompanied housing in a barraks/dorm room.
If the member is transferred overseas, no passport/visa assistance, no benefits back home, etc... Even if the member is being sent to a 'gay friendly' country in Europe*.
It's not my fight, but I couldn't help but think that while repealing DADT is a step in the right direction, the system still screws such couples royally.
*Let's face it, there are some countries in the world where the US Military has permanent bases that you wouldn't want to advertise.
I don't read AC A human right
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_in_Canada
Actually, "y'all" is singular. The plural is "All y'all."
You REALLY need to go back and take a government class if you think Obama is a socialist.
Your post's sentiment is exactly why I'm really embarassed to be an American these days. Such a large portion of our population of red blooded 'Mericans would rather hold on to the idea that the rich white guys should be the only one holding power and that anything they do in Europe is automatically a bad idea. We'd rather be wrong and independant that admit someone else does something better.
You likely have never traveled far from your hometown. Social services around the rest of the "1st world" are far superior to what we have. They also manage things with far less corruption and abuse. Whereas we want to keep cutting education budgets and dumbing down our population even more so that those few rich, white guys can have an easier time controlling the masses.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
Christmas Island (of goatse.cx fame) is 100% for Romney. Is this significant? Should I be breathless with anticipation? Or should I prepare to keep my eyes tightly shut in fear of seeing... him again?
The Northern Marianas are also 100% for Romney [gasp]! Mind you, it's only one voter each for both of these polities. The only other place with a majority for Romney right now is Lithuania, where 3 voters out of 5 plumped for him. Anywhere else with more than 2 votes is for Obama, often heavily and with several at 100% (he got all 32 votes from Austria, for instance).
Of course, the numbers are pretty low everywhere, as would be expected for a site like that.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
I doubt Romney would have received the nomination if Obama was white. Santorum probably would have won.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
Even British conservatives find Romney pretty scary.
There are lot of factors that lead to this. The Media being a big deal
Human nature and incentive structures explains most of the problems. The media is just reflecting who we are. I would welcome an erudite and dry public discussion of the issues, but you don't even get that in peer reviewed literature. (The hard sciences do a much better job then the social sciences and humanities, which are just laughable in their arrogance.) Nobody really listens to opposing points of view, but instead, we just cluster around narratives that reify our existing prejudices.
Perhaps the magic of democracy is simply that we have regular peaceful transitions of power. All the mouth-flapping is pretty meaningless.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
More central bank bailouts and foreign aid, at least in theory. In practice, I don't think Romney will do anything differently in that regard.
It is important to look to the constituency of the party. Who will have the most say when it comes to the issues.
The Dems (through Ruben and Summers) have a long history of financial deregulation, and are simply extending the intellectual heritage of Alan Greenspan -- who is a fan of Ayn Rand. Deregulation of the financial sectors was bi-partisan.
But recently we've seen wall street very upset with Obama over proposed regulations. In particular, we've got loan reform, credit card reform, and additional capital requirements on "too-big-to-fail" companies. The Dems have said that if your business really is so large that the government will be forced to bail you out, that the government has a regulatory interest in making sure you have enough capital to meet your leverage. Less risk means less short-term profit and big CEO bonuses.
So Wall street (which supported Obama in 2008) has been heavily investing in the GOP this cycle, and the GOP will probably repeal those regulations. That will probably have no near-term impact. Long-term, it will almost certainly mean there will be another government bailout to cover for corruption in the financial sector.
So the Dems and GOP are really opposite on this issue right now -- while historically (in the 90s and 00s) they have been aligned on the issue.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
I'm surprised the NY Times says the race is that close. Even if we throw out the Times' bias and the fact that a bunch of inaccurate/biased polls don't make them more accurate, I disagree with the logic behind the article ...
I have no idea who will win, but "national" polls aren't useful because of the Electoral college (skipping the U.S. history lesson) - I'll wholeheartedly agree that Obama has a 98% chance of winning the popular vote, but the election will come down to a couple "swing states" (Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin). Romney could lose the popular vote big in California and New York, therefore lose the popular vote, but win enough of the other (smaller) states to win the required 270 Electoral college votes.
I am also extremely confident in predicting that neither candidate will win a "landslide" of the popular vote, but either candidate could win an electoral college landslide (define "landslide" as 60% or more).
For example: 1984 the popular vote was 58.8% Reagan over 40.6% Mondale, but Mondale only won 13 Electoral college votes to Reagan's 525 ("landslide"). In 2008 the popular vote was 52.9% Obama over 45.7% McCain, the Electoral College result was 365 to 173 ... (landslide in Electoral college, but not in the popular vote)
the only thing that is 97.7% probable is that it will be very close. The "election experts" have been saying for a long time that it will come down to voter turnout, which is 100% true
It ain't what they call you. It's what you answer to. http://mylyceum.us/
I've been tracking http://electionanalytics.cs.illinois.edu/ for some time now -- a University managed site that uses Bayesian analysis of all of the available polls to come up with their estimates. I tend to think that Universities are less likely to biased in their poll meta-analysis in the first place, and of course I'm a big fan of Bayesian analysis for large multifactorial problems with many levels of conditional and marginal probability. Anyway, this site is a lot less ambiguous -- it currently calls it for Obama at the level of 99.6% probability, with an expected electoral vote count of almost 303 for Obama (where "EEV" isn't an integer valued function but rather reflects the expected mean outcome of many "elections" held assuming that there is some sort of unbiased iid process underlying the poll noise). Romney's numbers are dropping, fairly rapidly, over the last week -- it looks like Obama is very likely to be 99.9% likely to win going into the actual election on Tuesday.
You won't see this on the major news stations, of course, as they long ago gave up any pretence at objectivity in the election, and besides, if the election were statistically certain going into Election Day (as this one appears to be) it might actually influence the outcome, just as the stations that persist in claiming that Romney HAS a chance, or HAS "momentum" (whatever the hell that means outside of the context of physics in an environment where his polling numbers are almost without exception going down) are trying to influence the election, just as the stations that make the opposite claim for Obama are trying to influence the elections.
The other nice thing about the election analytics site is that it also predicts the cumulative outcome of the Senate and House races. The Senate race currently suggests that Obama will win by enough to have some coattails to catch and help out in close races there, although the House races appear to be a lock at this point. We'll see if any house races end up as surprises -- possible if Obama beats 300 EV by a substantial margin, possible if the fact that the election is "over" in many states and districts causes the Republicans to just stay home and not bother to vote "only" for a congressional candidate where a lot of democrats show up to ride the Obama wave home.
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
It's strange, friends and coworkers call me a nerd for talking about politics. On /., that's not nerdy enough.
At least on /. you're more likely to find reasonable debate and interesting opinions. Of course there's always crap posts mixed in, like ACs complaining that politics isn't a nerdy enough topic, but you're the one who decided to click on the story. . .
There are other stories that were submitted today, some that even deal exclusively with science and technology. Yet you're mad that people are talking politics a day before election day.
Which in turn is why the Times bought him and, as far as I can tell, hasn't changed anything but the branding.
I don't know who is going to win but I predict a 100% chance that the looser in the Presidential election will be the American voter.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Not sure what the idea is. Nate Silver does have an estimate, and it's currently at 86.1%. Not sure what to make of an analysis that is allegedly based on his predictions but comes up with different odds...
There's no difference between the 2 candidates we're "allowed" to vote for... so who the hell cares? Will we still be attacking Iran sometime next year? Will surveillance cameras still be going up on every street corner? Will my taxes AND national debt continue to climb while public services and infrastructure continue to dwindle? The answer to all of that is "yes", irrelevant of who wins the election. If you're voting democrat or republican, YOU are the problem. Wake up.
You REALLY need to go back and take a government class if you think Obama is a socialist.
Of course Obama is a Socialist, And a Muslim. Here's what it says in the "Conservative Radio Talk Show Dictionary"
Socialist: See Obama, Barack. .
Muslim: See Terrorist, See also Obama, Barack
Let's look up Mitt Romney...
Romney, Mitt: Socialist liberal who implemented a Obamacare-esque healthcare plan in MA while he was Governor.
Oops, it looks like I have an outdated version of the dictionary, let me check a newer version.
Romney, Mitt: Conservative Icon, Our Best Hope to deliver us from the ungodly Liberal Communist Obamacare scourge.
If Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck say it it has to be true, right?
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Yeah. Modded to +4, Insightful. Wonderful.
No matter how stupid and uninformed you are, get out there and vote. That way, we can perpetuate the distraction of the two-party system. --Stox
As a U.S. citizen I share the sentiment, but the fact is we have lots of political parties. I just wish more of them were strong enough to play a significant role in the political discourse. As it is, my concern is that if either of the two big ones collapsed due to internal issues, the remaining "superpower" party would tilt the political tables so far in their own direction that we'd end up with effectively a single party tyranny. They've both shown historical tendencies to act that way.
WALSTIB!
Except of course that Nate Silver does not actually have a track record. He predicted the outcome of one election accurately. That is not a "track record". Nate Silver built his reputation on analyzing baseball, then when he predicted 2008 accurately, he was called the new genius of political polling. Analysis of polling data is significantly different than analysis of baseball stats. This does not mean that he is not a good analyst of political polls. What it means is that he does not have a long enough track record for us to know if he is a good analyst of political polls.
His comments this election cycle certainly suggest that he is partisan rather than nonpartisan. The other two parts will have to wait at least until we see the outcome of this election (if he turns out to be correct in this election, I would suggest increased confidence in his accuracy, but a little bit of skepticism because we are still talking a short enough time frame that his success might be partially due to chance rather than accurate analysis).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
...
Let's see who's talking in Romney's camp: Evangelical Christians who believe the earth is a couple thousand years old. Then there's Mormons, who refer to their church as "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints" so the evangelicals don't realize that they're Mormons. There's the KKK and other racists. The Koch brothers and Karl Rove. People who believe that spending money is an exercise of free speech. The Ayn Rand fans who believe that altruism is a sin. Need I go on? Not really the best can of worms for you to open up.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
I've found some interesting statistics. Start with Nate Silver's article today. Note that if Romney wins even 0.55% more of the popular vote than Obama, Nate gives Romney a 50-50 chance of winning. Now go to Intrade, which currently is being massively manipulated, but ignore the popular Obama and Romney markets, and look at the Romney/Obama wins by more than 0.5% of the vote market. It's currently showing 42% for Romney and 57% for Obama, meaning they can't predict within 1% where the vote will land with more than 15% probability! Even the pollsters are confused.
So, I'd rather be Obama than Romney at this point, but with such crummy ability to guess how people are going to vote, Romney's odds aren't bad. That would help explain why Intrade is giving around 66% chance of Obama win, rather than anything like the probabilities Nate is giving him. I think if Nate took this into account properly, he'd be more in line with Intrade, even if Intrade is being manipulated.
There are really two very interesting races going on here. I'll watch the Romney/Obama results tomorrow eagerly, but there's also the Gallup/Nate Silver race. If Gallup is right about the popular vote (Romney by 5%), Romney wins by a landslide, Nate loses, and Gallup will become the only pollster of any worth. If all the other pollsters are right, Obama wins, Nate's status grows, and Gallop is surely run by worthless fools. It's really Gallup sticking their neck out, and I'm going to enjoy seeing if it gets chopped off or not.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
You think Gore would have gone into Iraq? We've spent in the neighborhood of $3 trillion there. Thats about $10,000 per capita in the U.S.. That's rather a lot of money. Maybe you think it's money well spent, or maybe you think it's a waste, but it almost certainly would have been spent dramatically different under Gore.
You think McCain would have passed Obamacare (which might be a pretty big deal to the ~5% of the people who will be covered who weren't before, and to the people who have to pay for it)? Despite presidents failing to pass health care reform for decades (and mostly it being a Democratic initiative)?
Or, to play cynicism against cynicism--you don't think that each party wants to do something to fire up its base and stick it to the other guys so they'll win the *next* election?
There are a lot of ways that it doesn't matter. But to say it doesn't matter at all sounds like a rationalization for not paying attention or getting involved--or it deserves a really robust argument.
For one thing Canada won't have to put up with Americans abusing their socialized healthcare system.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Two. He got the midterms right too (to the consternation of many on the left before the actual vote happened).
Admittedly two-for-two isn't a huge sample size, but many of the pollsters can't even boast that storied of a career. Other poll aggregators have even less going for them. Perhaps that's more of an indictment of the current state of the art than it is a brag for Nate, but either way it leaves those of us trying to objectively analyze the numbers in the same position: Until something better comes along, 538's the best we have.
I don't think Obama knew how polarizing of a figure he would be. Republicans never like a Democrat, but they positively hate Obama. He didn't anticipate the lengths they would go to make his presidency look weak. Like blocking the Veterans Jobs Bill.
It takes a lot of chutzpah to say that military spending is ok and shouldn't be defunded, start two wars under the last Republican president, and then block a bill to take the survivors of those very same wars and deny them aid. And then claim Obama isn't keeping his promises!
It honestly boggles me how anyone can vote for these people.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Dude... they gave him a Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 just for not being George W Bush .
Think about that.
The guy fucked everybody's shit up so much that they gave some other guy a Nobel Peace Prize just for not being him.
Yeah, I'm graced with his paid facebook posts. He sounds like a time traveler from a parallel universe where sounding like a 50's educational films narrator was the height of style. His "patriotisim" reeks of egotisim, eleetism and insanity. You get the feeling that in the paralell universe he's from he launched a first strike against the USSR on his first day of office.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Obama can only pull close to even in the latest CNN poll with a D+11 sample in a year when it looks like an R+6 electorate?
Romney in a blowout.
"The one" is done.
The world's opinion is irrelevant to our elections. As to the accuraacy of sabremetrics applied to politics in a situation where the only metrics are subjective polls with a veneer of objectivity (becuase the results are expressed numerically), let's talk Wednesday.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
I've often wondered, naively no doubt, why there isn't a bigger bias towards re-electing the incumbent. After all the incumbent has 4 years job experience as president and the challenger has none.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
I'm almost certain Gore wouldn't have invaded Iraq. I'm reasonably certain he wouldn't have invaded Afghanistan. The enormous cost to America, in lives and treasure, of those two wars does not seem to have brought corresponding benefits.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
"Stealing" ideas? Anybody who bothered to pay attention knew exactly where the ideas behind "obamacare" came from, and that they had been implemented in Mass.
I think -you- need to get a grip, and a clue.
I think among other things Obama proposed this set of reforms because he actually sought compromise with serious Republicans on free-market heath care reform. But there are no serious Republicans, as your post proves. If any of you had any balls at all, or gave a damn about the issues at stake, you would have -claimed- credit for obamacare, and passed it by approbation. Instead, I bet you now say it's flat unconstitutional. What a crock.
Matt
The funny thing is, you call people concerned about AGW "chicken littles".
Based on how vague actual problems arising from this are, that's the only rational approach.
Oh, but it's ok to be an outright fearmonger because it's something that you, personally, *really* believe might happen?
Let's turn this around. YOU are freaked out because in 100 years the ocean might be a foot higher. You are freaked out based on remote probabilities AGW may have some negative impact on people despite history showing humanity prospers during periods of warmer climate.
And yet you have no problem with Iran which has repeatedly stated intent to cleanse Israel with nuclear fire, and has an active program to develop nuclear weapons. No sir, no issues there! Go right ahead Iran!
You don't care about humanity at all. You only care about your cult and being right. In the end is that not the true definition of hypocrite?
I'll let you have the last word because cultists never let go, even when they've been shown to be guilty of the very things they accuse others of.
When millions die in Israel (and elsewhere) I hope you remember your little fantasy here and have at least a tiny smidgen of guilt.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Vote for the Mormon or you'll get the Muslim. Communism is NOT THE ANSWER.
As a Brit, I honestly have no idea whether this is parody or not.
As a foreigner having been living legally in a Southern American State for quiet a few years, I can inform you that it is sadly not a parody. It is frankly a very scary belief by many.
I can honestly say that I've heard the same words come out of my Oklahoman father's mouth as all the family and friends around the dinner table just nod in agreement. He gets all sorts of strange emails and letter they all forward between each other that they take as gospel. I can disprove each one with a few minutes and Google, usually even by using Fox news as a source. He then just gets confused and doesn't want to talk about it. Mom is about as bad (but I finally got her to check Snopes before sending me stuff). They just simply haven't learned not to believe everything they read on the internet or in email. Thus, the faked article about Obama being gone from office more than any other president in history because he left to perform Hadj in Mecca complete with bad photoshopped pictures is taken as truth.
That's a pretty good description of Nate Silver and why people pay attention to him.
Except people like Karl Rove and Joe Scarborough, who are willing to let their ideological leanings blind them to reality.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
How is it a one party system? There is always going to be some ideological overlap between different political parties.
A site that allows anyone but U.S. citizens vote seems to indicate that the rest of the world hopes these numbers are accurate. "
So, if these folks like BHO so much, they're welcome to him.
The problem isn't the ideological overlap, it's the huge voids that just aren't mentioned. Both parties are statists addicted to the current system with no interest in changing anything. All the elections do is change which troughs get a little more or a little less slop. The vast majority of "issues" the parties differ on are simply distracting shinies, meant to keep their constituencies in line. For example, the Bush administration, with full control of Congress, did not significantly change abortion availability, despite it being a favorite Republican talking point. Likewise, Obama did nothing to meaningfully address global warming, a major 'left-wing' talking point.
I'm aware that politics is the art of compromise, and that some things cannot be accomplished because such is the nature of the beast. However, there are many perspectives with significant support among the public which the existing Democratic-Republican party will not even discuss:
-meaningful election reform, either structurally (for example, national term limits or eliminating the first past the post voting system) or financially (publicly funded elections, transparent political donations)
-structural problems inherent in a government designed for 13 small, mosty rural states two centuries ago trying to run a continent-spanning country of 300+ million
-the complete lack of Protestants (who are the country's largest single religious group) on the Supreme Court
-foreign policy that does not focus on interfering in the internal affairs of other countries
-having a military that is not designed around worldwide force projection
-the erosion of civil liberties
-returning to a civilian (instead of a mercenary) military
-acknowledging the complete and utter failure of the War on Some Drugs
-public health insurance, something virtually every other first world country possesses
-real reductions in spending, not reductions in the rate of increase
-ending cost plus defense contracts
-the advantages and disadvantages of the Federal Reserve
-allowing the states to keep more tax revenue
-the utterly corrupt revolving door lobbying system
-lack of enforcement of existing law, from the IRS ignoring candidate advocacy by non-profits, to the whitewashing of rampant fraud in the mortgage industry
-that the War on Terror might not a be good idea
-directly addressing climate change (no, saying the word 'green' a lot doesn't count, Obama)
-the truly wretched governments of some of America's 'allies' (Saudi Arabia, for example)
-that much of America's 'foreign aid' is actually welfare for defense and other industries
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The Iowa Electronic Markets put Obama at a 74.9% chance. These are the people who put money with their predictions. http://iemweb.biz.uiowa.edu/graphs/graph_Pres12_WTA.cfm
Romney is going to win. My highly accurate personal polling system predicts this to a certainty level of 98.4%.
No, actually, I don't think things would have been different under Gore.
Would Bears Sterns and Lehman have failed? Probably either way.
But Seriously? Politics aside, if you really think a Gore Cabinet would have responded to the 9/11/01 attacks with a war in Iraq (led by the mean man who bullied Bush's dad a few years earlier), you are too easily dissuaded by the websites you're reading.
What if the voter models the polls are using is wrong? (Asking this question I assume that the reader knows how polls are constructed.) I took a look under the hood at the Pew Poll. They use D+4, while 2008 was D+6 - a banner year with lots of Demthusiasm for Obama. No way is the enthusiasm for Obama now the same as it was in 2008. And GOP voters will turn out in droves. So the voter models are wrong. Change the model, use the same data they have from polling, and lo and behold, all these Obama leads evaporate. Change the poll numbers and the Illinois predictions...um...change. Is there hard evidence for this? Yes. The early vote numbers in Ohio. Obama is running 250,000 votes short compared to 2008...and that was his margin over McCain. Methinks there is a good chance google will notice a large spike in searches for "recipe crow" on Wednesday.
At least Obama got his before he failed.
Yours is an extreme minority view (and even that minority would acknowledge that the vast majority of the time, "y'all" is plural. If you speak french or another language, "y'all" takes the place of "vous" or the second person plural pronoun missing in English. "Y'all" indeed does usually refer to a group. Where "all y'all" differs from all "y'all" is that "all y'all" more emphatically refers to the entirety of a group. There is a good example on the linked Wikipedia article.
Everyone should know that the pols are whack. The most accurate measure of the outcome of this (or any) contest can be found at the bookmakers.
William Hall is probably the biggest in the world. Most recent odds are Obama 5/1 to win, Mitt 2/7.
http://sports.williamhill.com/bet/en-gb/betting/y/12/Politics.html
Looks like things are fairly dynamic at William Hill - right now, Obama 2/9, Romney 10/3.
But bear in mind, by the time a few bets have been taken, bookies' odds are *not* a straightforward reflection of their expected result. There are *many* other factors in play.
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When did non-profits give up freedom of speech? I may be wrong, but would seriously be surprised if this is correct.
Just another day in Paradise
Nate was amazingly accurate. Gallup... crash and burn in flames.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
You are technically correct. The best kind of correct. But it is curious that there are instances where my original assertion (mostly I was joking) holds. Full disclosure: I'm a northerner. Born in Ann Arbor, MI and grew up in Northern VA (which is culturally part of DC, not VA) and cannot say "y'all" with any legitimacy.
What's wrong with this? They're entitled to their faith.
Proof, please.
Also, proof that they're so wrong we should write them out of the debate.
Also, proof that no racists voted for Obama.
I always confuse them with George Soros.
This sounds like you've run out of ideas and are firing on empty rhetoric.
While I'm no big fan of Ayn Rand, libertarians frequently make good economic sense. Do you want a better economy?
Futurist Traditionalism