All of Nate Silver's State-Level Polling Predictions Proved True

kkleiner writes "For the last few months, the political pundit class has been at war with NYT/FiveThirtyEight blogger Nate Silver. Joe Scarborough of MSNBC called him a "joke," while an op-ed in the LA Times accused him of running a "numbers racket." But last night, Silver triumphed: every one of his state-level presidential predictions proved true. "

Comments

Math

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.xkcd.org/1131/

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[YodasEvilTwin]

This. People need to learn that statistics and polling are sciences. Like all sciences they are inexact, with a margin for error; but the chances of the poll averages being wrong in this case were incredibly small.

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[alphatel]

This. People need to learn that statistics and polling are sciences. Like all sciences they are inexact, with a margin for error; but the chances of the poll averages being wrong in this case were incredibly small.

Or This. Pundits and Statisticians are about as far apart as Republicans and Climate Scientists.

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[explosivejared]

; but the chances of the poll averages being wrong in this case were incredibly small.

I'm not sure that's exactly knowable. Sure, the numbers are way better than contradictory pundit guts, but for instance, we had no way of knowing if a "Bradley Effect" would have been in play. Response rates for polling firms consistently came in below 10%. Polling is getting harder and harder in an age where fewer people have landlines and polling cell phones is restricted. As of now, state polls are good guides. They will be right up until they aren't, and then the science will change.

I'm not saying that the probability of systematic error is large, just unknowable. It was a perfectly reasonable and scientific position for a Republican to say "Romney's chances are equal to the probability of error in the polls, and I hope that probability is large."

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[sjames]

We can know the odds to a high precision. Just like I can know the odds of the flip of a weighted coin. That doesn't mean I can't be wrong when I guess my next coin toss, it just means I have a fair idea how likely I am to be wrong.

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[coldfarnorth]

Or as a friend of mine said:

Nate Silver is to talking-head punditry what the National Weather Service is to "Hurricanes are caused by teh gays."

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[mcgrew]

This topic isn't nearly as wild as the election the year I was born. From USA Today's In '52, huge computer called Univac changed election night:

In a few hours on Nov. 4, 1952, Univac altered politics, changed the world's perception of computers and upended the tech industry's status quo. Along the way, it embarrassed CBS long before Dan Rather could do that all by himself.

Computers were the stuff of science fiction and wide-eyed articles about "electric brains." Few people had actually seen one. Only a handful had been built, among them the first computer, ENIAC, created by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1940s.

In summer 1952, a Remington Rand executive approached CBS News chief Sig Mickelson and said the Univac might be able to plot early election-night returns against past voting patterns and spit out a predicted winner. Mickelson and anchor Walter Cronkite thought the claim was a load of baloney but figured it would at least be entertaining to try it on the air.

On election night, the 16,000-pound Univac remained at its home in Philadelphia. In the TV studio, CBS set up a fake computer -- a panel embedded with blinking Christmas lights and a teletype machine. Cronkite sat next to it. Correspondent Charles Collingwood and a camera crew set up in front of the real Univac.

By 8:30 p.m. ET -- long before news organizations of the era knew national election outcomes -- Univac spit out a startling prediction. It said Eisenhower would get 438 electoral votes to Stevenson's 93 -- a landslide victory. Because every poll had said the race would be tight, CBS didn't believe the computer and refused to air the prediction.

Under pressure, Woodbury rejigged the algorithms. Univac then gave Eisenhower 8-to-7 odds over Stevenson. At 9:15 p.m., Cronkite reported that on the air. But Woodbury kept working and found he'd made a mistake. He ran the numbers again and got the original results -- an Eisenhower landslide.

Late that night, as actual results came in, CBS realized Univac had been right. Embarrassed, Collingwood came back on the air and confessed to millions of viewers that Univac had predicted the results hours earlier.

In fact, the official count ended up being 442 electoral votes for Eisenhower and 89 for Stevenson. Univac had been off by less than 1%. It had missed the popular vote results by only 3%. Considering that the Univac had 5,000 vacuum tubes that did 1,000 calculations per second, that's pretty impressive. A musical Hallmark card has more computing power.

That doesn't take away from Silver's math, though, considering that the polls all had Obama and Romney neck and neck and Obama won by a huge margin. It seems Woodbury did a far better job with an incredibly primitive computer than the modern polsters' statisticians did with today's high tech machines.

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[Anonymous Coward]

It's not quite as simple as that. In past years we have had good state polls and bad national polls (like this year), good national polls and bad state polls (like the conservatives hoped for this year) and of course both of the other variations. Election year polling is still both an art and a science driven by rapidly changing variables that aren't directly measurable. Until we see who of the electorate actually comes out and votes, nobody knows the outcome for sure.
 
This is another nice feather in Silver's cap, but it's incorrect to categorize his intelligent guesses and approximations as a certainty.

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[jhoegl]

Pundits were creating the illusion of close races to drive up viewing.
They could care less if it adversely affected a vote or increased voter turnout.
The fact is they manipulate the information for their own personal gain. This time was it not only Fox News and MSNBC, but CNN.
This opens up an avenue for truth, which sheds light on what they are doing. Media outlets are calling him that because they are upset he is telling the actual truth and not making it cloudy to increase revenue.
Colbert Report made fun of this when he had him on the night before the election.

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[MightyMartian]

Indeed. There was an illusion of a close race to sell advertising. People love drama, and having a contest where the media reported "Obama's got it, Romney's cause is hopeless" would not have had the sexy urgency necessary to cash in on.

We are seeing the OJ simpson freeway chase kind of reporting being applied to elections.

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[halfEvilTech]

All things considered he was fairly accurate on the 2008 election as well. I think he got one state wrong if that as well.

So as far as I know he is 2 for 2.

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[MightyMartian]

Part of the problem was an obsession with national level polling. Silver was analyzing the races per state, which is the only legitimate way to analyze it in an electoral college system. National polling is at best only an extremely crude indicator, and to my mind, in most modern presidential elections is likely useless.

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[Artraze]

Not this.

No one was pretending that polls are some kind of random guess by someone. The thing is that polls and elections are different circumstances. When you vote, you need to travel and you can do it in secret. It also counts so maybe you change sides when push comes to shove. There's also fraud, which isn't exactly polled for either.

The ultimate question isn't whether the polls were "wrong", but whether they could accurately predict the outcome of an election, which is not the same as a poll. In a computer context, this is like using synthetic benchmarks to predict real-world performance. Sometimes with good data and a good model you can nail it. Sometimes you overlook something and are fairly off.

In reality, I'd say it's damn remarkable that the outcome was so close to the predicted value. From the perspective of fraud _alone_ this is a striking result: either the statisticians can predict fraud quite well or it's not as much of an issue as expected. (Or, maybe the shadow organization controlling the outcome of elections got lazy and decided to just follow the predictions this time around :p.)

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[MrLint]

My response to the response to Nate Silver

"Math is hard lets go shopping!"

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[Genda]

This is the price of allowing 10,000 independent journalistic voices to be consolidated into 2 or 4 mega-media-conglomerates who's infotainment is supposed to pass for a free and responsible forth column. What we now call news is to free journalism, what the grocery weekend throw away is to journalistic press. The current media is selling you ideas and opinions. It is paid for and owned by its corporate sponsors, so they will be the source of your information. Anyone who isn't getting news from outside of the United States (and from diverse sources) would be better served reading their toilet paper, in the end it will perform the same job.

Nobody who reads "REALITY" is by any means surprised by any of this, or the really shocking things our government is doing. In the debates, where were the questions regarding the gutting of the constitution or the fact that the President now has a license to kill? Where were the questions about the government printing trillions of dollars to "FAKE" the existence of an economy? Or even the questions about all our trade partners quietly working out new trade routes that exclude the use of dollars? Boys and girls, the fan and the schist are on the verge of close embrace, and ours news hasn't bothered to mention our emperor is prancing about buck nekid!!! I hope y'all have your emergency supplies well stocked... I suggest dehydrated food myself.

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[Anonymous Coward]

"That doesn't take away from Silver's math, though, considering that the polls all had Obama and Romney neck and neck and Obama won by a huge margin."

That's the thing though, Silver's math was extrapolated directly from the polls themselves. The polls weren't really close; that was just an illusion created by bad interpretation of the data. Media pundits cherry picked the closest polls, fudged margins of error, and made differences of 1% sound very small when in reality they represented hundreds of thousands of votes.

That's the whole point. The election wasn't ever really close at all. The evidence was there, most people just interpreted it badly (or outright dishonestly).

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[AthanasiusKircher]

Like all sciences they are inexact, with a margin for error; but the chances of the poll averages being wrong in this case were incredibly small.

Well, if we were talking about raw poll numbers with a calculated margin for error, you would probably be right.

The question about Silver's methodology (if there is one) is that he has a rather complicated weighting and averaging system that combines stats from a whole history of polls, and how it works is not entirely transparent.

I'm not criticizing Silver or saying he's wrong, but the aggregate numbers he was quoting were not simple averages of polls. Therefore, it's a lot more complicated to evaluate whether his chances of "being wrong in this case were incredibly small."

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[alva_edison]

10,000 sounds a bit high, where is that estimate coming from?
Just curious.
Although, maybe newspapers should become clipping services for blogs, i.e. let the blogosphere break the story, and use actual journalists to fact check the blogs, then publish a paper based on that.

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[xevioso]

The fantastic, insightful website http://natesilverwrong/ website was very helpful in showing me how Silver would be entirely proven incorrect, with quotes from lots of people about why he would be shown as an idiot, and his methods were skewed.

It seems to be down now. Not really sure why. :-)

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[Anonymous Coward]

But his analysis of national polls was correct too. He predicted Obama would win the popular vote by 2.5 points and he won by 2.4 points. Media outlets were rounding poll results to get "50% to 48% with 1% margin of error OMG it's practically tied!!!"

2.4% sounds like a small difference only until you realize it represents about 2.9 million votes. Pundits dumbed down the math and ended up looking dumb.

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[ibsteve2u]

Thinking the Univac would have blown up in today's election environment - when its computations were interrupted for the 34th time by a phone call from RNC headquarters.

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[Anonymous Coward]

All of those reasons for potential inaccuracies are essentially already accounted for and baked into the prediction model as they are using not just polling numbers but also past elections. Things like the fact that republican voters tend to have higher turnout relative to the polls, etc are already considered.

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[Anonymous Coward]

This. Why use an internet meme to sound smart?

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[Solandri]

Pundits were creating the illusion of close races to drive up viewing.

Not exactly. What you say is partly true. But there's another dynamic at play here: when predicting election outcomes, there are two sources of uncertainty, not one.

The first is random sampling error, which is what Nate Silver does an excellent job correcting for.

The second is uncertainty in how likely it is that someone will vote. This means if supporters of a candidate acknowledge that their opponent has a seemingly insurmountable lead in the polls, they create a self-fulfilling prophecy. If their candidate seemingly has no chance, then what's the point of voting for him? His supporters will stay home on election day, and he ends up losing even if the polls were wrong and he was actually in the lead.

So when it comes to elections, you basically have two choices. Hold a gun to everyone's head and force them to vote. Or everyone has to pretend their favored candidate could win, even if the polls show he's losing. When people don't do the latter, you get the situation we have in the U.S. - where people who would really prefer the Libertarian candidate end up voting for a Democrat or Republican. Because everyone "knows" the Libertarian candidate could never win. (There are other ways to combat this, e.g. instant run-off voting, but that's a different discussion.)

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[Anonymous Coward]

Regular readers of that blog will tell you that he debunked the 'Bradley Effect' years ago.

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[Anonymous Coward]

This is the price of allowing 10,000 independent journalistic voices to be consolidated into 2 or 4 mega-media-conglomerates who's infotainment is supposed to pass for a free and responsible forth column.

You are badly mixing the "fourth estate" and "fifth column" metaphors, neither of which actually fit your claim. Your post is like watching David and Goliath paint the Sistine Chapel.

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[alexander_686]

But this is almost the way it has to be done when you have a large population with many secular events – that is when the facts on the ground change.

You have a host of polls. Some have more rigor than others. Some are rolling (ask the same person 2 weeks apart.) Some have demographic data. Some are instant, some take a week to gather the data.

And during that time you have real events happening which is changing the game. Take the 1st debate where Rommey beat Obama. How much weight do you give to poll which spans the first debate, but is big and rigorous against a smaller, sloppier instant poll?

One has to make a subjective judgment based on knowledge of math, the strength and weakness of the various polls, experience, and wisdom.
This is an issue for all social scientist who use statistics. It’s better than you intuition but there are limits.

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[nitehawk214]

The fantastic, insightful website http://natesilverwrong/ website was very helpful in showing me how Silver would be entirely proven incorrect, with quotes from lots of people about why he would be shown as an idiot, and his methods were skewed.

It seems to be down now. Not really sure why. :-)

Because you mistyped the url. :)

Actually, the site really is down. Guess someone was embarrassed. The cache still exists, though the site seemed to be completely devoid of content anyhow.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Minor: It's fourth ESTATE, not fourth column. The column people refer to is the fifth column, which refers to infiltrators within one's ranks.

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[Ambitwistor]

That doesn't take away from Silver's math, though, considering that the polls all had Obama and Romney neck and neck and Obama won by a huge margin.

But the polls didn't have them neck and neck, if you looked at the state level and added up the electoral votes. That's what Silver's math was based on. He does have some non-poll information in the mix too, but Princeton Election Consortium got the same results using pure polls.

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[TWX]

My observation is that while there are third-party candidates that attract attention, rarely do their positions fall into the political spectrum somewhere that would allow them to gain a majority. In my experience, third-party candidates fall much farther to the left or to the right of their Democratic or Republican counterparts, and thus generally don't gain widespread acceptance.

The Tea Party is an aberration, but the Tea Party is an attempt to infiltrate and hijack the Republican Party- all Tea Party candidates are registered Republican. Should the Tea Party identify itself as its own unique party at this point then it would find itself in the same position as the Libertarians, with no national apparatus to help rearrange funding and poor name recognition. Granted, it would start with a position of relative strength given the number of Republican/Tea Party members that are in office, but without national support as part of the Republican party they'd probably lose elections fairly quickly. If they manage to more thoroughly take over the party, though, they might either be able to strip off the apparatus for a true separate Tea Party, or just make the Republican Party itself the defacto Tea Party in whole.

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[alexander_686]

Well, it depends on who you read.

Obama got 50%, Rommey got 48%. I call that pretty darn close.

On the other hand, if we are talking about the electoral college – that something else. Everybody knew where CA, NY, TX, etc. where going to go. They left just a few swing states, OH, FL, etc. In these swing states Obama had a narrow lead – but he only had to win a few to win. If the swing states were fair coins (50/20) Obama would probably win – which is my Silver (who used polls instead of fair coins) - gave Obama over a 80% chance to win.

Which makes Silver’s so good. Eisenhower won by a far large percentage – both with the popular vote and the electoral vote. Simpler computer and maths but a simpler problem as well.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Possibly because http://natesilverwrong/ isn't a web page

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[composer777]

I've always found the best way to find great news sources is to hold them accountable and stop using them when they screw up the big stories. For example, when the media was shocked by the 2008 crash, I wasn't. I had predicted it 5 years earlier (not necessarily when, but the fact that it would happen). How? I took a look at the small handful of pundits and bloggers that accurately predicted the demise of the tech bubble and looked at what they said would be the next bubble. If people actually started paying attention to the sources that get it right, vs the ones with the largest reach, places like FOX wouldn't exist. What I have found over the past decade is that far left independent news sources get it right far more often than mainstream (or far right) new sources.

The election is another great example. Some people weren't surprised, and those are the ones that we should look to next time, unless we enjoy being a bunch of dumbfounded idiots all the time.

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[Anonymous Coward]

But it actually WAS a somewhat close race:

National Vote: decided by 3,000,000.
Virginia: 100,000
Ohio: 100,000
Florida: STILL too close to call

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[Anonymous Coward]

The expression is couldn't care less. Learn to use your language properly.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Your post is like watching David and Goliath paint the Sistine Chapel.

I need to see that happen. Need.

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[kasperd]

When people don't do the latter, you get the situation we have in the U.S. - where people who would really prefer the Libertarian candidate end up voting for a Democrat or Republican. Because everyone "knows" the Libertarian candidate could never win. (There are other ways to combat this, e.g. instant run-off voting, but that's a different discussion.)

What you describe is the reason why such systems turn into two-party systems. I don't think that is a very democratic system. There are different variations of voting systems that can improve that situation. The instant runoff, which you mentioned, is probably the best. I knew the system already (it is quite simple, any nerd would be able to come up with that design), but I didn't know the name of the system, so thanks for mentioning it.

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[jpvlsmv]

There's also fraud, which isn't exactly polled for either.

I would suggest that the number of positive responses to the polls that ask "are you going to commit vote fraud this year?" is a statistically-accurate sampling of the actual in-person voter fraud.

--Joe
(0 respondants out of N gave a positive response to a question we didn't ask, which is within the poll's margin of error for the vanishingly small fraction of fraud)

Re:Math

[fahrbot-bot]

Pundits were creating the illusion of close races to drive up viewing.

Of they are simply delusional - to the very end. Example: Live Fox News coverage exchange between Meghan Kelly and Karl Rove just after Fox predicted an Ohio win for President Obama and, thus, the election. Rove said they were flat-out wrong and Kelly said:

Is this just math you do as a Republican to make you feel better, or is it real?

Karl assured her that his "math" was real. Kelly then trotted off to talk with the statisticians who explained their math and stood by their results with "99.95% certainty."

I really hate to say this, but "Yay Meghan" and, except for the talking-head pundits they had on, Fox actually did a rather professional job of covering the election (I flipped through all the major channels), though it was probably because they were expecting a huge Romney win... (especially considering how quickly they signed off after Obama's acceptance speech)

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[Dahamma]

That doesn't take away from Silver's math, though, considering that the polls all had Obama and Romney neck and neck and Obama won by a huge margin.

Actually, there wasn't all *that* much math... and in fact (given most of his raw data was just the polls) - the polls that mattered did *not* have them neck and neck. His key insight was just to use polling information by state, find the bias in some polls (like Rasmussen, which had Romney by 2%, hah!) and then weigh and average those polls to get predicted electoral votes. I bet it's simple enough computations Univac could chug through it in a reasonable time :)

It's basically a given now that future presidential race predictions will be based on those same ideas... in fact, the Princeton predictions use a similar model and came up with pretty much the same results:

ELECTORAL PREDICTION (mode): Barack Obama 303 EV, Mitt Romney 235 EV. The mode is the single most frequent value on the EV histogram. It corresponds to the map below, and has a 22% chance of being exactly correct. The next-most-likely outcome is Obama 332, Romney 206 EV.

[and unlike Silver, their blog goes into all of the gory details of their model, which is pretty cool...]

Re:Math

[Anonymous Coward]

>This. People need to learn that statistics and polling are sciences. Like all sciences they are inexact, with a margin for error; but the chances of the poll averages being wrong in this case were incredibly small.

No. They're educated guesses.

Nate Silver was only proven right because Hurricane Sandy gave Obama a 4-5% bump in the last days of the race.

So either:
1) Nate Silver is a witch that can predict the weather or
2) He was wrong, but was accidentally right

The margin in Ohio, Virginia and Florida is so narrow that Obama really needs to be grateful that disaster happened, so that he could be re-elected.

Capcha: BLACKOUT

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[fahrbot-bot]

That doesn't take away from Silver's math, though, considering that the polls all had Obama and Romney neck and neck and Obama won by a huge margin.

Actually, it wasn't "all the polls" that said that, just some of the polls. His math actually took all the polls into consideration and their vectors, which is the point. Additionally, while Obama won by a large Electoral College margin, the Popular Vote was rather close - something the Republicans will try to remind us all of in the months to come as they try to find some grip on reality.

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[AvitarX]

National: 2%
VA:3%
OH:2%
FL: irrelevant for the election

2% is a decent spread really I would think, not many contested elections go by more than that.

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[BigSlowTarget]

So the fourth column would be a combination of the fourth estate and the fifth column or in other words a government like organization that pretends to monitor the others and be on your side while actually setting you up to be sheared like a sheep. Great.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Your post is like watching David and Goliath paint the Sistine Chapel.

I need to see that happen. Need.

No, no, the marijuana legalization thread was earlier today. You're in the wrong place.

Re:Math

[Anonymous Coward]

Introducing schist into the blades of a fan would be detrimental to the fan blades, the fan motor, and pretty much anyone within the general vicinity of said introduction. Wear proper eye protection.

Re:Math

[BasilBrush]

Because everyone "knows" the Libertarian candidate could never win.

And they're right. Not only for the reason you state, but also because outside of Slashdot and fanatical gun and piracy sites, there isn't a lot of support for libertarianism.

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[Relayman]

I won a free lunch Tuesday. At 10 a.m. EST, I bet a friend that not only would Obama win, but that he would win at least 300 electoral college votes. And I didn't even look at what Nate had to say. I was one of the people not surprised by the outcome.

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[Relayman]

In Ohio, there were a fair number of races at least 10 percentage points apart (55%-45% or better).

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[Jon_S]

Silver's methodology (if there is one) is that he has a rather complicated weighting and averaging system that combines stats from a whole history of polls, and how it works is not entirely transparent.

True, not totally transparent enough for our open source fans, but he does describe his methodology in a fair amount of detail including how he calculates the "house effect" of various pollsters.

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[NatasRevol]

So you enjoyed the 2 minute walk as she meandered through the building at the height of election decisions? Cause that was like really bad reality tv. REALLLY BAD.

Also,

except for the talking-head pundits they had on, Fox actually did a rather professional job of covering the election

is oxy-moronic. Every time I flipped to it, there was always a republican pundit on, trying to sell their pitch one last time. As if their paychecks were dependent on it.

Re:Math

[BasilBrush]

but for instance, we had no way of knowing if a "Bradley Effect" would have been in play

Sure we do. Nate Silver has looked at this effect a number of times. If it exists at all, it's tiny.

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/search/label/bradley%20effect

I'm not saying that the probability of systematic error is large, just unknowable.

It is knowable, and that's exactly why Nate Silvers forecasts are so much more accurate than anyone else's. He does the donkey work to minimise these systematic errors.

It was a perfectly reasonable and scientific position for a Republican to say "Romney's chances are equal to the probability of error in the polls, and I hope that probability is large."

No, it was really, really dumb. Not only can systematic errors be minimised, but margin of error is not going to go in the same direction on all polls.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Calling people and asking them questions isn't really science.

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[NatasRevol]

Obama got 50%, Rommey got 48%

You can call it whatever you like.

But it's also ~2,800,000 votes different.

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[ciotog]

It is on my network!

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[BasilBrush]

The thing is that polls and elections are different circumstances. When you vote, you need to travel and you can do it in secret. It also counts so maybe you change sides when push comes to shove.

But you know to what extent the polls are biased in these ways by looking at previous election polls and results. And that's exactly what Nate Silver does.

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[careysub]

It was Megyn Kelly's finest hour. It really says something when even SHE gets fed up with right-wing BS and insists on looking at the facts!

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[careysub]

All things considered he was fairly accurate on the 2008 election as well. I think he got one state wrong if that as well.

So as far as I know he is 2 for 2.

Actually that would be 99 for 100, the electoral college result for each individual state. And the one he missed was very close, and under-polled.

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[Anonymous Coward]

I thought it was painted by Michael the Angel.

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[elfprince13]

Ideological typology polls show that only somewhere between 40%-60% percent of Americans fall on the traditional left/right spectrum, and that libertarians ought to have a 20% block of dedicated votes, but have appeal to both sides of the spectrum on some issues, just as the current Republican party spans the spectrum between libertarian, social conservative, neoconservative, and some centrist-like positions. I suspect there is a strong correlation between voter turnout (around 60% this year) and disenchantment with the existing parties. Which makes sense when you look at natural voting blocks based on ideological typology polls. A libertarian, or green, or other reasonably qualified 3rd party or indepedent candidate who had the campaign and fundraising apparatus to keep up would probably do quite well. Look what happened when Ross Perot entered the race.

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[sribe]

People need to learn that statistics and polling are sciences. Like all sciences they are inexact, with a margin for error; but the chances of the poll averages being wrong in this case were incredibly small.

No, actually the poll averages were not correct. Read up a bit more on what he actually did.

The point is actually that the poll averages are reasonably likely to be wrong, because some polls are designed much better than others. Most news outlets just average the polls. Nate Silver weights them in an attempt to give more weight to accurate ones. So, the simple averages of polls are right in most cases, but in a handful of states are sufficiently skewed by biased polls to give an incorrect prediction. Nate Silvers' weighting of polls, on the other hand, got all 50 states correct--and in many so-called "contested" states actually nailed the Romney v Obama share perfectly to 0.1%!

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[Anonymous Coward]

I saw that post as well and it gave me hope amidst the sound and fury.

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[fahrbot-bot]

No, not the walk, the fact that she actually went to get some facts. In reality, I bet she was just really pissed off at Rove for being a hyper-partisan dick. You're correct that it was difficult to find pundit-free air time on Fox, but it was there and not badly done.

Of course, any (marginal) good will Fox earned was immediately blown when the usual ass-hats (Hannity, O'Reilly, Palin, etc) got on the air and asserted that Romney lost because the people who voted for Obama are ignorant parasites who "want stuff and things" from the government - as opposed to all the old, rich, white, straight men that voted for Romney (you know, the "job creators") that just want money and power ...

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[MobyDisk]

lol! Look at the last comment made before the site went down!

Stephen O'Harrow KiNg oF AlBaNiA at University of Hawaii at Manoa
If/when Obama wins tonight, how long will this website stay up?
Reply 69 likes [Like button] Tuesday at 2:33pm

Re:Math

[DragonWriter]

What you describe is the reason why such systems turn into two-party systems. I don't think that is a very democratic system. There are different variations of voting systems that can improve that situation. The instant runoff [wikipedia.org], which you mentioned, is probably the best.

Instant run-off is the pretty much the single-winner preference voting system that does the least to mitigate the problems with first-past-the-post elections that preference voting systems are usually offered to resolve. About the only criterion I can think of under which it is arguably the best is ease of understanding for people whose only prior experience with voting systems are with variations on first-past-the-post like plurality and majority-runoff. (Which, to be fair, isn't completely unimportant.)

Re:Math

[TsuruchiBrian]

2.4% *is* a small difference. Yeah it's 2.9 million votes, but that's what percentages are for. They normalize ratios of numbers at different scales into something that can be compared.

Winning by 2 votes in the supreme court case is much more impressive than winning by a million votes in a presidential election. A million votes is nothing in a presidential election. 2.9 million votes is more than nothing, but it's still not very much.

2.4% is the same margin of victory regardless of whether that 2.4% is a 10 million votes or 1 vote.

Re:Math

[NatasRevol]

It was completely staged. Did you not hear her say 'the sound cut out here when we practiced this'.

Fully agree on your second point. But then that too was staged. And predictable.

Which is why I only turned to Fox for the lols. Funny to watch them stroke out when things started turning blue.

Re:Math

[ubrgeek]

As soon as "the sources that get it right" start hiring the same eye candy as Fox people start paying attention to them.

Re:Math

[TsuruchiBrian]

Yes the pundits were wrong. But that doesn't mean that Romney couldn't have won. Neither candidate was remotely likely of winning in a landslide (by almost any definition, although some people thing 48/52 is a landslide). But the data showed that right up until the polls opened Obama's chances of winning where about 2/3 and Romney's chances about 1/3.

Re:Math

[Anonymous Coward]

So there is such thing as a free lunch in politics?!

Re:Math

[realityimpaired]

Yeah... but a Hurricane is pink and fruity... A straight drink it ain't....

Re:Math

[geekoid]

Yeah, Nate predicted it, exactly. Maybe depending on Florida, but everything else was perfect.

You just guessed.

See the difference?

Re:Math

[ted.hansson]

What you describe is the reason why such systems turn into two-party systems.

The electoral college and "winner-takes-all" mechanic is what turns it into a two-party system. A parliament with proportional representation based on popular vote could easily be a plurality, as is indeed the case in most places with that voting system.

Re:Math

[Anonymous Coward]

"I dunno Daaaaavieeeeeee"

Re:Math

[ceoyoyo]

The fourth column would be a large group of pissed off Spanish revolutionaries, just like the first, second and third columns.

Re:Math

[ceoyoyo]

Judging by how accurate Silver's predictions were, either your hypothesized effects on voting are very small or Silver is already correcting for them.

Re:Math

[hondo77]

For example, when the media was shocked by the 2008 crash, I wasn't. I had predicted it 5 years earlier (not necessarily when, but the fact that it would happen).

You didn't predict anything. You made a guess. It took five entire years for reality to coincide with your guess. That's all. When you can make accurate guesses consistently over time, then maybe we can talk about calling them "predictions".

Re:Math

[Bacon Bits]

Pundits dumbed down and ended up dumb.

FTFY.

Re:Math

[Hognoxious]

I thought a programming language ( 1980s popular in ) that yoda like talks was referring to he.

Re:Math

[jbeach]

Generally agreed, I just would like to add that IMHO the Tea Party is an attempt to rebrand the Republican Party after the ruinous damage done to it's rep by George W. Bush. It is much more often rented astroturf for super-wealthy conservatives than it is any real grassroots org. So, I'll personally be shocked and stunned if something calling itself the Tea Party splits off from the Republican Party and becomes any sort of force to contend with - unless, as this separate party it remains a front for super-wealthy conservatives.

Re:Math

[schnell]

This is the price of allowing 10,000 independent journalistic voices to be consolidated into 2 or 4 mega-media-conglomerates

The problem with this thesis is that you DO have 10,000 voices out there, in fact many more - it's called the Internet, and there are no shortage of outlets for people to make their voices heard. (Most of them are not even remotely "journalistic," but that's a different issue.) There are a few scarily large media mega-conglomerates out there today as you point out. But doing actual polling, research and man-on-the-street interviewing is very time and money/resource intensive, so there only going to be a few organizations out there that can afford to do this work anyway.

So even if there were ten thousand independent Real Journalism outlets out there, the East Kenosha Advertiser-Bee and the Bloom County Beacon are not going to be doing independent national election polling or adding substantive new data to the discussion... they will only be repeating the numbers from the few Big Guys, which is what all the 10,000 bloggers are doing anyway.

As to your other points about nobody reporting the "FAKE" economy, impending apocalypse, naked emperors and such, I humbly submit that there are many like-minded souls with your same beliefs on the aforementioned Internet. You may wish to subscribe to their newsletters. If the "mainstream media" is not reporting these topics, it may be because they do not honestly see them as existing in the same way you do, and the majority of Internet-literate news consumers - who are free to visit any of those 10,000 websites for their news and commentary - would appear to agree.

Re:Math

[Anonymous Coward]

Or 99 for 100.

Re:Math

[s73v3r]

But isn't that how the media portrayed the Obama/McCain race 4 years ago?

Re:Math

[DeadCatX2]

In my experience, third-party candidates fall much farther to the left or to the right of their Democratic or Republican counterparts,

Or in the case of Libertarians, they somehow fall much farther to the left and to the right of their Democratic and Republican counterparts.

Re:Math

[noshellswill]

Well spoken. Obama.nations Bantu Neoliths dis-voted in 2012 to the tune of 12.5M ... while 2.5M poor , pissed white voters refused to to support Romney. Those 2.5+M poor working whites insufficiently hated the GREEN/Bantu/Cosmopolitan syndicate & sent Romney down to defeat. Can't win if your natural ally won't CYA.

Re:Math

[s73v3r]

When people don't do the latter, you get the situation we have in the U.S. - where people who would really prefer the Libertarian candidate end up voting for a Democrat or Republican. Because everyone "knows" the Libertarian candidate could never win. (There are other ways to combat this, e.g. instant run-off voting, but that's a different discussion.)

No, that's due to a completely different problem. The people who would rather vote Libertarian end up voting Democrat or Republican because they would rather someone who kinda matches their views get into office than for someone whom they extremely disagree with get into office.

Re:Math

[DragonTHC]

Because political polling specifically deals with language it's an art on top of a science.

Since it's an opinion of art, it's meaningless out of context.

Re:Math

[s73v3r]

There are states which split their electoral votes based on proportion of popular vote received in that state.

Re:Math

[Anonymous Coward]

[The Tea Party] might either be able to strip off the apparatus for a true separate Tea Party, or just make the Republican Party itself the defacto Tea Party in whole.

In your latter scenario, it will likely lead to the end of Congressional gridlock.

If the Tea Party succeeds in their current efforts to oust all remaining moderates from the Republican party, then their support base will shrink small enough to ensure Democratic victories in both houses of Congress and the presidency.

It's interesting to note that the continued rise of the Tea Party provides us with the most realistic and achievable avenue to eliminating gridlock.

Re:Math

[Rod Beauvex]

Be careful about tell the plebians that there is a such thing as objective fact. They can turn nasty when presented with such an idea.

Re:Math

[HiThere]

The political attitudes of the third parties are not what guarantee them a permanent minority position, it's the plurality wins voting system. A majority wins voting system would not have this problem, and that's what Instand Runoff and Condorcet voting synthesize.

FWIW, it can be proven that there is no best voting system. All systems have flaws. But the plurality system is probably the worst multi-party voting system. It's provably the worst in current use, if the goal is that the majority of people not be displeased by the result. (If you change the goal, the proof fails, depending, of course, on what the replacement goal is. The quibble is because there could be lots of multi-party voting systems that weren't considered in the proof. E.g., "Pick one at random" was not analysed.)

P.S.: This is my summary of a old Scientific American article on voting systems. But read the entire article, not just the summary, or you'll get the wrong idea.

Re:Math

[HiThere]

Yeah. Nate Silver made explicit predictions, and knew precisely what his variables are. The gp observed the populace and the news and made an estimate. Also Nate Silver had a lot more than just a lunch riding on it. And also Nate Silver made a lot more detailed prediction.

Both, however, predicted the same thing. Both were correct. Both were sufficiently accurate for their purposes.

So there are both similarities and differences. But, by investing enough time and effort Nate Silver has a better chance of repeating his success.

FWIW, I also predicted an easy Obama victory, based on news reports. And I was correct enough for my purposes.

Re:Math

[MightyMartian]

There was a very concerted effort to devalue Silver, and it was clearly coming from Republican-friendly sources. Some of the attacks were reasonably sophisticated word salads, others amounted to "Silver is a liberal poopoo head." Some have eaten crow, a few are insisting he got it right by accident, and others have simply disappeared.

Re:Math

[ae1294]

Yeah... but a Hurricane is pink and fruity... A straight drink it ain't....

A real man isn't afraid to order a fruity drink because they taste damn good...

Re:Math

[jbeach]

Above is why Paul Krugman is one of the few people near the pundit class who is actually worth listening to.

Re:Math

[Yvanhoe]

More than a small difference, it is an irrelevant difference. They do not fight on this score, but on the 0.1% that will make a few states swing. 1% in Washington are not worth 1% in Ohio.

Re:Math

[Rod Beauvex]

There is now Dr. Pepper on my monitor.

Re:Math

[Mike Buddha]

I'd like to see someone repeat his experiment with a musical Hallmark card.

Re:Math

[sciencewhiz]

If the swing states were fair coins (50/20)

If I had a 50/20 fair coin, I could make a lot of money.

Re:Math

[Anonymous Coward]

Couldn't* care less

Re:Math

[Anonymous Coward]

He missed Indiana which is acceptable considering nobody thought Indiana would go blue. It went back to normal this year and was called for Romney 15 minutes into coverage.

Re:Math

[Daniel Dvorkin]

People need to learn that statistics and polling are sciences.

There are, unfortunately, a large number of people, many of them on Slashdot, who will never, ever be convinced of this. They have this dimly remembered high-school "science class" idea of what science is, and that idea doesn't include uncertainty. You can often find them trashing large, well-designed studies by claiming that the scientists who published the results of the studies didn't follow The Scientific Method, which in their minds is this checklist which must be followed and ... ta da! Science happens! And if you don't follow (their idea of) the checklist, then they know you can't really be doing science, because they memorized TSM in tenth grade and by God that's the way science works. And all those so-called scientists who aren't following the checklist? Well, they're just a bunch of puffed-up ivory tower eggheads who will say anything to get rich on grant money.

Identification of specific cases of this phenomenon is left as an exercise to the reader.

Re:Math

[sciencewhiz]

While the electoral college margin seems large, It's still smaller then normal. Since Alaska and Hawaii became states, this is the 6th closest, and two that were closer had electoral votes split 3 ways. The closer ones were both of Bush Jrs, Carter, Nixon, and Kennedy.

Since 1960, the mean electoral votes for the victor is 382 and the median is 367

Re:Math

[Anonymous Coward]

Compare:

The first map on: http://what-if.xkcd.com/19/

and the real map on: http://www.politico.com/2012-election/map/#/President/2012/

Re:Math

[ChronoFish]

"...My observation is that while there are third-party candidates that attract attention, rarely do their positions fall into the political spectrum somewhere that would allow them to gain a majority....."

This has been my view (and frustration). Green party is too liberal, Tea party is too conservative. The RINOs and Blue Collar Democrats are the candidate that probably fit my view the best.

Socially Liberal / Libertarian, fiscally conservative. What party is that? Leave government out of my personal affairs - including deciding on who I can marry or whether the women in my wife are able to make certain medical decisions. Don't spy on me unless you have a warrant, reform the patent system in way that protects the consumer and small businesses. At the same time, be smart with my money; don't blindly accept unions, do invest in projects that advance the state (science, infrastructure that propels business, education that can prove that it is educating) don't simply piss it away on a military project because it happens to provide jobs in a favorite senator's state, but do invest at the levels the military is requiring.

This all seems like common sense to me... but I realize that other peoples common sense may differ....

-CF

Re:Math

[Anonymous Coward]

2.4% is a SMALL difference.

In fact, it's 1.2% that decided the election.

Re:Math

[ChronoFish]

Yes, look what happened to Ross Perot.

He garnered lots of press, and took a large percentage of the republican party and small percentage of the centrist. And then his movement got hi-jacked by Pat Buchanan and subsequently died just as it (really) got started.

If the Reform Party was able to sustain its original message (which was almost entirely fiscal in nature) (and not fall back on trying to woo the far right wing which is what happened) for 12 years (3 presidential election cycles) - it *may* have been able to be the first true 3rd party in our generation. Instead it became little more than a conservative platform for those who couldn't garner respect from the Republican party. It's really the precursor to the Tea Party movement - which has become an ultra-right wing conservative wolf in libertarian clothing - and which is on the verge of ditching the disguises all-together now that they've been called out (As long as Fox News approves or directs them to do so)...

-CF

Re:Math

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually he didn't do anything, the independent journos that he suscribed to predicted and guessed. He merely collated the reports and probably did a bit of mental averaging.

Re:Math

[westlake]

My observation is that while there are third-party candidates that attract attention, rarely do their positions fall into the political spectrum somewhere that would allow them to gain a majority

Third parties in the US tend to fall into two familiar categories:

Those which form around a charismatic leader with genuine appeal across the political spectrum but whose inevitable departure from the scene is fatal.

Norman Thomas. Theodore Roosevelt.

Those who have a death grip on a regional or political demographic that is clearly in decline.

The Dixiecrats of 1948. The Republicans of 2012. The Republicans of 1850 were solidly Midwestern. But to a national audience, they were the party of free agriculture, Industrial expansion, Internal improvements. The party of the railroad. Energetic. Optimistic. Out to make things happen.

Re:Math

[Genda]

You think the number of reporters, journalists, and news writers in the United States is fewer than 10,000? I thought I was understating by perhaps an order of magnitude.

Re:Math

[jc42]

The expression is couldn't care less. Learn to use your language properly.

In political discussions, that's about as likely as is valid statistical math. ("We have a sample of one. That's good enough for a trend." ;-)

Face it; you've long since lost that battle. Nobody but the language peevers and a few linguists care at all about such trivia. English is as full of idioms ("phrase whose actual meaning can't be determined from the meanings of its component words") as any other human language. This has been true since before it was called "English", and it'll be true even when that name is no longer used for its descendants.

Re:Math

[elfprince13]

My point was (money =) press coverage = votes. That's the only thing that distinguishes successful third party candidates from unsuccessful ones. Gary Johnson was arguably more qualified to be president than Romney OR Obama, in terms of both executive experience and ability to conduct meaningful policy discussions, and nobody paid attention. $15 or $20 million would have changed that.

Re:Math

[moortak]

Damn right real men aren't afraid to order fruity drinks because they taste good, they are afraid because those things bring a nasty hang over with them.

Re:Math

[jc42]

... [Nate Silver] debunked the 'Bradley Effect' years ago.

Perhaps. But not in as funny a way as the explanation of the wins by Obama in 2008, and by Kennedy way back in 1960.

Before the 1960 election, lots of pundits said he couldn't win, because there were millions of Americans who would never vote for a Catholic. After he won, investigations turned up the explanation that there were in fact millions of voters who would never vote for a Catholic, but they were also people who would also never vote for a Democrat. So his being a Catholic didn't actually lose him any votes.

The same explanation has been proposed for Obama's wins. For those who can't figure it out, the explanation is: Yes, there are millions of Americans who would never vote for a black man (or woman). But they are mostly people who would also never vote for a Democrat. So being a black candidate running as a Democrat doesn't lose you hardly any votes.

I'm not sure whether the people making this argument are pulling our legs or not. But if you have a sense of humor about such matters, you may find it funny.

I also have friends who claim that they're sufficiently anti-PC that they'll tell pollsters outrageous things like "I won't vote for him because he's _____" (fill in the blank. They do this even when they are planning to vote for him, because they enjoy playing with pollsters' minds. Well, at least they claim to say things like this to pollsters.

I've never done this, because I've never actually been called by a pollster. Maybe they look at my info, and decide I'm not an appropriate random person for their questions ...

Re:Math

[ChronoFish]

*maybe* in key markets. $15/$20 million in a many-Muti $100 million election (about $700 million per candidate) is still not enough for a nation-wide campaign. (http://elections.nytimes.com/2012/campaign-finance)

And more to my point - which is that only lasts for one election and you really need 3 strong election cycles before your 3rd party starts to garner serious non-fringe momentum.

-CF

Re:Math

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe the disenchantment isn't with the existing parties but with the existing voting system. First-past-the-post may have served a purpose in small independent states but in a nation of 300m plus people it's perfectly ridiculous. Preferential voting or proportional representation might get a few more Americans to the polling places. You should also fix the process; it should never be as hard or time-consuming to vote as it appears to be in the U.S.

Re:Math

[Anonymous Coward]

er, sorry, but 2.4% is a small difference. It might not result in a small number, but it is a small difference.

Re:Math

[Pretzalzz]

They haven't finished counting the vote. Mostly on the West Coast. CA/WA/OR/CO/ID/MT and the northeast[CT/NH/ME principally]. These are almost all states Obama won except ID/MT. Obama's final margin is likely to be over 3% when all is said and done. So the polls shouldn't be analyzed/graded too precisely yet.

Re:Math

[AdamWill]

This always sounds like a great argument, except that the evidence we have doesn't really bear it out.

Even in 'two-party system' countries, the two parties seem to change far more than that theory would allow for. Where are the Whigs and the Federalists now? In the U.K., the Whigs transformed into the rather different Liberals, who were decimated by the rise of Labour yet persist as the smaller third party, the Liberal Democrats, after a merger with the Social Democrats.

Often the 'two-party system' theorists excuse these changes by constructing narratives where there are periods of stability followed by some kind of 'exceptional event' which causes a 'realignment', but to me, this is really just retrospectively imposing a narrative on much messier events, to fit your convenient belief.

Most strikingly, consider this country, Canada. We have an identical electoral system to the U.K., which is often argued to be a two-party system (notwithstanding the changes I noted above), just as much as the U.S. system - the same arguments are made, that people believe only two parties can possibly attain power, so they only vote for those two parties, and the electoral system reinforces this.

Yet here, at the last federal election, the Liberals - who had been one of the main parties for over a century, and were considered to be part of a two-party system along with the Conservatives, the only two parties realistically capable of attaining power - were virtually destroyed at the polls. They now have just 34 seats in a 308 seat chamber, and got 18.9% of the popular vote; they'd never previously in their 140+ year history polled under 20%. The strangest thing is there isn't even the possibility to construct any kind of narrative of an 'exceptional event' leading to this - people just flat out got sick of the Liberals and felt they ran a terrible campaign with a terrible leader, and so they just up and voted for other parties. Even though according to the two party theorists, they shouldn't have done, because they shouldn't have believed those parties could possibly win. But they did, and now the NDP - a party which had never previously gained more than 43 seats, or just over 20% of the vote - is the second party, with 103 seats and over 30% of the popular vote. That's only the most recent example; Canada has had a much more turbulent party history than the U.S. or the U.K., despite sharing the same system as the U.K., with all the arguments about it encouraging two-party stability.

I don't have all the answers as to how things _do_ work, but I think the two-party theory is pretty weak and not really borne out by a close reading of the history of mature democracies, even ones that are commonly considered to be two-party systems.

Re:Math

[AdamWill]

er, just realized that second paragraph was a bit confusing. First I mentioned American history - the U.S. Whigs and Federalists (you could add many other expired parties to that list) - then I switched to U.K. history, which had a *different* Whig party. Sorry for the confusion. The point was that both the U.S. and U.K. have had much more complex party histories than the two-party theory really allows for.

Re:Math

[AdamWill]

This is true, and nothing new. Both the Republicans and Democrats have been at least partially gutted from the inside before. The Republicans were not the bastion of big business and evangelical Christianity prior to the 1950s and 1970s, not even close. The Democrats were the party of the segregated South and of Jim Crow - I wonder whether some younger voters are even aware of that, now. You would've have caught a black person in the South dead voting for the Democrats prior to the 1970s...if the Democrats weren't actively preventing them from voting...

The Tea Party is just continuing what appears to be a grand tradition of 20th century U.S. politics; using one of the two big parties as a host and then eating it from the inside out.

Re:Math

[AdamWill]

after all, the Republicans have always been big fans of the popular vote. :P

Re:Math

[Hognoxious]

Only a handful had been built, among them the first computer, ENIAC, created by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1940s.

Some guy from, umm, Bletchley Park on line one. Says his name's Turing - something about a Colossus.

Yeah, I saw that movie. Must be a crank.

Re:Math

[jrumney]

2.4% is a SMALL difference.

No, the amount of the popular vote that Bush won over Gore in 2000 was a small difference. So small in fact, it was negative. 2.4% is actually one of the wider margins in recent decades.

Re:Math

[Paradise Pete]

2.4% *is* a small difference.

You can build some pretty swanky casinos with a 2.4% advantage.

Re:Math

[Paradise Pete]

And the one he missed was very close, and under-polled.

Were there any that were very close and under-polled that he got right? If we're selectively tossing out results those should go as well.

Re:Math

[sunspot42]

>That doesn't take away from Silver's math, though, considering that the polls all had Obama and Romney
>neck and neck and Obama won by a huge margin.

Uh, I'm sorry, but "all" the polls did not have Obama & Romney "neck and neck". Gallup and Rasmussen had them neck and neck in the national polls, but we don't elect Presidents via national polls, we elect them via the Electoral College on a state-by-state basis. And virtually all of the polls in most of the swing states showed Obama leading by comfortable margins greater than 2% throughout the past few months. It was only truly close in Florida (where Obama managed to squeak out a win) and North Carolina (where Obama remained behind though close in the polls in the weeks leading up to the election). There was a dip in the swing state polls after the first debate, but that quickly evaporated and by the time of the election Obama was about back to his polling peak on average.

Obama won the Electoral College by an enormous margin. The popular vote he only won by about 2%, which is a respectable margin but not as impressive as the roughly 60/40 split of votes in the Electoral College. That having been said, I believe he's the first Democrat since FDR to be re-elected with more than 300 votes in the Electoral College, and likely a harbinger of things to come for the Democratic Party, especially since the Republicans seem to be doubling down on the stupid.

Re:Math

[fearofcarpet]

In summer 1952, a Remington Rand executive approached CBS News chief Sig Mickelson and said the Univac might be able to plot early election-night returns against past voting patterns and spit out a predicted winner. Mickelson and anchor Walter Cronkite thought the claim was a load of baloney but figured it would at least be entertaining to try it on the air.

Only in the 50's could there people with names as awesome as Remington Rand, Sig Mickelson and Univac.

Re:Math

[goodmanj]

As the Republicans have moved to the social right, they've opened a gigantic hole in the American political spectrum for the ideas you describe. There's room for a Libertarian-lite party which is pragmatic about statism, or a New Republican party which has rid itself of its bigots.

It's not my own political position (I'm a proud Robin Hood liberal) but it's one that I respect.

Re:Math

[goodmanj]

The Tea Party is just continuing what appears to be a grand tradition of 20th century U.S. politics; using one of the two big parties as a host and then eating it from the inside out.

Very apt metaphor. But a parasite has to be careful not to kill its host before it's ready to emerge.

Re:Math

[sunspot42]

>2.4% *is* a small difference.

By the standards of modern Presidential elections it's not that small. Bush won in 2004 with only a 2.46% margin - lower than Obama's 2.5% now being reported - and had the audacity to call his re-election a "mandate". Of course, this is the same guy who "won" with a -0.51% margin in 2000.

Carter only won with a 2.06% margin. Nixon came into his first term on a 0.70% margin. Kennedy bagged a 0.17% margin.

At the other extreme, Nixon blew away McGovern with a 23.15% margin, although that second term didn't exactly turn out the way the Republicans expected...

Re:Math

[sunspot42]

Whoops, got that EC count totally wrong. Obama's the first Dem since Roosevelt to be re-elected with more than 50% of the popular vote. All of the Dems who got re-elected won more than 300 votes in the EC (although Carter got elected on just 297).

Re:Math

[badpazzword]

Next elections however there will be a third form of uncertainty: feedback loops. If people start really buying into fivethirtyeight predictions, they will react to them to inform their voting. This feedback loop already does exist indirectly with the underlying poll data, but next elections the loop will be much tighter with no guarantees of stability.

Re:Math

[goodmanj]

No, the only states that can split their electoral votes do it winner-take-all by district, it's not a strict population proportion.

And for good reason: any state that adopted proportional electoral votes would render itself politically irrelevant. If my state has 10 electoral votes, and we award 6 to one guy and 4 to the other, the winner of our state pulls ahead by 2 votes instead of 10. We've just given away 80% of our power to pick the president.

I'm not saying that the winner-take-all system is better -- far from it. But states have a strong disincentive to change.

Re:Math

[kasperd]

Instant run-off is the pretty much the single-winner preference voting system that does the least to mitigate the problems with first-past-the-post elections that preference voting systems are usually offered to resolve.

The problems mentioned in the Wikipedia article on first-past-the-post voting are solved by instant run-off. The most prominent problem is that first-past-the-post effectively is run-off voting with the first round of voting being done by the media rather than the voters. With run-off or instant run-off that problem is solved by taking that power away from the media and giving it to the voters. So I don't know which other problems you are referring to. Could you describe the problem, and how it could be solved?

Re:Math

[kasperd]

The electoral college and "winner-takes-all" mechanic is what turns it into a two-party system.

That too. But eliminating that wouldn't solve the two-party problem. You'd need to remove the incentives turning it into a two-party party system from both the levels of the election. The two levels in the election is a left-over from a time where communication was a technical challenge. Today we have technology that overcomes all those hurdles. A direct vote with preferential voting would make the system much more democratic, and eliminate the two-party effect. Alas the people in a position to change it are exactly the people, who benefit from the two-party effect.

Re:Math

[Anonymous Coward]

My name is Joe too. But I don't go around shoving that unwanted irrelevant off-topic information into the body of my posts.

--Joe

Re:Math

[Kyusaku Natsume]

The problem for Republicans was that they instead of using Clinton's "It's the economy stupid!" to get the election in the bag they conceded all the racial minorities votes to the Democrats, they created a handicap for themselves of 20-30% of the electorate. On top of that, they alienated women, that are the majority of population, regardless of race, they alienated religious moderates that are a majority of Americans and with their hate against gays they alienated not only the LGBT community, but also the young population that have friends in that community. The Republicans played this election to lose.

Re:Math

[Anonymous Coward]

Kudos for referencing Reality. Unfortunately for the dreamers, you cannot wish it away by any means. Once you actively begin to accept it, you go on a lifelong journey to your Self.

Re:Math

[djinnn]

That's a winner in smart-assery:

When you can make accurate guesses consistently over time, then maybe we can talk about calling them "predictions".

That's exactly the point he was making: give more credit to sources which have been shown righter in their previous predictions. But i guess agreeing wouldn't have given you the same ego boost.

You didn't predict anything. You made a guess. It took five entire years for reality to coincide with your guess.

A guess? Just because he did not give a time range? Well, he could easily have added "within 10 years". Many people did (I've been taught exactly that in 2002 during a market finance class).
But even without it, who would you rather trust now that it did happen? Someone who said it was going to, someone who said it wasn't, or someone who had no idea whether it would or not?
What you're doing is dismissing a statement claiming it does not contain enough information, which leaves you with either one that contains even less or one that contains none at all... Which contradicts your very point of wise trust allocation based on past record.

Re:Math

[hweimer]

The point is actually that the poll averages are reasonably likely to be wrong, because some polls are designed much better than others. Most news outlets just average the polls. Nate Silver weights them in an attempt to give more weight to accurate ones. So, the simple averages of polls are right in most cases, but in a handful of states are sufficiently skewed by biased polls to give an incorrect prediction. Nate Silvers' weighting of polls, on the other hand, got all 50 states correct--and in many so-called "contested" states actually nailed the Romney v Obama share perfectly to 0.1%!

I don't think a safe call can be made that Nate Silver's method (which not only uses poll weighting, but also "state fundamentals") is actually superior compared to simple poll averaging as done by the Princeton people or by Andrew Tanenbaum. While Silver correctly predicted all states in the presidential election, with Florida being sheer luck, he missed the Senate races in MT and ND quite badly (in the latter he claimed a 92% probability for an R win).

Re:Math

[udachny]

No, when you put your money where your mouth is that is when you can call something a prediction.

Prediction can come true or it can fail to materialise, but if you are willing to put a bet down, then it's a prediction and not just running off the mouth.

Re:Math

[Cederic]

whether the women in my wife are able to make certain medical decisions.

Are there many women in your wife?

Re:Math

[Lorens]

Hold a gun to everyone's head and force them to vote.

Gun? Bad idea. Fines are better, 20-dollar fine in Australia for example. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_voting

Re:Math

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the price of allowing 10,000 independent journalistic voices to be consolidated into 2 or 4 mega-media-conglomerates

2 or 4? Wow. With the Internet, there have to be hundreds or thousands of serious news sources, more than ever before.

And there are far more independent wackos posting conspiracy theories.

Re:Math

[guanxi]

There's also fraud, which isn't exactly polled for either.

Apparently there's not a lot of fraud, because the vote pretty much matched the polls.

Re:Math

[Anonymous Coward]

For example, when the media was shocked by the 2008 crash, I wasn't. I had predicted it 5 years earlier (not necessarily when, but the fact that it would happen).

Who would have thought that that a capitalist society which has had multiple crashes would have one again? I'm shocked and impressed by your prescience.

Re:Math

[Thugthrasher]

And....Obama won by 7.3% in 2004, Clinton won by 5.6% and 8.5%, GHWB won by 7.7%, Reagan won by 18.2% and 9.7%, and LBJ won by 22.6%. That covers every election since the earliest one you mentioned (Kennedy), to the most recent election. This puts this 2.5% victory as the 6th smallest out of 14 elections since that time and it is less than HALF the margin of victory of the next smallest election. It is also 32% of the average(7.87) and 39% of the median(6.42) since Kennedy. So, it is relatively rather small, even in modern elections. It's not small if you only count "modern" as since GWB, but if you go earlier than that, it is definitely rather small.

Re:Math

[Anonymous Coward]

A real man doesn't think fruity drinks taste good.

Re:Math

[S1ngularity]

Brings me back to KitH

Re:Math

[Anonymous Coward]

You might find this interesting: Duverger's Law

First-past-the-post is a HORRIBLE way to determine an election, for example, we have a government in Majority Power (essentially dictators) that received LESS than 40% of the popular vote.

Considering that the other four parties that ran essentially represent a spectrum of left(ish) perspectives, it's a clear example of Duverger's Law at work, AND the ~60% of Canadians that voted for some particular flavour of a left-leaning party are now, nevertheless, subject to the ambitions of an ardently right-wing neo-con ideologue...

-AC

Re:Math

[tbannist]

Instant run-off doesn't meet all of the Condorcet criteria. If you look at the voting system criteria section of the instant runoff voting page, it'll do a better job of explaining the problems. IRV is an improvement over FPTP, though.

Re:Math

[tompaulco]

The problem for Republicans was that they instead of using Clinton's "It's the economy stupid!" to get the election in the bag they conceded all the racial minorities votes to the Democrats, they created a handicap for themselves of 20-30% of the electorate. On top of that, they alienated women, that are the majority of population, regardless of race, they alienated religious moderates that are a majority of Americans and with their hate against gays they alienated not only the LGBT community, but also the young population that have friends in that community. The Republicans played this election to lose.
Wow, they alienated all those groups and still only lost by 2%. I guess they must really be the better choice ad would have won if they just would have played nice with even one of those other groups.
I figure the republicans lost because Romney tried to campaign as being the right choice for America, when he should have just taken the low road and tried to campaign as the right choice for the 10 states that have any bearing in an election.

Re:Math

[kasperd]

it'll do a better job of explaining the problems.

Now I see how instant runoff could have shortcomings compared to other methods. There is however a long list of criteria for elections. Each of those criteria in itself sounds very sensible and something you could reasonably require a voting system to satisfy. Unfortunately they are incompatible, and you cannot have a system satisfy all of them.

I am wondering, if there was to be an election to chose a voting system, how that would turn out. And should such an election chose a preference of the voting systems or a preference of the criteria characterizing good voting systems?

It is complicated, but that complexity shouldn't stand in the way of replacing a clearly inferior system with a better system.

Re:Math

[wolja]

Unfortunately for conservatives, good for the rest of us, science is the antichrist and must be avoided at all costs.

In Australia, and seemingly from afar the US, the conservatives are trapped in the paradox of selling ice to eskimos. They market to, rally with and exclusively listen to themselves then get very surprised when election after election they increase their majorities in the their safe seats and don't have much effect, except on those occasions when the opposition has been in power to long.

In the 70's & 80's , again in Australia but apparently the US to, they diversified to dupe the working class into believing they cared for them, despite massive job losses, safety net cuts etc etc every time they were elected, against all logic. A cadre that is all about the delusion that giving tax cuts to rich people increases employment sees the working class as fodder for the important people. These were the captives of the shock jocks and newscorpse where fact was anathema and dumbarse patriotism despite the facts was the norm. Hopefully social media is starting to affect that as the non right is starting to pull back from its flight to the intelligensia they started in the 60's and are using repeated personal logic to overcome the lies from the likes of the tea party.

Re:Math

[sunspot42]

>This puts this 2.5% victory as the 6th smallest out of 14 elections

In other words, it's in the middle of the pack.

Re:Math

[Thugthrasher]

>This puts this 2.5% victory as the 6th smallest out of 14 elections

In other words, it's in the middle of the pack.

That's why I mentioned the rest of the numbers, so you could see why it was relatively small. If we had the numbers (1 2 3 4 5 6 1000 2000 4500 9000 10000 15000 15001 15002), then using your logic (that 6/14 is all that matters) the 6 would not be a relatively small member of that set. The other things (less than 50% of the next largest margin of victory, 32% of the average, 35% of the median) are what put it in context and allow you to see that it is relatively small.

Re:Math

[Kyusaku Natsume]

Because the USA's economy at this time sucks for almost everyone regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation or age and that is a big drawback for any incumbent and his party in any barely functioning democracy. That's why I think republicans had the election in the bag, but by pandering too much to their extreme right wing they ended losing. See

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/11/07/us/politics/obamas-diverse-base-of-support.html?ref=politics
http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/11/poll-latino-vote-devastated-gop-even-worse-than-exits-showed.php?ref=fpa

From the NYT I'm impressed with the strong push toward democrats by young voters in Arizona.

Best Regards

Re:Math

[Outtascope]

After 12+ years of Republican gerrymandering, if you switched to proportional vote (which is done by congressional districts where it is currently in place), then you needn't even bother having elections. Check out what Husted is trying to do in Ohio and it becomes obvious just how AWFUL an idea this is. That system would have had Obama losing at least 5 states that he won both electorally and by popular vote. Check out the insane congressional district maps to see just how obnoxious this has become. Things, even simple things, are not always as straight forward as they appear. If you were to do proportional, you would have to redistrict each state for that purpose via a simple geographic mathematical formula, or you would have to allocate directly against the state popular vote. And if you are going to do that and not make it winner take all, you might as well go with the national popular vote. There really isn't a good reason not to do that anymore.

Re:Math

[couchslug]

"A real man isn't afraid to order a fruity drink because they taste damn good..."

The Spartans and Greek warriors were among the ultimate "real men".
Just because a lot of out homosexuals are silly bottoms doesn't mean they ALL are....

Re:Math

[AdamWill]

The majority party in a parliamentary democracy are not 'essentially dictators'. Such hyperbole is absurd and only tends to make people not want to take you seriously.

I'm well aware of the advantages and limitations of various electoral systems, thanks. Personally I favour proportional representation, but it has its own drawbacks and one can certainly reasonably sustain an argument in favour of various other systems. I don't think anyone's invented the perfect democracy yet.

Re:Math

[DirtyLiar]

Pundits were creating the illusion of close races to drive up viewing.

Which is hilarious, because with myself and a few others I know, it backfired!

I just watched a couple movies, and kept my tablet on a webpage that that showed the election results and automatically updated every minute or so.

Whenever I got curious, which happened every hour or so, I'd just glance at my tablet. No fuss, no muss, no waiting for a half-hour for babbling "newscasters", er... news presenters to get around to what I was interested in.

Re:Math

[TWX]

Normally I'd agree, but the thing to remember is that once the footsoldiers are whipped up into a frenzy, they often don't take very good instruction from the generals anymore. Further complicating it is Fox News, which has its ratings for advertising to look after. If it's profitable to continue whipping up the relatively uneducated base even if the moneybags want it to stop, they might not stop whipping them up, and the movement could actually splinter away from the control of those who initiated it.

So, basically we could see a new political party develop because of a need for television ratings.

Re:Math

[Relayman]

No, it's better than a guess. It's called fuzzy logic and it serves me well. It allows me to make educated guesses without having to massage a lot of data.

The main-stream media and the campaigns wanted to talk about how close the race was so that people would watch the news, click on the stories and get out and vote. If you publicize, like Nate did, that Candidate B is definitely going to win, Candidate B's supporters may skip voting and Candidate A's may make a big push to vote, reversing the prediction of the polls.

Re:Math

[bhiestand]

All of those reasons for potential inaccuracies are essentially already accounted for and baked into the prediction model as they are using not just polling numbers but also past elections. Things like the fact that republican voters tend to have higher turnout relative to the polls, etc are already considered.

Not all of them. He can't easily account for huge changes. For example: major storms, changes in early voting, voter ID laws, extremely long lines at polling stations (compared to previous elections), voting machine hacking. I'm not implying that Sandy had an effect, the data really shows that it didn't (although it may well cement Christie as viable in 2016). But the rest were without real recent precedent and in flux in the final days leading up to the election

I have tremendous respect for Silver's work, and generally would place my money wherever his math lands, but I was still worried about this election. Florida, Ohio, and several other states were showing many signs of drastic changes that could significantly impact the ability of some groups to vote. I don't believe Silver accounted for these potential issues, nor that he could have.

Re:Math

[Anonymous Coward]

The President now has a license to kill

It's not simply that he has such license but that he can issue them at will.

Good for him

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad the electoral system in the USA is a joke and doesn't represent the vote of the people.

Re:Good for him

[Anonymous Coward]

Another possibility is that the Founding Fathers understood just what kind of dumbshits most of "the people" are, and built in some safeguards to allow civilization to survive the inevitable popular vote to shut it down.

Re:Good for him

[FilmedInNoir]

Too bad the electoral system in the USA is a joke and doesn't represent the vote of the people.

So you wanted Al Gore to be president in 2000?

Re:Good for him

[Latentius]

While the possibility of that is certainly true, it is false for this recent presidential election. Not all districts have reported in, but the most recent numbers show that Obama is ahead in the popular vote by a hair under 2.9 million votes.

http://www.google.com/elections/ed/us/results

Re:Good for him

[Vermifax]

It exactly represents the vote of the people state by state. As it is supposed to.

Re:Good for him

[superdave80]

I wish people would stop blaming the electoral college. The system is fine. It is the method in which the individual states assign the votes that is the problem. Florida in 2000 wouldn't have been such a big deal if they had distributed the electoral votes by district, rather than winner take all.

Win California by one vote? You get all 55 electoral votes! How stupid is that?

Re:Good for him

[Anonymous Coward]

Tuesday, the Pres. won the popular vote and the electoral vote. How could the nation have chosen more decisively?

Re:Good for him

[ArcadeMan]

Does it?

If the votes in every state are 49% for Party A and 51% for Party B, that means Party B wins with "100% of the votes" country-wide yet 49% of the Americans would have voted for Party A.

How is that representative?

Re:Good for him

[alen]

i understand you live in flyover country, but there is a reason cows, chickens and corn can't vote

Re:Good for him

[ArcadeMan]

It's as stupid as going with votes by district.

Win each district by one vote? You get all the votes, and hence all the states and the election! How stupid is that?

Re:Good for him

[Tridus]

There's only one President, and the guy with the most votes cast for him is there.

How is this NOT representative?

Re:Good for him

[Anonymous Coward]

Another possibility is that the Founding Fathers understood just what kind of dumbshits most of "the people" are, and built in some safeguards to allow civilization to survive the inevitable popular vote to shut it down.

Not only that, but the restrictions on who could vote (basically white landowners) wasn't there because of some inherent prejudice that suggested women, free blacks or other demographics were lesser. The restrictions where there because white landowners had a very high chance of having a solid education. It morphed over time (both in society and in the "history" books) into something more racist / misogynistic. The only thing worse than pure "majority rules" is "uneducated majority rules".

Re:Good for him

[Ziggitz]

As opposed to the alternative? Jesus Fucking Christ, yes.

Re:Good for him

[alen]

did that ever happen?
will it every happen? most likely not

people in every state have different beliefs on different issues which is the point behind the electoral college. Its supposed to make it hard to win an election by pandering and populism

Re:Good for him

[rhsanborn]

It does tend to over-represent smaller states. This was somewhat intended, but as one analyst on Tuesday put it, "Should an electoral vote in Wyoming, that represents 130,000 people be equal to an electoral vote in California that represents over 600,000 people."

David Brooks gave an interesting response, he said that the electoral system forces the candidates to make an effort to play somewhat to the middle. Without the electoral system, Barack Obama would have campaigned heavily in California to get the liberal count up there. Mitt Romney would have campaigned heavily in Texas to instigate the conservative vote. The result was that they needed to go to places that weren't exactly on their side and try to convince them. They were forced to answer questions that both sides wanted to hear an answer to, rather than just their base. (I dare say most people haven't been pushing for real answers, but that's another issue altogether)

Re:Good for him

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad the electoral system in the USA is a joke and doesn't represent the vote of the people.

So you wanted Al Gore to be president in 2000?

Well he wouldn't have been any worse than the village idiot from Texas. Well okay, born in Connecticut, prep school in Massachusetts, Yale University, and then he went on to be the village idiot in Crawford, Texas.

Re:Good for him

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. 1000x more than Dubya.

Re:Good for him

[ArcadeMan]

But he would have won with 51% of the votes, not 100%. The electoral results are not representative of the votes.

Re:Good for him

[Tridus]

The result of the vote is that he won. The result of the electoral vote is that he won.

This is pretty much the textbook definition of whining about something that doesn't matter in the slightest.

Re:Good for him

[superdave80]

You get all the votes, and hence all the states and the election! How stupid is that?

So the person that gets more popular votes and electoral votes wins the election. I'm not sure I see what the problem is here.

Re:Good for him

[sjames]

Because the candidate the majority voted for took office.

You could argue that a coalition government might have better represented the people's desires, but that's not an issue of the electoral college.

Re:Good for him

[MightyMartian]

The Electoral College system was never meant to represent "the will of the people". The House of Representatives is supposed to represent the will of the people. The presidency and the Senate had entirely different purposes and mandates.

Re:Good for him

[AK Marc]

As bad as he is, he couldn't have been worse than Bush Jr.

Re:Good for him

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

How is this NOT representative?

Because the people that voted for Obama are not real Americans.

Re:Good for him

[CannonballHead]

This could be framed another way; that is, "swing states" are the only ones the candidates care about. The rest of us are taken for granted.

Re:Good for him

[kelemvor4]

So you wanted Al Gore to be president in 2000?

I did.

Re:Good for him

[king neckbeard]

What he's saying is that if Party B gets 51% of California's votes, they should get 28 votes instead of 55, with the remaining 27 votes going to Party A. That's assuming that the state is using a proportional vote. If it's a Congressional district vote, then we haven't been given enough information. However, what's very clear is that winning just over half the state and getting all of the electoral votes is unfair.

Re:Good for him

[Antipater]

Its supposed to make it hard to win an election by pandering and populism

Is it really? If so, it's doing a heckuva job. Instead of making it hard to win by pandering, it makes it so the only way to win is by pandering - but to a very select group of people. Whatever Florida wants every four years, Florida gets. Whatever Ohio wants, Ohio gets. Tyranny of the minority at its finest.

Re:Good for him

[mrsquid0]

Yes! Given what a disaster Little Bush turned out to be it Al Gore would probably have been a significant improvement.

Re:Good for him

[Anonymous Coward]

You get all the votes, and hence all the states and the election! How stupid is that?

So the person that gets more popular votes and electoral votes wins the election. I'm not sure I see what the problem is here.

It's demonstrating that if it's "stupid" to grant all a state's electoral votes to the candidate that won the popular vote in that state by a small margin, than by induction it must also be stupid to grant all of a district's electoral votes to the candidate that won that district's popular vote by a small margin.

Re:Good for him

[Bigbutt]

In looking back, I think Gore would have been a better president. I think the problem with the Republicans (outside of the ordinary racist, homophobic, misogynistic part) is that everyone is looking back and saying "Gore would have been better" and folks are voting that way.

[John]

Re:Good for him

[amRadioHed]

The electoral system causes presidential candidates to entirely ignore EIGHTY PERCENT of the population. Does that sound right to you? I think it is perfectly reasonable for a candidate to spend a lot of time in California, Texas, New York, and Florida. Because that's where most of the constituents are.

Re:Good for him

[Anonymous Coward]

You're just rationalizing. The reason only landowners could vote was an artifact of the historical evolution of political power in England. When the Normans invaded England, they handed out perpetual land tenures to their supporters. This directly led to the Magna Carta, which locked in the landed gentry's rights when the dynasty tried too hard to centralize power. This resulted in a devolution of political power, somewhat unique in Europe.

This notion that only landed white men could hold political power wasn't something that was thought through. It just _was_, like the idea that only opposite-sex couples could marry. Only when society changed and challenged the convention did people _invent_ rationales for keeping or changing the status quo.

Also, women were able to hold and own property in their own right long before the American Revolution. Likewise for blacks. As far as I can tell, the idea that women were only fit ruling the household, while men ruled in the community can at least be traced back to Athens. The Athenians used to make fun of the Spartans, who let their women cavort outside the household, and participate in all sorts of "manly" things.

Re:Good for him

[tomhath]

Not stupid at all. The USA is a federation of states. Each state decides which candidate it supports for the federal Chief Executive.

Re:Good for him

[sgtrock]

What? You can't follow the news when the candidates are out of state? /sarcasm

Re:Good for him

[amRadioHed]

You say the electoral college is not the problem, but what you describe is exactly why it's a problem. Allocating electoral votes by district is only marginally better than allocating them by state. It's still the same thing. Anything other than allocating votes per voter is plain wrong.

Re:Good for him

[Anonymous Coward]

are you literally retarded? you've just described democracy. SOMEONE has to win.

Re:Good for him

[amRadioHed]

What the electoral system was meant to do has nothing to do with what it currently does. Electors were not meant to be bound to the popular votes of the states, as they now are. The original purpose for the electoral system no longer exists, and yet we are stuck with this backwards, broken system.

Re:Good for him

[amicusNYCL]

What exactly are you trying to suggest? Are you suggesting that Obama gets to be president 50.5% of the time, Romney 48.1% of the time, Gary Johnson 0.9% of the time, Jill Stein 0.3% of the time, and Roseann Barr gets to be president 0.05% of the time? Does Obama need to call up Roseann when he has a decision to make?

Re:Good for him

[mrsquid0]

No, that is not correct. The US founding fathers kept the franchise more or less the way that it had been, and did not make significant changes. The reason that the franchise in the early US was restricted to certain property owners (the exact requirements varied greatly from state to state) is because that is how election had worked in the colonies for most of the previous 200 years. Also, in many states free black men, who met the property requirements, were originally able to vote. However, that right was systematically eliminated by the early 1800s. As for property ownership correlating with education, the vast majority of voters at the time had little or no formal education. Most property owners were skilled tradesmen who learned their skill through apprenticeships, not in a class or at a school.

Re:Good for him

[Anonymous Coward]

Nebraska and Main would differ with your ideas...

It is up to the STATE how it is distributed. Dont like it change your state...

Re:Good for him

[fustakrakich]

Well, he got reelected. So I can only assume that some people disagree. And I'll bet you a dollar that, if he could have run a third term, he would have won again.

Re:Good for him

[kelemvor4]

In 2000, Al Gore had 50,999,897 votes vs George Bush with 50,456,002. More people voted for the guy who lost the election than the guy who won. That's an example of how the system does not work properly.

Source: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0876793.html

That's half a million voters whose votes basically did not count, and THAT is why the electoral college system is a problem.

Re:Good for him

[mdielmann]

It's as stupid as going with votes by district.

Win each district by one vote? You get all the votes, and hence all the states and the election! How stupid is that?

This needs to be stated as clearly as possible, because it is one side of the greatest flaw in first-to-the-finish voting.

The more districts where the votes are aggregated, the less of the popular vote you need to win.

The more (plausible) options there are on a vote, the less of the popular vote you need to win.

Take a second and read that again. Now I'll explain

First, a district example.

Let's say you have only 1 district, two candidates, and a million people in this imaginary nation. You get 500,001 votes, you're the new president. It's pretty straightforward, and you clearly have the popular vote, if only barely.

Now, let's say we still have 1 million people and two candidates, but we have 10 districts of 100,000 each. To win a district, you need 50,001 votes. To become president, you need 6 districts. Do the math and you only need 300,006 votes to win. While you may have the popular vote, it's not necessary to win.

Now, the candidate example.

Let's say you have only 1 district, two candidates, and a million people in this imaginary nation. You get 500,001 votes, you're the new president. It's pretty straightforward, and you clearly have the popular vote, if only barely. (Yes, it's exactly the same as above.)

Now, let's ay we still have 1 district and one million people, but we have 10 candidates. Given an unrealistically tight race, you could win with only 100,001 votes. Practically, you'd need more than that. How much more? Well, that depends on how close the candidates are in popularity.

So there you have it. If you think popular vote is the most reasonable way to choose the president (which is NOT the model the US uses), you want fewer districts and candidates, or you want to stop using first-to-the-finish voting.

Also, if you combine the two elements above, many districts and many candidates, the percentage of the popular vote required to become president becomes even lower. For a handy real-world example, see Canada.

For the conspiracy theory lovers out there, a nation in the state listed above with a lax immigration policy is a ripe target for a peaceful invasion. Immigrate enough people to become a third of the population in a third of the districts, wait until they have voting rights, have them vote for who they want to be in charge, and the government is yours. This may be easier if you make a new party for this purpose as it dilutes the voter power of those who aren't voting in concert to overthrow the current government. That's right, 4 million people, good planning, dedication, and 5 to 10 years, and a nation the size of Canada could have a peaceful revolution. Conspiracists, you may start to spin your tinfoil hats!

Re:Good for him

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is stupid.

Re:Good for him

[KiloByte]

Because if one state does it differently, you will have a majority of voters casting votes against the critter that gets elected.

Re:Good for him

[kelemvor4]

I wish people would stop blaming the electoral college. The system is fine. It is the method in which the individual states assign the votes that is the problem. Florida in 2000 wouldn't have been such a big deal if they had distributed the electoral votes by district, rather than winner take all.

Win California by one vote? You get all 55 electoral votes! How stupid is that?

The system is not fine. In 2000, a guy with fewer votes than his competitor won the election. System broken.

Re:Good for him

[pavon]

So the person that gets more popular votes and electoral votes wins the election

No that's not what happens. For example, suppose that in state A each of 20 districts is 45% Republican and 55% Democrat so all 20 electoral votes go to Democrats. Then in state B each of 15 districts is 65% Republican and 35% Democrat, so all 15 votes go to the Republicans. Then the Democrat wins the electoral vote by 20 to 15, even though the Republican had 54% of the popular vote. This is despite the fact that the electoral votes in this example were even distributed purely based on population (each district is the exact same size).

Splitting large elections into a series of smaller winner takes all elections does not give the same result as popular vote, because it suppresses the minority vote in each district. And that's before you get into bigger practical problems like gerrymandering. If you want popular vote then go with direct popular vote. If you want to maintain the current handicap for smaller states that the electoral congress provides (I think it's good), then require all states to allocate their electoral votes in proportion to the total vote within the entire state. Don't split things up into even smaller winner-takes-all elections.

Re:Good for him

[Hatta]

Jesus Fucking Christ ran in 2000? How did he not split the evangelical vote?

Re:Good for him

[tomhath]

No, that's an example of candidates who know how to campaign concentrating their efforts in swing states.

Gore screwed up by standing in front of cheering crowds in New York and California. But those are a given for the Democrats, he was wasting his time.

Re:Good for him

[Anonymous Coward]

If you think that Bush could have been re-elected in 2008, you're not only a complete and utter moron, but you also pay no attention about the real world around you (crying "liberal bias" much?).

Re:Good for him

[tomhath]

if they had distributed the electoral votes by district

Which would have given Romney this election. The idea has merit...

But the idea is to get a mix of how candidates are elected - House of Representatives is as local as it can be done, Senate statewide popular vote in different years, President statewide by popular vote. It works for me.

Re:Good for him

[lightknight]

Or perhaps that they, in their day, had and many of them being themselves politicians, knew that future politicians would lie / make undeliverable promises as well. And that that was the reason for the creation of the electoral college -> to grab a bunch of people who are used to these types, and let them vet the candidates.

Considering that ballots come with a 'straight-line' party vote, I would assume that their fears were justified. Vote not for a party, but for the person, as it is the person you are putting in office, not the party.

Re:Good for him

[tgd]

The electoral system causes presidential candidates to entirely ignore EIGHTY PERCENT of the population. Does that sound right to you? I think it is perfectly reasonable for a candidate to spend a lot of time in California, Texas, New York, and Florida. Because that's where most of the constituents are.

It doesn't ignore eighty percent of the population. It does precisely what it was intended to do -- ignore the entire population.

Electing the president, in the US, is done by the electors associated with the states, not by the people. That's just like how a Prime Minister is elected by the MPs in the UK, or most other elected officials. Why? Because the population is a bunch of morons who aren't qualified to pick a leader.

The fact that you can vote for anything other than positions associated with your state is a tradition the states created, but was *not* the intent of the founders of the US. Go read the 12th amendment -- you may be surprised what it contains, if you haven't. There is absolutely nothing about the people voting for the President, and there was no intention for that to be the case.

The US was founded under the belief that voters needed to be educated, and best understood their local issues, and the people elected in the states had the job of understanding the broader issues. But no one seems to actually learn about the structure of the US government or the reasons why it was carefully structured as it was anymore.

The thing that is messed up in the US isn't that a handful of voters in swing states are picking the president, its that the teeming masses of mouth breathers no matter where they live have any say in it. We've cut out the layers of indirection that were put in place explicitly to keep a more stable central government.

Re:Good for him

[Ziggitz]

He was way too liberal. Kept talking about helping the poor and ran on a very anti-war platform.

Re:Good for him

[dkleinsc]

David Brooks gave an interesting response, he said that the electoral system forces the candidates to make an effort to play somewhat to the middle.

David Brooks is completely wrong about this. For instance, I'm in Ohio, the swing state that everyone was focused on for months. Here are some of the appeals I got in my mailbox and on billboards:
- Obama is actually the son of a convicted drug dealer and a porn actress, not a Kenyan. And he's been lying about his name the whole time.
- Voter fraud is a felony (but only in neighborhoods that are mostly poor and black).
- Any kind of increase in taxes will cause the economy to collapse.
- Social Security should be abolished.

Tell me exactly how that forces candidates to appeal to the center.

Re:Good for him

[tgd]

That's half a million voters whose votes basically did not count, and THAT is why the electoral college system is a problem.

Nowhere in the constitution or the intentions of the founders of the US is there anything saying the opinion of the voters SHOULD count towards who is President. In fact, they explicitly set it up to ensure they *didn't*.

The president is the CEO of the US, and the states are the board of directors. You don't see employees of corporations voting for their CEO. Why? Because the vast majority of employees aren't qualified to determine who would make a good CEO.

Re:Good for him

[Anonymous Coward]

Win California by one vote? You get all 55 electoral votes! How stupid is that?

So if you win by 53 votes you get all 55 electoral votes? That makes more sense?

Re:Good for him

[tomhath]

The goal was and still is to prevent a few large cities from having absolute rule. The country needs rural and undeveloped areas that are somewhat protected from urbanites.

Re:Good for him

[Anonymous Coward]

This is true but there is the definite possibility of the popular vote & Electoral College vote not matching, in fact if the Electoral Votes are in direct ratio to the population AND if the Electoral Votes are apportioned per state in direct proportion to the vote of the state (e.g. NOT 'all or nothing) then there would be absolutely 0 need for the Electoral College...so what's it's purpose other than to skew the results of the popular vote?

Re:Good for him

[mspohr]

I heard of a plan (apparently already implemented in seven states) to have all of a state's electoral votes go to the person with the most national votes.
This sounds like a good idea.
This would help ensure that the winner was the person with the most votes.
I can't think of a downside for this. In order to earn the electoral votes of these states, the candidates would have to earn the most national votes which means that they would have to try to earn votes in all states and not write off states that were safely in one camp.

Re:Good for him

[alva_edison]

I'd actually like to see the following as a system. The votes are tallied for each congressional district plus 2 extra for each state. So In Wisconsin, 3 districts would have voted Democrat, 5 Republican, and the 2 for state popular would go to the Democrat, a nicely split electoral vote. Of course, then they would be talking about the swing districts in addition to swing states. Since the swinginess of states would only be two votes, it would change where campaigns are conducted, not necessarily how.

Re:Good for him

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm glad that you provided this reference. Ignoring the 3rd (and 4th and 5th) party canditates, Obama won by slighly more than 1% (even closer in Ohio and Florida). That is no "huge margin" or "illusion of close race". It is well within the margin of error and quite a feat for Silver to predict it that well.

Re:Good for him

[superdave80]

The USA is a federation of states.

That is true.

Each state decides which candidate it supports for the federal Chief Executive.

That is also true.

What exactly is your point as it relates to my post?

Re:Good for him

[wed128]

So move!

(Disclaimer...voted for Romney)

Re:Good for him

[shutdown -p now]

It worked fine when USA was more of a federation, and power balance was more in favor of the states. These days, too many things are decided on federal level that directly affect the lives of the citizens, from IRS to DEA, and the system is ill-suited to that.

Re:Good for him

[19thNervousBreakdown]

The system is only broken if the intention is to always have the winner be the person with the most votes. If that's the case, then yes, it is an incredibly stupid system compared to simply totaling the votes and picking the winner.

But I don't think that's the intention of the system.

Re:Good for him

[zerro]

yep - the job creators had fundamental disagreements with Matthew 6 & 19

Re:Good for him

[Ziggitz]

You're an idiot. Bush ran against two very uninspiring candidates, the first one arguably having his base split by the green party candidate and could have won. During the second election the full consequences of relaxed regulations on wall street, the mounting debt from 2 wars and the well hidden but inevitable housing market crash had not come to fruition yet. By the time the 2008 election had come around all of them had been realized. There is no fucking way Bush could have ever won a third term if such a thing existed.

Re:Good for him

[forand]

There is a very reasonable solution to many of these problems which does not require any changes to the US constitution: all the states agree to assign their electoral college votes to the winner of the national popular vote. After 2004 many "blue" states signed up. You can find more on their (admittedly horrible looking) site.

Re:Good for him

[fustakrakich]

Obviously you are full of it and know nothing about people. You are simply spewing. Obama didn't win by any large margin against McCain/Palin. Not only would Bush have won then, he would have won last Tuesday. The republicans are playing the 'crazy card' for a reason.

I'll assume you are posting AC so you can mod the discussion.

Re:Good for him

[TubeSteak]

The real Americans live on reservations.
Neither Democratic nor Republican Presidents have improved their unemployement numbers.

Re:Good for him

[superdave80]

Splitting large elections into a series of smaller winner takes all elections does not give the same result as popular vote,

I'm not terribly interested in what the popular vote is. Remember, the US is NOT one big blob of a nation. We are a collection of states, each given a certain 'weight' of say in national decisions (Congress, electing the President, etc.) I would just like to see the states distribute their electoral votes more in line with the will of the people. The couple of million people that voted for Romney in California feel disenfranchised when they see zero of the fifty-five electoral votes going to their candidate.

...because it suppresses the minority vote in each district.

How does the winner take all approach we have now NOT suppress the minority vote?

Re:Good for him

[superdave80]

Anything other than allocating votes per voter is plain wrong.

You realize that all of the laws that get passed in this country don't rely on having the majority of the population behind it? Why does electing a president suddenly require a majority of the population?

Re:Good for him

[voidptr]

You can argue the benefits and downsides of the Electoral College vs Popular vote all day long.

However, you can't retroactively the specific outcome of a race run under one set of rules as evidence for a switch. The rules of the game determine the entire strategy or the race, and thus the outcome. If both parties were campaigning for a popular vote win in 2000, the results wouldn't be the same as what they actually were with both sides going for a EC win. As long as the election is held under EC rules, the aggregate popular vote is a relatively meaningless number.

It'd be like arguing every score in football should be one point, because you just lost two field goals to a touchdown, but scored on more possessions. Maybe you should change the rules in the future, but you can't go back and rescore a game played where FGs are 3 and touchdowns are 7 and pretend the strategy and outcome of the game wouldn't have changed.

Re:Good for him

[fustakrakich]

Oh please, the economy was crashing in the summer of 2000 also. And besides, you're acting like it wasn't planned all along. You all are a bunch of cry babies with this crap about Gore being any better. He had Lieberman, every bit as evil as Cheney, more so in my book. A warmonger supreme. You probably weren't alive before Reagan, so I really can't expect you to know better. And you're really dumb if you think the president actually controls the economy.

Re:Good for him

[superdave80]

In 2000, a guy with fewer votes than his competitor won the election. System broken.

George Bush won more electoral votes than Gore. He did not have 'fewer votes'. Popular vote is not required for passing laws. Are you saying that we should change that too?

Re:Good for him

[omnichad]

Try living in Illinois, but not near Chicago. About 1/5 of our population is centered in Chicago. This means that almost all of our laws favor a very tiny geographic region of the state. The rest of us really don't get what works for us. 20% is enough to tip the scales to win almost anything in state legislature.

Re:Good for him

[superdave80]

This has to be the worst idea I have ever heard. As a California citizen, why in the holy hell should I care how OTHER states voted in determining how the electoral votes of my state are assigned?

Re:Good for him

[rsborg]

It's as stupid as going with votes by district.

Win each district by one vote? You get all the votes, and hence all the states and the election! How stupid is that?

It's quantization. Just that your granularity of quanta in the current electoral college is winner-take-all for state level (for 48 of 50 states and D.C.). At this level it's very inefficient. In order to corrupt the entire process, a swing state or two can be targeted, and corrupted (see FL in 2000, OH in 2004) so that votes are spoiled, missing, etc.

Quantizing at the individual vote level would lead to complete ignorance of the rural vote (not a horrible thing in my opinion, but undesirable to many states currently) in favor of large urban centers - candidate who wins most biggest cities wins presidency.

Instead, quantizing at the district level gives you some balance between the rural and urban centers, while also making it much more difficult for a single secretary of state to swing votes to his/her party. 1EV per district. You can even add 2EV for the winner of each state to match the current congress size, so the little states do get some respect for being full states.

Of course, this also runs into the problem of gerrymandering as all districts are freakily gerrymandered right now.

Re:Good for him

[ohnocitizen]

Mod parent up. Candidates are forced to play to swing states and their specific concerns (car companies, corn subsidies) vs larger national concerns. They also have to play towards states that tend to be more conservative than the rest of the country. Look at the population centers and the maps of votes by district. If the campaign was aiming at the popular vote, issues would more accurately reflect what the majority of the nation wants. Things like universal healthcare, for one.

Re:Good for him

[pavon]

How does the winner take all approach we have now NOT suppress the minority vote?

I'm not saying that. I'm saying your suggestion has the exact same flaws as the current system, and won't make people feel any less disenfranchised.

Re:Good for him

[ohnocitizen]

If all the states joined the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact we wouldn't be having this discussion.

Re:Good for him

[omnichad]

You only think that because your preferred candidate did not win. It's true that the electoral college suppresses all but the two major parties, but it also gives better representation to states with small populations. Nobody gets less than one electoral vote.

Re:Good for him

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah I bet he doesn't even want to mine babies for oil! Commie bastard.

Re:Good for him

[nedlohs]

Yes it would be a great idea if you wanted the citizens of your state to have a much smaller say in the outcome than the citizens of other states. And wanted to ensure that none of the promises and bribes in an election cycle had any benefit for your citizens.

Re:Good for him

[Anonymous Coward]

Jesus Fucking Christ

Wouldn't that be incest?

Re:Good for him

[omnichad]

I live in "flyover" country - actually just on the other side of the river from St. Louis. Have you ever stopped to think that democratic policies tend to favor population centers and have bad effects for rural areas? Likewise, republican policy often tends to fare badly for city dwellers. It's too bad there's such a divide in understanding. Even calling it flyover country shows you have no concern for this part of the country, and would be a poor choice for a President who is to lead all the people.

Re:Good for him

[Nimey]

The House of Representatives is supposed to represent the will of the people.

And then gerrymandering happened. Bet you if we still had circa-2009 district maps the House would have changed hands.

Re:Good for him

[Artifakt]

The whole metaphor of the Nation as Business stinks. You go telling people the President is a CEO, your next step is to say that USA Inc. can fire its underperforming citizens. Of course you favor disenfranchising the vast majority of voters - your metaphor justifies taking every single right they have away, not just the franchise. And, it justifies taking all yours away as well, which is probably not what you intended and not something I would wish on you. I'm giving you the benefit of a doubt and assuming you meant "nowhere in the constitution, PRE-AMENDMENTS" rather than including them in your analysis, and even with that limitation, there's nothing to say the founders opposed the individual ballot BECAUSE OF A CORPORATE ANALOGY. The founding fathers may have mostly opposed direct popular election of the president. At least some of them certainly wanted the EC as a check on democracy running roughtshod over the rights of the states. To turn that into claiming the US is intended to function as would a corporation, is sort of like claiming Teddy Rosevelt was a total pacifist because only a Ghandi clone would have started a national park system. You have to ignore a tremendous number of inconvenient facts to stretch the truth that far.

Re:Good for him

[Raenex]

And I'll bet you a dollar that, if he could have run a third term, he would have won again.

You're dreaming. Bush was around 50% approval rating in Oct. 2004 and barely won that election. In Oct. 2008, his approval rating was less than 30%. He wouldn't have stood a chance.

Re:Good for him

[aevan]

We Frankenstein 'em... 50.5% of the grey matter comes from Obama...48 from Mittens and so forth...

What could possibly go wrong?

Re:Good for him

[Anonymous Coward]

You'll eventually figure out that treating everything as just as the same as everything else isn't wisdom.

The two systems described (state electors distributed by district, and winner-of-state-takes-all), are *different* to each other. Proper intelligence is to judge between them, pro & cons; not finding the thinnest excuse possible to dismiss the very idea that one might possibly be better than the other.

Re:Good for him

[fustakrakich]

Congress has less than 13% approval rating, and 95% are reelected almost every time. Please, stop with the Gore crap. He's no better than anybody else.

Re:Good for him

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's assume we have State A with 10,000,000 voters and 50 electoral votes. Then, let's assume we have States B-K (ten states), each with 1,000,000 voters and 5 electoral votes.

So, if State A's voting is 5,000,000 for Candidate A, 4,999,998 for Candidate B, and 2 for Ralph Nader, Candidate A gets 50 electoral votes. States B-J vote 1 for Candidate A, 999,998 for Candidate B, and 1 for Ralph Nader, giving Candidate B 45 electoral votes. State K votes 500,001 for Candidate A, 499,999 for Candidate B, and 0 for Ralph Nader, giving Candidate A another 5 electoral votes.

In total, Candidate A has 55 electoral votes, Candidate B has 45. But, Candidate A has 5,500,010 actual votes, Candidate B has 14,499,979 actual votes, and nobody cares how Nader did anyway. Candidate A only got 27.5% of the vote and WON over Candidate B's 72.5% majority.

An absurd, hypothetical situation? Perhaps. But tweak the population numbers slightly and you could easily get the difference between New York and a handful of plains states. Why should 51% of New York voters count for more than 100% of an equal population of plains states voters?

(besides the obvious answer that they're in the plains states and you, most likely having never set foot on outside ground that isn't concrete or asphalt in your life, have to strain all belief to consider that people actually live out there in the first place)

Re:Good for him

[Githaron]

Chicago needs to be its own state.

Re:Good for him

[iluvcapra]

That would be an interesting idea.

Some systems have a proportional executive: Switzerland has a governing council of seven people, none is the sole "president." Parliamentary governments assign cabinet seats based on support in the legislature.

Many, many systems have proportional legislatures. Winner-take-all is simple but it encourages tactical voting and has a tendency to produce an equilibrium of two parties with mediocre support.

Re:Good for him

[amRadioHed]

You're entirely wrong. The original design was that the people wouldn't vote for the president, but we do now. The people vote for who their electors vote for. That maybe wasn't how the founders intended for it to work, but they allowed the states to choose how to allocate their electoral votes and all of them have chosen to leave it up to their voters.

Re:Good for him

[LMariachi]

Congress as a whole has a low national approval rating. You can’t extrapolate from that that individual Congressmen have low approval ratings among their own constituents.

Re:Good for him

[amRadioHed]

Have you ever cast a ballot to vote on a federal law? Have you ever cast a ballot to vote for the president? See the difference?

Re:Good for him

[amRadioHed]

So the 20% of the population in the swing states gets absolute control over the presidential election. How is that not worse than the majority having control?

Re:Good for him

[Jeremi]

How is this NOT representative?

It doesn't represent the will of 49% of the voters.

A truly representative system would slice off 49% of Candidate A and 51% of Candidate B, sew the pieces together, and nominate the result as President.

Re:Good for him

[Raenex]

Nevermind Gore, you've got to be living in some magical bubble to think Bush would have won a 3rd consecutive term. People were fed up with the Iraq war and the economy was collapsing around his knees. His presidency was in tatters.

Re:Good for him

[iluvcapra]

Remember, the US is NOT one big blob of a nation. We are a collection of states, each given a certain 'weight' of say in national decisions.

Note that for the purposes of individual rights, the United States is both, thus the big "and" in Amendment 14:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

The deeper problem with the assignment of EC weights is that just about every state line in the US was drawn for extremely obscure political reasons that have no bearing on modern communities: the colonies were divided by British noblemen through land grants, the middle states were divided by Whigs and Democrats in order to prevent each other the senate majority necessary to alter slavery, and the western states were drawn by Republicans to deny Redeemer Democrats a majority in the senate to roll back Reconstruction.

Re:Good for him

[superdave80]

I'm saying your suggestion has the exact same flaws as the current system...

Current system: California gives all 55 EVs to Obama despite nearly 40% of the state/districts wanting Romney.

District system: California give rougly 35 EVs to Obama and 20 EVs to Romney, which is roughly in line with how the electorate voted.

You use this phrase 'exact same', but I'm not sure you understand what it means.

...and won't make people feel any less disenfranchised.

I think those people that voted for Romney who now see their vote having some effect on the outcome of the election would strongly disagree with you.

Re:Good for him

[careysub]

... Not only would Bush have won then, he would have won last Tuesday...

Which is why, of course, that Bush was so prominent on the campaign trail for both McCain and Romney. Indeed his endorsement speeches at both Republican National Conventions were the stuff of legend.

Or was that "fantasy"?

Re:Good for him

[superdave80]

As I replied to another poster, this has to be the worst idea I have ever heard. As a California citizen, why in the holy hell should I care how OTHER states voted in determining how the electoral votes of my state are assigned?

Re:Good for him

[Githaron]

Sure but the question is how many roundings should there be before getting the answer. 1000, 100, 10, 1? The more roundings, the greater the change of a inaccurate result. A democratically chosen president requires a minimum or 1 rounding. I believe there should only be 1 rounding since today's technology makes it feasible.

Re:Good for him

[tgd]

You're entirely wrong. The original design was that the people wouldn't vote for the president, but we do now. The people vote for who their electors vote for. That maybe wasn't how the founders intended for it to work, but they allowed the states to choose how to allocate their electoral votes and all of them have chosen to leave it up to their voters.

You're entirely wrong. The original design was that the people wouldn't vote for the president

I do not think it means what you think it means.

Re:Good for him

[tgd]

The whole metaphor of the Nation as Business stinks. You go telling people the President is a CEO, your next step is to say that USA Inc. can fire its underperforming citizens. Of course you favor disenfranchising the vast majority of voters - your metaphor justifies taking every single right they have away, not just the franchise. And, it justifies taking all yours away as well, which is probably not what you intended and not something I would wish on you. I'm giving you the benefit of a doubt and assuming you meant "nowhere in the constitution, PRE-AMENDMENTS" rather than including them in your analysis, and even with that limitation, there's nothing to say the founders opposed the individual ballot BECAUSE OF A CORPORATE ANALOGY. The founding fathers may have mostly opposed direct popular election of the president. At least some of them certainly wanted the EC as a check on democracy running roughtshod over the rights of the states. To turn that into claiming the US is intended to function as would a corporation, is sort of like claiming Teddy Rosevelt was a total pacifist because only a Ghandi clone would have started a national park system. You have to ignore a tremendous number of inconvenient facts to stretch the truth that far.

Its like kindergarden here on Slashdot today. Can no one read the English language?

Re:Good for him

[cbhacking]

Side A wins 51% of the (states/districts/electoral votes) by 1 percent.
Side B wins 49% of the same category by a landslide.

Now do you see the problem? This kind of bullshit is why Gerrymandering exists; you district your populations so that the districts you can't possibly win (less than, say, 45% support in the last election) lose all of your supporters, and move those supporters over to other (adjacent) districts that your party actually has a chance at (say, 49% support before). Now, assume everybody votes the same way they did before. The first district still ends up with the same winner-take-all result, but by 80% instead of 55%. The second through nth districts change from one side winning by a little to the other side winning by a little... resuling in a landslide victory (by winner-take-all district) for your party, even though the popular vote is *still* against you.

The only differences at the presidential levels are A) you can't Gerrymander states (not practically), and B) low-population states receive disproportionate votes.
A) is dealt with by focusing on appealing to one swing state (very close to an even split) at a time, until you're polling at just over 50% there, and then moving to the next. You don't have to win them all, and you don't have to win them by much at all.
B) is the only reason the candidates bother to compaign in the "flyover" states at all, not that which way Colorado or Montana or Idaho were going to break actually impacted anything in this particular election. It sure did in 2000, though. I understand small states have a disproportionate vote, but I still think it's stupid.

Re:Good for him

[porges]

Note that a consequence of this is that district-level gerrymandering, which already produces disproportionate congressional delegations, would then also produce disproportional EVs from state. That is, Ohio, a 51/49 state, would have had something like 14 Repub. EVs and then Dems would have had 4.

Re:Good for him

[Anonymous Coward]

If they completely ignored those states and went off bending over backwards for some swing state enough to do what people in California, etc., don't want, they would lose California. They aren't ignoring such states, they already have them covered by their basic platform. Unless you think people are dumb enough that they would always vote a certain way in some states and couldn't be lost by a candidate drifting too far from their basic ideology, in which case it wouldn't matter if they campaigned there or not anyway.

Re:Good for him

[geekoid]

The president influence impacts the economy. I was around during Reagan, and his bad decisions hurt the economy, badly and for years after he left.

Re:Good for him

[g0del]

No. Congressional districts have been gerrymandered to hell and back, and there's little chance of that changing any time soon. Allocating electoral votes by district gives a huge advantage to whichever party managed to control the redistricting process after the last census.

Re:Good for him

[Anonymous Coward]

The argument is that while this case can happen (and hopefully does), it does not mean that the majority vote is equal to the electoral vote.

According to wikipedia, under the current system, a person can win the Presidency with only 22% of the popular vote assuming very specific turnout (certain states having the winner have exactly 1 majority vote).

Re:Good for him

[mspohr]

I don't think it would work out like you say.
Think of it this way...
Most states are "red" or "blue" which means that they are ignored. The politicians don't spend any time there because they know that the state will go their way or to their opponent regardless of what they do. Result is that the citizen votes are taken for granted and they don't have any say and they don't get any promises or bribes. Both majority and minority voters feel their votes don't count since the result is already set.
If a state elected to delegate all of their electoral votes to the national vote winner, then every vote in that state would count towards the national total so even if it was a solidly red or blue state, the opposition could pick up votes there and would come to the state to offer promises and bribes to gain these votes. Result is that the minority citizens get promises and bribes and are motivated to vote because their vote will count. Also, the majority citizens get promises and bribes because their votes suddenly count towards the national total.

Re:Good for him

[nmoore]

I cast a ballot to vote for a slate of electors who claimed they would cast their electoral vote in a particular way. The duplicity is the ballot had the Presidential candidate's name and not the electors' names, but in my state only politics, and not law, demands that the electors actually vote for the name I selected.

Re:Good for him

[careysub]

Quantizing at the individual vote level would lead to complete ignorance of the rural vote (not a horrible thing in my opinion, but undesirable to many states currently) in favor of large urban centers - candidate who wins most biggest cities wins presidency.

This claim is trotted out every time election by popular vote is discusses but it is not true in any close election (like all recent elections). If the popular vote is closely split, then every vote counts equally where ever it is located, and campaigns have incentive to go after them.

Re:Good for him

[fustakrakich]

Nevermind Gore...

?? All you damn people are blaming us for the whole Bush presidency because we didn't vote for Gore. And personally, I still have no regrets. That's what you get for nominating him... And Lieberman, well that clinched it. There was no fucking way. And let's cut to the chase, the only democrat that could have beaten Bush for a third term would have been Hillary (but not with my vote), regardless of the economy. Obama, no way. He was pure marketing and propaganda. That's what people ended up voting for, and against Palin. But Bush was the better, more convincing con man. That's what wins hearts and minds. He would have convinced all the rubes to give him one more chance. He gives out shit, and the people would call it ice cream. It worked for him twice before. There's no reason to expect anything different on the third try. Instead of talking to me, ask the people that voted for him. Ask them why they would do such a thing. And ask them if they would replace him with Obama. I bet you won't like the answer. To me you're just projecting your anger and are blind to the facts for it.

Re:Good for him

[kelemvor4]

In 2000, a guy with fewer votes than his competitor won the election. System broken.

George Bush won more electoral votes than Gore. He did not have 'fewer votes'. Popular vote is not required for passing laws. Are you saying that we should change that too?

No, but I am saying over 500,000 Americans votes did not count in that election. That's the problem. You have a right to vote... buuuut your vote may not really count anyway.

Re:Good for him

[amRadioHed]

Did you read anything beyond that? The original design doesn't apply anymore. It's no longer relevant, hence you are wrong in saying it is still any part of why we have the electoral system today.

Re:Good for him

[kelemvor4]

You only think that because your preferred candidate did not win. It's true that the electoral college suppresses all but the two major parties, but it also gives better representation to states with small populations. Nobody gets less than one electoral vote.

I am biased because the guy I voted for didn't win. However, that doesn't change the fact that the guy with fewer votes won. I wouldn't be arguing about it if the roles were reversed but it wouldn't make the system any less broken.

Re:Good for him

[king neckbeard]

I think the gerrymandering is generally done in a manner to protect incumbents, not a particular party. That's why the House has so many batshit crazy fringe politicians from both Republicans and Democrats.

Re:Good for him

[BasilBrush]

Obama didn't win by any large margin against McCain/Palin.

Obama won the popular vote by 7.2 points. (52.9% vs 45.7%)
And he won by 365 electoral college votes to 173.
That is most certainly a large margin.

Not only would Bush have won then, he would have won last Tuesday.

Karl Rove is that you?

The republicans are playing the 'crazy card' for a reason.

Because you are representative of their average IQ?

Re:Good for him

[nedlohs]

For the people in that state their vote is worth only what the vote of every other person in the country is worth. Whereas for everyone not in that state their vote is worth that plus whatever is adds to the chance of winning the electoral college votes of the state they are in. Hence the votes in the state doing that are worth less than the votes in other states.

Re:Good for him

[fustakrakich]

He didn't make the decisions, any more than Carter, or Nixon before him. He followed orders, like all politicians do. Or what, you think all those 'contributions' come without a price? And like this time around, the banks and Wall Street wrecked the economy, and got away clean. Just like every other time before either of us, or our parents, and grandparents were born. Turtles all the way down. The president is the magician's assistant. Contrary to what I expect as an out of hand dismissal in response.

Re:Good for him

[Raenex]

?? All you damn people are blaming us for the whole Bush presidency because we didn't vote for Gore.

I was only responding to your argument that Bush would have won a third term, which is Karl Rovian "Math You Do As a Republican to Make Yourself Feel Better".

Re:Good for him

[fustakrakich]

:-) Whatever you say...

Re:Good for him

[fustakrakich]

I must be doing good. Got you thinkin' I'm for the republican, and I got a couple of goofs who think I'm for Obama. Sure explains how these bums always win an election.

Re:Good for him

[mspohr]

The votes of people in safe red or blue states are worth nothing.

Re:Good for him

[Anonymous Coward]

What the fuck kind of racism is that statement?

Re:Good for him

[Anonymous Coward]

Due to gerrymandering, I doubt there would be any swinginess to the districts at all.

Pennsylvania for example could easily be drawn for 20 Democrat votes by spreading the votes from the Philadelphia, Pittsburg, Erie and a few other area votes out across most of the state to drown out any Republican opposition. It could also be drawn down to about 8/12 towards Republicans (6 districts + 2 state D, 12 districts R). It would be in interest of those who were in control to do so whenever possible to increase the odds that they stay in control.

Perhaps you could get rid of gerrymandering by requiring redistricting after every census via an algorithmic approach such as splitlines:

http://rangevoting.org/SplitLR.html

Good luck getting that to pass anywhere.

Re:Good for him

[s73v3r]

Bush's approval was in the toilet when he left office, and Obama beat McCain/Palin by over 7 points. There is no way that he would have won then, nor today.

Re:Good for him

[s73v3r]

That's because people don't vote for Congress. They vote for their representatives. And if you look at the approval ratings of individual legislators in their districts, they generally have high/average approval ratings.

Re:Good for him

[s73v3r]

It's up to the state to decide that. There are a couple states that do that.

Re:Good for him

[s73v3r]

Well, more states could adopt California's Citizen's Redistricting Committee, which controls distracting in the state, as opposed to the legislature. X Democrats, X Republicans, and X Other make up the committee (I think it's 5 of each).

You can tell they did a decent job because many of the legislators were unhappy with the decision.

Re:Good for him

[felipekk]

Already solved. Here's your 10 candidates example based on how it works in Brazil and lots of other countries:

10 candidates for the presidency. The two that get the most votes go for a second round, and then the one with the most votes wins. This way the elected president always have to have received at some point 50% + 1 vote (of valid votes).

Re:Good for him

[TankSpanker04]

In other words, the electoral college system creates a distinction between types of voters depending on which state you're in. For example: a republican voter in CA is less represented than a liberal voter in TX due to the political "lean" of those states. And this is precisely what bothers me about the system.

Re:Good for him

[Raenex]

If you're not Republican, then I'm baffled at your ludicrous statements that Bush would have won a 3rd term. That kind of stunning disregard for the feelings of the country, reflected in the approval ratings, is hard to explain otherwise. But whatever, I'm tired of beating this dead horse.

Re:Good for him

[rodarson2k]

And given that safe red and blue states, according to Nate Silver's analysis, constitute 88% of the union, this proposal seems to have value to a great number of people.

Re:Good for him

[RabidReindeer]

David Brooks is completely wrong about this. For instance, I'm in Ohio, the swing state that everyone was focused on for months. Here are some of the appeals I got in my mailbox and on billboards:
- Obama is actually the son of a convicted drug dealer and a porn actress, not a Kenyan. And he's been lying about his name the whole time.

Did they send you the professionally produced DVD that "proves" it like they did in Florida? In the final few days, we also got hysterical phone calls and flyers claiming that Obama was the most pro-abortion president ever and that if we didn't get him out, he'd start killing babies right and left.

The truth didn't merely leave the building, it jumped off the roof.

Re:Good for him

[RabidReindeer]

I wish people would stop blaming the electoral college. The system is fine. It is the method in which the individual states assign the votes that is the problem. Florida in 2000 wouldn't have been such a big deal if they had distributed the electoral votes by district, rather than winner take all.

Win California by one vote? You get all 55 electoral votes! How stupid is that?

The system is not fine. In 2000, a guy with fewer votes than his competitor won the election. System broken.

Florida in 2000 was intensely gerrymandered. They had some pretty nasty fights about it shortly thereafter because, it, like Texas was platted out to favor those in power.

I don't like this all-or-nothing allocation either, but I think it would be a lot more representative if the electors were allocated by popular vote percentages of the entire state, not by political districts.

Re:Good for him

[fustakrakich]

...I'm baffled at your ludicrous statements that Bush would have won a 3rd term

Let's just say I've noticed how well propaganda works. You, too, should have no doubt. Mass media doesn't report the reality, it creates it.

Re:Good for him

[ceoyoyo]

"has a tendency to produce an equilibrium of two parties with mediocre support."

People say this, but it isn't true. Of all the major representative legislatures in the world, only the US has devolved to a hardcore two-party system (and it wasn't even always that way in the US). Canada, the UK and India all have multiple competitive parties in their legislatures, including sub-national ones.

Re:Good for him

[ceoyoyo]

Candidates will always play to areas where they can gain support. If a state/district/city/neighborhood is firmly on your side, you're not going to concentrate your campaigning there. Swing states are a media creation.

Re:Good for him

[nedlohs]

Except with that idea their votes are worth every so slightly more than the votes of the people in the state that just goes with the popular vote. Again, that's bad for the people in that state, since there votes are now worth less than "nothing" by your metric.

Re:Good for him

[omnichad]

I agree that it's broken, but heavily populated california should not be able to completely bully states like Rhode Island out of a chance. Even though their population is small, part of the deal with being part of the union is having your needs met by it. And meeting their needs is in the greater interest of the country. That means that little states get a slightly unfair larger vote to make up for it. If the popular vote didn't win, it's possibly because what's popular might have been particularly bad for a group of people who happen to get handicapped representation.

Re:Good for him

[s73v3r]

No they don't. The swing states are just the ones that have a somewhat evenly divided populace. If California or Texas was evenly divided as well, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Re:Good for him

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe you are looking for the phrase "Native Americans" and even that is anglo-centric since none of them called it America before the white man showed up. First People is probably a more apt name.

Re:Good for him

[Phroggy]

yep - the job creators had fundamental disagreements with Matthew 6 & 19

Not to mention 23...

Re:Good for him

[Anonymous Coward]

It could if we casted it to a void pointer first.....

Re:Good for him

[CronoCloud]

More than 1/5....cook county alone has 5 million people in a state that has about 12 million. But Chicago subsidizes downstate which can't afford to pay for their own infrastructure, because that's where the money and people are.

Re:Good for him

[dkleinsc]

Did they send you the professionally produced DVD that "proves" it like they did in Florida?

Yes, that's it exactly. It was by a guy in California who specializes in conspiracy theory films.

Re:Good for him

[kwerle]

Claimer: I'm glad Obama won.

District system: California give rougly 35 EVs to Obama and 20 EVs to Romney, which is roughly in line with how the electorate voted.

Obama 35/55 ~= 64%
http://www.politico.com/2012-election/map/#/President/2012/CA
Voters for Obama: ~59%

I don't see a need to go by district. Hell, I'm a fan of using the popular vote nationally. We're voting for one president as a nation. My vote should not count more or less because I live in a town that leans heavily one way or the other.

Re:Good for him

[AdamWill]

That's the most ridiculous post in this thread, and in a Slashdot politics thread, that's saying something. What comparison would you like us to make? That the approval rating of Bush's left testicle was actually quite high?

Re:Good for him

[AdamWill]

Because sometimes it doesn't happen that way, viz 2000. It works fine if the votes in every state of 49% for A and 51% for B, but if the votes in 26 states are 51% A and 49% B and the votes in 25 states are 99% B and 1% A, A wins (simplification, but you get the point). That seems a problem.

(of course the problem in 2000 was more to do with over-representation of under-populated states, but eh. that's a separate effect.) it is clearly shown that your system does not always result in the guy with the most votes winning.

Re:Good for him

[Hognoxious]

That's just like how a Prime Minister is elected by the MPs in the UK

The prime minister isn't elected by MPs.

What's more, the POTUS isn't the equivalent of the PMOTUKOGBANI anyway. That would be Her Majesty Elizabetta Von Schleswig-Holstenpilsner.

Re:Good for him

[goodmanj]

the restrictions on who could vote (basically white landowners) wasn't there because of some inherent prejudice that suggested women, free blacks or other demographics were lesser. The restrictions where there because white landowners had a very high chance of having a solid education

You can rationalize bigotry, but it's still bigotry. "Let's focus on educating women and freedmen, so they can participate in our democracy too!" George Washington never said.

Re:Good for him

[goodmanj]

Oh, yes, definitely, let's restart the argument about the 2000 and 2004 elections. That sounds like a very productive use of our time.

Re:Good for him

[goodmanj]

No, Maine and Nebraska (the states you're talking about) are winner-take-all within each congressional district.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_(United_States)#Congressional_District_Method

Re:Good for him

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you just finish 10th grade civics? Most of the participants in this discussion are well aware of what the electoral college is, why the founding fathers set it up, and how we've re-interpreted it in the modern era to make it more democratic.

Your post sounds like a third grader standing up in an astrophysics meeting to explain that black holes aren't actually holes, but dead stars. Run along now, the grownups are talking.

Re:Good for him

[Anonymous Coward]

Oops, I'm sorry, in your earlier post I accused you of having a child's understanding of electoral politics. Now I see that you *do* understand how we made the electoral college system more democratic, you just think that was a bad idea.

Which means you're not just stupid, you're an oligarchist. Find another country to play Animal Farm in.

Re:Good for him

[goodmanj]

Unlike the GP, I'm not going to insult you. But I will ask, why *shouldn't* an area with a small fraction of the total population receive a small fraction of the attention and resources? I'm sure you can find reasons why your region is crucial to the nation's well-being, but I can make that argument anywhere. Why do rural areas deserve disproportionate attention?

I also question whether Democrats' policies are actually more anti-rural than Republicans', but that's for another time.

Re:Good for him

[AdamWill]

Well, Ohio voted for Obama. So perhaps that's an indication that they *should* have played to the centre. You make a decent point, but it would only have been a _good_ point if Romney had actually won Ohio...

Re:Good for him

[ohnocitizen]

Because if every state assigns electoral votes by the popular vote, then the popular vote determines the election. That means a state like California, with its massive population, would get more attention than smaller swing states currently do. If I lived in CA, I'd passionately support the Compact.

Re:Good for him

[Hognoxious]

In the sense that a district is in effect a sub-state, it's moved the problem rather than solved it.

Re:Good for him

[Hognoxious]

I suppose it's OK for all of Texas' votes to go to Romney, though?

You're arguing about how many points a field goal should be after the final whistle's blown.

Re:Good for him

[Hognoxious]

You've been reading too much Chomsky.

Re:Good for him

[Hognoxious]

I'm intrigued. Because within living memory the UK has had either Labour or Conservatives in government. Very occasionally they've been propped up temporarily by the Liberals or the Unionists, but that does not even come close to what you claim.

That's leaving aside anomalies like WW2 and the current clusterfuck, which won't last beyond the next election.

Re:Good for him

[Hognoxious]

There must be some way to do that using a 3D printer.

Re:Good for him

[Anonymous Coward]

Vote for your state! Let the polls know you are on the currently losing side to drive the numbers even. Your state will then get attention and promises from both candidates! Hack the system!

Re:Good for him

[omnichad]

Well - the reason why they would get disproportionate attention is because proportionate attention would give less resources than direct self-rule. And yet these states joined the union. The smallest states would have no reason to join the union or stay without any chance at real representation. They're still making the overall nation stronger by being there.

Democrat's policies are well-utilized in rural areas (that is, social welfare programs). But here, it's not for lack of jobs or other resources. It's just too easy to make a career out of living off the state/federal government. And do better than they would with the low wages of a real job. Because the programs were created with the cost of living of the city in mind.

Re:Good for him

[omnichad]

It's more like we can't afford to pay for their infrastructure. Our state has so much corruption and it really funnels the money from downstate to Chicago. We aren't dirt poor in the rest of the state, and I'm sure we can pay for our own infrastructure just fine like any of the low-population states out there. It's not like we even have large hills to contend with when building roads.

Re:Good for him

[fustakrakich]

No, too much Goebbels... You can't argue with success, however fleeting.

Re:Good for him

[tilante]

People say this a lot, but... the Electoral College has chosen a candidate who didn't win the popular vote only three times in the last two hundred years, and only once in the last hundred years. So, it usually does represent the vote of the people. (And the 2000 election debacle boils down to Florida, and the various shenanigans that happened there. It's still uncertain who really did win Florida in 2000, since the results are within the statistical margin of error... but the decision ultimately came to the Supreme Court, which the Bushes had managed to pack heavily with conservatives, so... yeah.)

That's not to say that it couldn't be improved. I'd personally suggest that instead of "winner take all", the states should allocate their electoral votes according to the election results in their state. That would introduce some rounding errors, but it would also get rid of the whole thing of "key states" in the election.

Re:Good for him

[tilante]

You could look at it that way... but the prejudice that suggested women, blacks, and other demographics were lesser was a major factor in why they were much less likely to be educated and to own land.

Re:Good for him

[ceoyoyo]

The UK currently has a coalition government, doesn't it? Here's the Wikipedia diagram:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliament_of_the_United_Kingdom

For comparison, here's Canada:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliament_of_Canada.

The India page doesn't have a nice diagram, but there are a bajillion parties.

Now the US:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Congress.

I "claimed" that the UK, Canada and India all have competitive third parties. They do. A third party doesn't necessarily ever make it into power, but they exert influence. Particularly with a coalition or minority government, the third party becomes disproportionately powerful. Also extremely important is the ability for third parties to form, or existing ones to gain power, in times of need: "the current clusterfuck", wars, times of geographical disagreement or when there are more than two prominent viewpoints on important issues.

Re:Good for him

[Hognoxious]

The UK currently has a coalition government, doesn't it?

Read what I wrote, idiot.

I "claimed" that the UK, Canada and India all have competitive third parties. They do.

At most two of them do, idiot.

Re:Good for him

[Hognoxious]

For that to happen the people would have to be so polarized that they wouldn't be voting in the same election, they'd be in separate countries probably at war with each other.

This has happened, I hear.

Re:Good for him

[superdave80]

That means a city like Los Angeles, with its massive population, would get more attention than smaller swing states currently do

Fixed that for you. Elections would be all about population centers, not populous states. You live anywhere else in California, and you are just as ignored as before.

Dividing the electoral votes along districts would keep any one area from being anymore important than another, and candidates would have to (gasp) campaign across the entire country, rather than picking a few swing states (winner take all system) or a few large population centers (popular vote).

Re:Good for him

[superdave80]

I suppose it's OK for all of Texas' votes to go to Romney, though?

Why would you suppose that's OK? I used California as an example. Was I suppose to list all 50 states with the breakdown of how the EVs should be distributed?

You're arguing about how many points a field goal should be after the final whistle's blown.

No, no I'm not. I'm arguing about how many points a field goal should be for all future games, using the most recent game as an...wait for it... example!

Re:Good for him

[ohnocitizen]

Good point about the cities, but I see that as a bonus. I don't see why someone's vote out in the country should count more than someone in a city. Let the people choose, not the political divisions of land we live on. Making it districts would rapidly become problematic given the horribly corrupt process of redistricting...

Re:Good for him

[CronoCloud]

Umm, the low population states DON'T pay for their own infrastructure. Alaska, Montana, Idaho, etc etc...are net receivers of Federal money. Same goes for the old confederacy... the "Red" states are the states that are MORE dependent on federal money.

Illinois, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, even California...could survive on their own...easy. They'd actually come out ahead, dollar wise.... Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, etc.....couldn't.

See the problem is here that some rural folks like you "THINK" the big cities are freeloaders and all the money is going north...but in fact...it's the reverse. I live in central illinois and I know for a fact that without massive federal and state spending...my county couldn't afford the instracture it has now...let alone improving it or replacing it. check you local newspaper for how many times your local politicians say: "we're looking into a sate or federal grant" or "we're looking into federal/state funding" or "we got matching funs for...." My county couldn't keep it's roads maintained without federal money..

The true "Welfare Queens", are the red states and red counties.

Re:Good for him

[ceoyoyo]

Fine, let me summarize your argument:

"If you exclude the present day and any other examples I feel are inconvenient to my argument, I am right." Your latest post added "idiot" to the end.

You sir are truly a magnificent example of the debater's art, as well as a master logician. Are you employed in a think-tank perhaps? Or maybe a southern US state's board of education?

Re:Good for him

[LMariachi]

You care to make an argument to the contrary? Because you haven't yet.

Re:Good for him

[mdielmann]

You will always be under- or over-represented depending on the trends in your area and how closely you match them. That is always the case, unless you happen to live somewhere where everyone agrees. In which case, why are you having a vote?

Re:Good for him

[mdielmann]

There are a number of systems, all of which have their benefits and drawbacks. I wasn't proposing a solution, I was defining the problem.

Re:Good for him

[j-beda]

This is a nifty way around the requirement of constitutional amendment to enact a popular vote change to the electoral college. Currently it is almost 50% enacted:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact

The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) is an agreement among several U.S. states. States passing this interstate compact have agreed to replace their current rules regarding the apportionment of presidential electors with rules guaranteeing the election of the presidential candidate with the most popular votes in all fifty states and Washington, D.C. The agreement is to go into effect only when the participating states that have joined the compact together have an absolute majority in the Electoral College. In the subsequent presidential election, the participating states would award all their electoral votes to the national popular vote winner, who as a result would win the presidency by winning more than half of electoral votes. Until the compact is joined by states with a majority of electoral votes, all states will continue to award their electoral votes in their current manner.

Re:Good for him

[j-beda]

This is a nifty way around the requirement of constitutional amendment to enact a popular vote change to the electoral college. Currently it is almost 50% enacted:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact [wikipedia.org]

The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) is an agreement among several U.S. states. States passing this interstate compact have agreed to replace their current rules regarding the apportionment of presidential electors with rules guaranteeing the election of the presidential candidate with the most popular votes in all fifty states and Washington, D.C. The agreement is to go into effect only when the participating states that have joined the compact together have an absolute majority in the Electoral College. In the subsequent presidential election, the participating states would award all their electoral votes to the national popular vote winner, who as a result would win the presidency by winning more than half of electoral votes. Until the compact is joined by states with a majority of electoral votes, all states will continue to award their electoral votes in their current manner.

Re:Good for him

[j-beda]

This has to be the worst idea I have ever heard. As a California citizen, why in the holy hell should I care how OTHER states voted in determining how the electoral votes of my state are assigned?

You might feel that the electoral college system as currently practiced (winner take all at the state level) does not match how you want the system to work. If you want the system to work on a country-wide majority, this is a nifty way around the requirement of constitutional amendment to enact a popular vote change to the electoral college. Currently it is almost 50% enacted, and California is a state that has passed it into law. Certainly, I could see why California Republicans might think it was better than the current manner in which their vote effects the outcome of the election.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact [wikipedia.org]

The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) is an agreement among several U.S. states. States passing this interstate compact have agreed to replace their current rules regarding the apportionment of presidential electors with rules guaranteeing the election of the presidential candidate with the most popular votes in all fifty states and Washington, D.C. The agreement is to go into effect only when the participating states that have joined the compact together have an absolute majority in the Electoral College. In the subsequent presidential election, the participating states would award all their electoral votes to the national popular vote winner, who as a result would win the presidency by winning more than half of electoral votes. Until the compact is joined by states with a majority of electoral votes, all states will continue to award their electoral votes in their current manner.

Obligatory xkcd link

[drdread66]

http://xkcd.com/1131/

Once in a while, Randall really nails it.

But when?

[metrometro]

As Nate Silver pointed out, many times, over the course of the campaign, predicting what will happen one day before the election is easy. Very easy. Most everyone gets that right.

Predicting what will happen in June is hard. And much more interesting.

Re:But when?

[Latentius]

And yet, even the very day of the election, there were still large numbers of pundits predicting a landslide victory for Romney. Guess the predictions aren't that easy, or perhaps it's just easier to ignore the numbers and resort to wishful thinking.

Re:But when?

[explosivejared]

Exactly. Neither Nate nor any of the many other poll aggregators (Sam Wang, Drew Linzer, etc.) have found any way to conquer the inherit unpredictability of political events far into the future. Read Daniel Kahnemann. Experts, no matter how "scientific" their methods are consistently wrong and worse at predicting politics far into the future than the proverbial dart throwing monkey.

We care about Nate Silver and people that do what he does for two reasons: 1) They definitively point out that most pundits are full of crap and unwilling to realize that polling, not their guts, describe what's happening in the short run in the most accurate way currently possible. 2) For partisan reasons. Democrats love Silver because his numbers provided a security blanket to liberals afraid for Obama. To be fair, had the election turned out different and Nate's numbers called it for Romney, Republicans would be lionizing him as well, and we'd all be mocking whatever the Democratic version of "Unskewed Polls" had been. That popular media figures skew left really helps Silver's celebrity this time around.

Re:But when?

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that most of the pundits claimed that the race would either go in Romney's favour (Fox News), or would be a squeaker (pretty much every other pundit). In reality, Obama won pretty handily, and only those people who actually looked at the numbers (instead of their "guts") got it right. The National polls showed, in aggregate, by the end of the campaign, a 1-point advantage for Obama (which was pretty much right on the money). The State polls, except for Florida, were also very close to the end result. But the pundits decided that polls didn't matter, and what mattered most was their "narrative".

Well, facts matter. Numbers matter. And the post-modern view of most of the political class that only "narratives" matter is hokum.

Re:But when?

[bluefoxlucid]

Why do you think the early media reports were landslide for Romney? Why do you think it stayed so tense? Why do you think states were called before they were reporting, or that they were called for Romney at 74% reporting with 60% going to Obama? 97% chance of Obama victory. Obama's gonna win, Obama's winning, cool. Let's put in the Harry Potter DVDs and make some popcorn.

Don't watch Harry Potter, you faggots! Watch MSNBC and CSPAN so we can get ratings! Hey! HEY! HEY, CHECK IT PEOPLE, ROMNEY IS WINNING!

Re:But when?

[Anonymous Coward]

As Nate Silver pointed out, many times, over the course of the campaign, predicting what will happen one day before the election is easy. Very easy. Most everyone gets that right.

Predicting what will happen in June is hard. And much more interesting.

It is easy to make predictions the night before if you actually use numbers rather than your gut. But most pundits ignore numbers.

Look at the predictions from pundits right before the election. They were SHOCKINGLY inaccurate. CNN was pushing the narrative that it was a horserace that could go either way. They had a bunch of articles about how things might not be decided for days or even weeks. Fox News, of course, was heavily pushing the narrative that Romney was the prohibitive favorite and might even win in landslide fashion.

So the statement that "most everybody gets that right" is wrong if you are talking about the media. The media as a whole was never right. Of course, that's mostly because it was in their favor to be wrong (declaring things really close when it wasn't) than right. It is perfectly clear that being wrong and profitable is better than right and viewer starved when it comes to cable news.

Re:But when?

[scumdamn]

This was the case in 2010. Many progressive blogs thought the turnout numbers would be much more Democratic than they were because party ID changed so much in two years. You have to trust the poll aggregates and I believe they have learned their lesson since. Let's see if the Republican pundits and publications do the same or if they declare 2014 a sea change and the beginning of a Republican ascendency just because typically Democratice constituencies don't turn out like Republican constituencies in off-years.

Re:But when?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's nothing interesting in "predicting" correctly in june, as it's nothing more than a lucky guess. At that point, much of the info hasn't even been made available (so much new dirt gets thrown in those last few months) that there's no way to possibly make an informed decision about how people will vote.

As far as predicting it the day before being easy, then please explain all the pundits on Monday predicting a landslide victory for Romney?

Re:But when?

[rhsanborn]

Large numbers of conservative pundits predicting a landslide for Romney. They also predict that the Earth is 6,000 years old, evolution isn't true, and illegitimate rape can't result in pregnancy. Let's call it wishful thinking instead of a prediction.

Re:But when?

[sjames]

Most pundits aren't there to perform an insightful political analysis, they're there to tell a bunch of people what they want to hear so they can sell the soap.

Re:But when?

[Anonymous Coward]

How does this get modded insightful? Its pure nonsense.

Re:But when?

[metrometro]

Over the past 100 years, the incumbent president has lost seats in the House every cycle but two. It's the fall-off from the coattails in the prior cycle. Anyone who expected otherwise wasn't all that serious.

The story of 2010 wasn't losing the house, it was losing the House to crazies. Dems got elected in '06 and '08, ejecting moderate Republicans. When the GOP took those seats back, it was with hard right candidates, almost exclusively (see XKCDs excellent chart on this).

Re:But when?

[metrometro]

Please refrain from predicting 2014 election outcomes for at least another week.

Re:But when?

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop propagating lies.

Yes, people will always predict their man will win. For fuck's sake, Gary Johnson was always introduced as "The Next President of the United States" even though everyone and their mother knows it's bullshit.

But the Republicans are not for a young earth, or think illegitimate rape can't cause pregnancy. That was one or two guys, and they got disowned for it, money cut off, by the national committee.

Re:But when?

[NatasRevol]

I laughed when about 5 minutes after the polls closes all of the midwest states from Texas to North Dakota turned red.

They could have done that at noon. Of any day in the last month.

Re:But when?

[Anonymous Coward]

The right as of late has a very loose relationship with facts. While it might help them with their base to ignore facts like evolution and global climate change, that very attitude towards scientific inquiry damns them.

Re:But when?

[Anonymous Coward]

But the Republicans are not for a young earth, or think illegitimate rape can't cause pregnancy. That was one or two guys, and they got disowned for it, money cut off, by the national committee.

Stop plugging your ears. A significant number of Republicans really are promoting Young Earth Creationism. A significant number of Republicans really do believe rape can't cause pregnancy, and that any woman who is pregnant as a result of a rape must have really wanted it. The RNC put on a public show of cutting off support to those jackasses when the controversy was fresh, then (after the ADD mass media had turned its attention elsewhere) quietly supported them anyways. Their horrifying opinions about rape are not new, by the way -- they've been uttered for decades by Republican "social conservative" politicians.

Living in denial is not a good idea. The rot has you so bad that you just let slip with that rapist-enabling phrase "illegitimate rape" and don't even seem to realize you should be ashamed for even using it. Wake up. If you are legitimately against Tealiban conservatism, you ought to vote with your feet and leave the party which shelters and fosters it, not wince and look the other way and try to cover for them like you just did here.

Re:But when?

[thereitis]

Or perhaps saying Romney will win by a landslide is designed to get people to vote for Romney because he's going to win anyway, or no point in voting for Obama because he's going to lose anyway. If that was the intention, it missed its mark. :)

Re:But when?

[s73v3r]

The prediction of pundits doesn't really count, as they're not interested in being accurate. They're interested in being entertaining or shocking, so they get invited back on TV more.

Re:But when?

[AdamWill]

well, they call California and New York one minute after the poll closes too. they don't do it one minute before to avoid charges that they could affect the result.

Re:But when?

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair, in my home state, the outcome was a fargone conclusion, to the point counting the vote was a mere formality. It'll vote Republican in 2016, 2020, 2024, 2028, and so on.

I don't fault statisticians for recognizing making the easy calls.

Re:But when?

[Anonymous Coward]

You really need to learn the definitions of some words and phrases such as "large number" and "predict"

Re:But when?

[dunkelfalke]

wtf is a legitimate rape then?

Re:But when?

[udachny]

I predicted that Obama won in August, once I saw that at the RNC convention Romney decided to declare himself a bigger Democrat than Obama.

He ran trying to out-Obama Obama and this cannot work because he'd have to get some of the Democrats on his side, but why would they vote for a Democrat running as a Republican rather than voting for a Democrat running on the Democrat ticket?

Of-course it helped Obama plenty that Bernanke voted for him but then again, Bernanke likes his position of incredible power, so that's not a surprise.

I left a number of comments on this topic back in September and August.

Re:But when?

[rhsanborn]

Seriously? The Republican party is trying to get it put into text books in Texas, you know, that large state that is the Republican response to California?

Seriously...

[sunking2]

The only ones who believed the race was a 'virtual tie' were those who had gains to be had by it being so, namely the media.

Re:Seriously...

[explosivejared]

Romney's own internal numbers had Obama up by 5 in Ohio the weekend before the election even.

Re:Seriously...

[Anonymous Coward]

It was a statistical tie, but because of the way the electoral college works, for Romney to have won he would have had to had to have had more of the tied States break for him than vice versa.

If you assume a really simple model, namely that Romney had to win Ohio, Virginia and Florida to win, and assume that he had a 50/50 shot at each, then his chances of winning were only about 1 in 8, or about 13%. Silver's model was obviously much more sophisticated and took into account every possible permutation and how likely they were.

And, that is not even taking into account the fact that Obama had a slight but insignificant edge in Ohio the entire time.

So basically, the only way that Romney was going to win was:

1) A systematic bias to the polling (which is what Republican pundits believed, but polling companies make money by being accurate, so probably not something to bank on).

2) A unlikely roll of the dice (hey, it happens in sports all the time).

Re:Seriously...

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, those in the campaigns were motivated to portray it as a tie. They didn't want to admit they were behind. And the risk of claiming they were ahead would be that voters might think they need not go out and vote, since their candidate would already win. Portraying it as a tie lends urgency to your voting base.

Re:Seriously...

[T.E.D.]

The only ones who believed the race was a 'virtual tie' were those who had gains to be had by it being so, namely the media.

...and those who listened to the media, rather than the few relatively unknown statewide poll aggregators like Nate.

In otherwords: almost everyone. :-(

Excellent

[seepho]

Are we going to see /. posts on the thousands of people whose predictions were false, or are we going full on confirmation bias here?

Re:Excellent

[Anonymous Coward]

You can stream The Daily Show and Rachel Maddow from your browser and see clips of all the bad predictions and all the people who were surprised by how bad they lost.

Their predictions aren't nerd-news because they weren't dominated by math, but by belief.

Re:Excellent

[seepho]

So you're telling me that Nate Silver is the only person who principally used math in his predictions?

Re:Excellent

[Anonymous Coward]

"So you're telling me that Nate Silver is the only person who principally used math in his predictions?"

Yep, nailed it. It's just a theory.

Obama won because Jesus wanted it.

Just to be clear, these are statistics.

[mosb1000]

You can't really prove a probability wrong (unless it's 0% or 100%). While his most likely outcomes played out, it doesn't mean that he would have been wrong if a few of them hadn't.

Re:Just to be clear, these are statistics.

[Hatta]

Sure you can, you just have to do it in aggregate. If when Nate Silver says there's an 80% chance of X happening, go back and see if X happens 80% of the time.

Re:Just to be clear, these are statistics.

[mosb1000]

These are one time events. You can't check to see of Obama will win Florida in 2012 6 times out of 10.

Re:Just to be clear, these are statistics.

[Colonel Korn]

We sort of can do an aggregate evaluation if we look at all of the state numbers and use all of the elections where Silver modeled the outcome based on polling and treat them as separate events. When we do so we see that Silver is most likely wrong...about his uncertainty. His predictions with 50-80% seem to be accurate something like >95% of the time, so he's probably overestimating the error in his model.

Re:Just to be clear, these are statistics.

[fermion]

As has been mention Silver is not a celebrity because his model was the best or even remarkable. He is celebrity because he knows how to communicate, he is promoting himself for a book, and many people who think their model was better said his was bunk.

Notice I did not saw thought, or was, or was not. This is statistics. It is always a mistake to believe statistics will always be your friend. It will not. Relying on math alone is always a mistake. Models have a way of skewing from reality over time. Which is what happened to those that supported Romney and believed their numbers and algorithms predicted reality better. p. Nevertheless Silver's is a star created by those who opposed not based on observations or valid maths, but on personal belief. The belief that the non-white vote would disappear. The belief that most white people were fundamentally racist and therefore who vote against the black man when given an aristocratic white man.(while a majority can be shown to be have racist feeling, most now live or spent time in diverse community so they know a non-white can be, on occasion as good or better choice than a randomly selected white). The belief that jobs are the issue, when in fact, historically speaking, the job situation is relatively better for everyone except for the older white male. And ultimately, that a women should enjoy being raped and accept the baby to raise on her own.

Re:Just to be clear, these are statistics.

[Zephyn]

The way Florida's been handling elections? Bad example. Pick a different state.

Re:Just to be clear, these are statistics.

[Hatta]

Yes, but you can see if the methods used to predict these one time events are accurate for many one time events. The statistical methods used don't change from election to election.

Re:Just to be clear, these are statistics.

[timeOday]

There was not one prediction here, but several. For example Rasmussen missed 6 of 9 swing-state predictions, whereas Silverman and a few others nailed them all. So, while you're technically correct, the odds of this occurring purely by chance are quite small.

Re:Just to be clear, these are statistics.

[mosb1000]

I'm not trying to say he got it right by chance. What I'm trying to say is that even if he'd missed a few, his analysis would still have been correct.

Re:Just to be clear, these are statistics.

[professionalfurryele]

Interestingly enough if you go back and look at his predictions I suspect you will find he is out performing his own estimates of how frequently he should be wrong. I say interestingly because I'm not convinced his probabilities are off since to evaluate that you need to have a large number of elections and look at how frequently his calls a state wrong, and we have two elections to look at. Two is not a large number.

However there is something even more interesting underlying this uncertainty. I'm not privy to the secret sauce in Silver's analysis, but I suspect the bulk of his uncertainties don't come from statistical error as you have with ordinary polling because he is aggregating so many polls, instead the main source of uncertainty for him is the random bias of the pollsters in totality, which varies a fair old chunk from year to year.

What this effectively means is each year you have to add a random 'the pollsters collectively screwed up this much in their turnout forecasts' factor, which is broadly speaking a constant shift in /all/ your polling averages. What this means is, if Silver is correct in his estimate of how variable this term is (and I see no reason he isn't since as far as I can tell he is basing it on historical trends), at some point he is predicting that he will screw up big time and several of those 20% chances states go the other way will come up at the same time, with his average performance matching his predictions long term. If Nate Silver is right, odds are pretty good one election in the next say 10 he will screw up monumentally.

That said quantified uncertainty is better than idiot pundits. To paraphrase xkcd who had a great strip on this on Wednesday: Maths, it works bitches!

Re:Just to be clear, these are statistics.

[Anonymous Coward]

A chi square test or null hypothesis test would be perfect.

Re:Just to be clear, these are statistics.

[BasilBrush]

As has been mention Silver is not a celebrity because his model was the best or even remarkable.

He called 49/50 states correctly in 2008.
In 2012 he got every state right.

For sure that's both the best and remarkable. No one else has come close.

Re:Just to be clear, these are statistics.

[TMB]

The problem is that a lot of his uncertainty comes from systematics, not statistical error. If it was pure statistical error, then you could definitely do that based on 3 elections, but he was either going to get essentially every state right (if the systematics were small) or every state wrong by about the same amount (if they weren't).

Not how statistics works

[GofG]

This actually shows that Silver is poorly calibrated. if he were accurately calibrated, 80% of his 80%-confidence predictions would come true, 50% of his 50%-confidence predictions would come true, etc. But 100% of his >50%-confidence predictions came true. In the future, he should be more sure of his predictions.

Re:Not how statistics works

[iluvcapra]

Can't really draw any conclusions until he's done 5 or 10 elections.

Re:Not how statistics works

[YodasEvilTwin]

...that's not how statistics work either. A result does not alter the underlying probabilities.

Re:Not how statistics works

[khallow]

You have to remember that these are highly correlated events. A lot of the uncertainty goes all the same way. But I otherwise agree with the other poster. We'll need more of a track record to see how Silver does.

There are still warning signs. For example, he has issued predictions with three digits of precision. That's an obvious sign that something isn't right.

Re:Not how statistics works

[Anonymous Coward]

No. If his confidence intervals were properly calculated, GPs description would be (approximately) true. The likelihood that he "accidentally" got all of his 50%+ predictions right is minuscule.

Re:Not how statistics works

[Anonymous Coward]

He already did 2 previous elections as far as I know with very good accuracy.

Re:Not how statistics works

[Anonymous Coward]

It isn't so remarkable when you see that there were not that many 50%-confidence value predictions, only a few states (maybe only one) had confidence values near 50%. The rest has relatively high confidence values of 80%+.

Re:Not how statistics works

[VAElynx]

This actually shows that Silver is poorly calibrated. if he were accurately calibrated, 80% of his 80%-confidence predictions would come true, 50% of his 50%-confidence predictions would come true, etc. But 100% of his >50%-confidence predictions came true. In the future, he should be more sure of his predictions.

Congratulations, this is the stupidest thing I have read today.
The confidence rate of a prediction doesn't work like that. It's the probability with which the null hypothesis can be rejected given the data, basically, suppose that the relationship you are trying to prove isn't there, how likely it is that the data were generated by a statistical fluke? And much like any other statistics, a bunch of predictions with a 50% confidence interval doesn't mean that half of them must come right, especially in a single sample - all it means is that it's as likely for the theory to be true as for it to be false.

Re:Not how statistics works

[GofG]

He predicted every state-level election, correct? Maybe 80 representatives, 33 senators or whatever?

He should have predicted at least one of them incorrectly. There is just no way he isn't undercalibrated. His predictions were *massively* correct, closer to 99% than 95% (100:1 vs 20:1).

Re:Not how statistics works

[radtea]

This actually shows that Silver is poorly calibrated. if he were accurately calibrated, 80% of his 80%-confidence predictions would come true, 50% of his 50%-confidence predictions would come true, etc. But 100% of his >50%-confidence predictions came true. In the future, he should be more sure of his predictions.

Not necessarily. Most of the uncertainty in his predictions was due to the conditional probability of systematic bias in likely voter models. For example, Gallup was showing much better results for Romney and the Rac... err... Republicans across the board, which was probably due to how they screened people who responded.

Systematic error shows up as a conditional probability, so you are lumping together completely disjoint realities into your final result. In terms of discrete conditional probabilites, imagine that based on historical data you have three equally likley possible conditions: 5% Democratic bias, no bias, and 5% Republican bias. You run your simulations with each of these three biases, and you get a result that says senators D0, D1, D2, D3, D4, D5, D6, D7, D8 and D9 are all 80% likely to win. But 99% of that 20% chance they'll lose comes from the condition where there's a 5% Republican bias.

But remember: those three conditions describe completely disjoint realities. They are not sampling error, but statements of ignorance about the actual state of the world.

Now the world really is just one way (it may be ambiguous relative to some human categorization, but then that ambiguity is just part of the one unique way the world realy is.) So only one of the three conditions are true. If it happens that the no-bias case is the way the world really is, then 100% of those 80% chances will come true.

That said, in future elections Bayesian predictions of the kind Silver and everyone else in this space are making will lower the conditional probabilities of bias, because this election demonstrated good low-bias results, but so long as the ultimate uncertainty is dominated by the systematic error, Bayesian predictors will tend to appear either uncannily accurate or dismayingly inaccurate.

However, averaged over many, many election cycles (18 or more) you would expect to get statisics such that 80% of the 80% calls are correct, and so on. But within individual elections that use fixed likely-voter models that won't be the case.

Conditional probabilities are one of the most difficult things for humans to understand (the Monty Hall problem is a classic case where all the confusion comes from treating a conditional probability as if it was a total probability) so it's worth practicing the art of thinking carefully about these things, and the odds are still good I've said at least one confusing or incorrect thing in the above.

Re:Not how statistics works

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone in this room is now dumber for having [read your post]. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

Re:Not how statistics works

[epine]

But 100% of his >50%-confidence predictions came true. In the future, he should be more sure of his predictions.

I'm not sure that I agree with you a hundred percent on your policework there, Lou.

The national polls were showing strength for Romney, but when you drilled down, the models predicted victory for Obama. Whether the errors moved together (broad correlation) or not (independent precinct variation) determines whether you can apply "skill" with skill.

There were many pieces on Silver recently. The most cynical was this one:
Tarnished Silver: Assessing the new king of stats

Cosh is an erudite and formidable writer, which a background in French literature, and a redneck persona right out of the donut shop sketch on Canadian Air Farce. (I'd really like to see that sketch redone with Cosh vs Hitchens. Then the camera pulls back to show Pierre Trudeau and Margaret Atwood at the next table engaged in banal chitchat.)

In this case I'm not going to nod and slurp my double-double jumbo Timmies and cuckoo "you got that right" after every punchline.

Nate actually wrote up a postmortem piece on his bungled UK election call where he discusses the use of exit polls to apply a uniform swing (broad correlation) to the election as a whole, by which means the BBC outperformed his own predication. When you break it down, the R^2 values on vote shares weren't all that different. In that election, the best prediction came from a group which split the difference, applying swing to broad regions (such as Scotland, which behaved differently than the rest of the UK).

Silver goes on to argue that the UK should adopt more detailed exit polls as we have in America. I don't understand this, because I don't understand the incentive of people to A) participate, or B) tell the truth. If I have a vested interest in the outcome (let's just say I'm opposed to organized religions lacking the basic dignity to concoct their miracles *prior* to the invention of the printing press). Why shouldn't I just say or do whatever I believe serves my interest every step of the way? Every politician does this. It's his job to lie, and ours to tell the truth? Blow me.

The more exact psephology becomes, the easier it becomes for Joe Donut to play the game alongside the pols. This is not a feedback loop that converges to a good place.

In any case, Lou, I think you should sign up for a MOOC entitled Discussing "Skill" with Skill. This broadly means writing down the necessary preconditions (such as: x not equal to zero when dividing by x; x has a known sign when multiplying both sides of an inequality; infinite series converges; variables are i.i.d. in a variance summation).

Another potential source of nationwide "correlation" is electronic voting fraud. 90 to 95% predictions would be my personal ceiling in any American election until the last closed-source voting machine is on the downward escalator in some deep ocean trench.

Are you going to apply the i.i.d. assumption in a state government by Jeb Bush? If so, you're a brave man. May the votes be with you.

Re:Not how statistics works

[Anonymous Coward]

. For example, he has issued predictions with three digits of precision. That's an obvious sign that something isn't right.

Well said.

Re:Not how statistics works

[nitehawk214]

This actually shows that Silver is poorly calibrated. if he were accurately calibrated, 80% of his 80%-confidence predictions would come true, 50% of his 50%-confidence predictions would come true, etc. But 100% of his >50%-confidence predictions came true. In the future, he should be more sure of his predictions.

There is a big difference between "Obama has a 51% chance of winning." and "Obama will get 51% of the votes."

Re:Not how statistics works

[Anonymous Coward]

It's more likely he forgot to truncate. 3 digits with 10% error doesn't mean you can use the last digit for anything.

Re:Not how statistics works

[Anonymous Coward]

He predicted every state-level presidential result. This year, only about 7 states were considered close enough to be in the running. Guessing 7 out of 7 is not the same as guessing 50 out of 50, and well within the expected outcome of an 80% confidence interval.

Re:Not how statistics works

[GofG]

Yes, it does work like that.

Nate Silver made more than a hundred predictions at around 80% confidence. 100% of those predictions came true. Therefore he is undercalibrated.

Unless you are saying he made one prediction, that the polls were not biased in favor of democracts, and gave this prediction 80% confidence... in which case, yes, that's a fair point.

Re:Not how statistics works

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if they were all 90% odds then over the course of all the states over the last three election cycles he should have a 10% fail rate. He doesn't. He's padding the down-side either intentionally or unintentionally.

Re:Not how statistics works

[Odin's Raven]

...that's not how statistics work either. A result does not alter the underlying probabilities.

That's only true for dusty old fuddy-duddy classical Newtonian statistics. These days quantum statistics is where it's at. Everyone knows that reading poll results can fundamentally alter data, even data that wasn't tabulated for that specific poll. (Something to do with bell curve entanglement and the spin/charm of pundits - gets kind of technical at that point.) Why just yesterday I glanced at a USA Today that someone had left behind on the subway, saw the usual 57-color pie chart about whether readers thought giraffes tasted great or were less filling, and next thing I knew the first president of the USA was George Washington instead of Herbert Whistlefjord.

Re:Not how statistics works

[coldfarnorth]

Sometimes confidence intervals are conservative.

Re:Not how statistics works

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually he did miss. Two states on the presidential race fell out of his margin of error, so technically he did miss them. Also, two of his senate predictions were wrong as well. I can't find the information about the HoR races.

Re:Not how statistics works

[tgibbs]

It's not like calculating the probability of a dice roll. There are a lot of empirical assumptions in Silver's model. He adjusts for economic conditions, he normalizes polls for historical bias, etc. He has to decide what distributions to use for his Monte-Carlo simulations. So there's plenty of room for him to refine his methodology based on performance. Sam Wang using a simpler median-based method achieved similar accuracy and he argues that Silver's confidence limits are too wide.

Re:Not how statistics works

[Anonymous Coward]

If we use his % prediction it turns out that

10% of the time the result map would match his map
28% of the time one state would be off
32% of the time exactly two states would be off

So i have to agree, In fact if his map would have been wrong by 1 or 2 then it would have been a better outcome for his model.

Re:Not how statistics works

[wed128]

This made me laugh...wish i had mod points!

Re:Not how statistics works

[Anonymous Coward]

...that's not how statistics work either. A result does not alter the underlying probabilities.

That's only true if the observations are statistically independent of the results. Predicting a 90% chance of rain won't change the weather, but it will change the probability of finding an empty beach chair.

Traffic patterns, auctions, parimutuel systems, elections...all of these have a feedback loop that makes the underlying probabilities dependent on the players predictions of the outcome.

Re:Not how statistics works

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it does work like that.

Nate Silver made more than a hundred predictions at around 80% confidence. 100% of those predictions came true. Therefore he is undercalibrated.

You are truly the Picasso of mathematicians. I applaud your bold rejection of established methods. The simple application of basic arithmetic to unrelated is most deft. You have a promising future as a political pundit.

Re:Not how statistics works

[AvitarX]

What I gathered from actually reading his blog though, these were treated as related events.

Obama losing Ohio was to mean he lost VA, and FL, and the Presidency and maybe CO.

He posted on (Sunday I believe) that the only way Obama was going to lose the election was if all polls had made underlying assumptions that skewed them to Obama, he added that historically this wasn't the case.

Essentially his 10% loss for Obama was a prediction that the polls were skewed by enough for him to lose (not margin of error, but actual skew in underlying assumptions that every pollster made).

The fact that this was not the case leads all of his predictions to be accurate (even the ones approaching 50/50).

The numbers come from runs of the model he uses with various tweaks, but they assume things such as a failure to predict one midwest state flows into others, or even into the nation. His models DO NOT assume independence of the results when coming up with numbers.

The fact that his essentially 50/50 (FL 50.3% Obama) turned out to be right is promising, though we don't have a tight call on the other-side to measure if there was skew (next closest state is NC with 75% chance going Romney).

his popular vote was quite close too.

This is why he calls the "tipping point states", his model pretty much assumed if Obama lost OH, he would also lost other safer states such as NV and CO, he would therefor of lost the election if losing OH (though technically he could of won VA (which he did) and NV to fill back up, and that was somewhat accounted for in the model (see the chances of NV and VA as tipping point states), as different geographic regions were given some independence in the models.

Re:Not how statistics works

[Anonymous Coward]

He did miss one in North Dakota, and confessed on The Daily Show that he'd called that one wrong (he predicted the Republican incumbent senator Rick Berg would be re-elected, but Berg was unseated by his Democratic challenger).

Re:Not how statistics works

[Anonymous Coward]

And that's not what we are talking about.

Re:Not how statistics works

[mpeskett]

Of course not, but if you predict a whole bunch of things and say you're assigning 50% probability to them, you should expect (approximately) 50% of them to occur. If events don't match your expectations, you should modify your expectations.

i.e. If more than 50% of those events occurs, then either you were less confident in your predictions than you should have been, or it's a fluke and your success rate will tend back towards 50% in the long run. That's what's meant by calibration.

Re:Not how statistics works

[BasilBrush]

He predicted every state-level election, correct? Maybe 80 representatives, 33 senators or whatever?

He should have predicted at least one of them incorrectly. There is just no way he isn't undercalibrated. His predictions were *massively* correct, closer to 99% than 95% (100:1 vs 20:1).

You haven't noticed that 43 of his predictions were 99%-100% calls. Only 7 had any significantly uncertainty in them. It's way too early to tell if his calibration is off. It'll need more elections for that.

Re:Not how statistics works

[RabidReindeer]

This made me laugh...wish i had mod points!

On the other hand, if I'm not confused, one of the reasons now being put forth for Romney losing is that the "Evil MainStream Media" made it look like like Obama was going to win, so he did.

Then, on the other hand, I flipped by the Fox website on election day and I could have sworn that they were declaring Black Panthers had taken over polling places and that Obama was personally getting involved. So maybe I just confuse easily.

Re:Not how statistics works

[ceoyoyo]

You're not correct. An X% (Bayesian) credibility interval means that the true value lies within that interval with X% probability. If you make a prediction based on the interval and give it a Y% probability of being true, it should end up being true Y% of the time. Frequentist confidence intervals have a slightly different pedantic interpretation but, when you're doing normally distributed stats they end up being the same thing as the credibility interval anyway (so it really is pedantic in that case).

If Silver makes a prediction and gives it an 80% probability, he should be wrong about 20% of the time, unless he's being overly conservative.

Realistically, 50 states is probably too few to actually reliably test his confidence intervals, particularly since most of them are very narrow and fairly far from the tie.

Re:Not how statistics works

[guises]

He is aggregating many polls which each survey thousands of people. Three digits of precision is not at all unreasonable.

Re:Not how statistics works

[khallow]

Three digits of precision is not at all unreasonable.

No way. We're looking at a lot of errors, not only from sample size (thousands is not big enough to justify three digits of precision), but also from poll errors (some which would be systemic and common to several polls) and errors from Silver's voting model. One digit is all you can ask for under such circumstances and even that may yield a false sense of accuracy.

Re:Not how statistics works

[goodmanj]

But 100% of his >50%-confidence predictions came true. In the future, he should be more sure of his predictions.

No, there's a conditional probability bias here. The question isn't, "what are the odds that Silver will get every state right?" The question is, "what are the odds that Silver would get every state right, *given* that he was correct about the overall result?" Because we wouldn't be having this conversation if he'd predicted a win for Romney.

Knowing something about the overall result affects the likelihood of specific individual outcomes. Knowing that the average grade in my Calculus class was an A does make it more likely that I personally got a good grade. If this sounds weird, Google the "Monty Hall problem", which will really bend your brain.

Re:Not how statistics works

[Anonymous Coward]

There are still warning signs. For example, he has issued predictions with three digits of precision. That's an obvious sign that something isn't right.

These "three digits" are they the electoral vote totals? Because you are in a no-win type scenario if you make 2-digit predictions that cannot occur or are very unlikely to occur. 332 to 206 is a feasible result (assumes FLA to Obama) but how do you get 330 to 210??? Or should he give the result with error bars 330 +/- 10 and 210 +/- 10???

If we were guessing how much will Govs Christie and Romney weigh on election day, then 2-digit precision is more practical, but when only some 3-digit combinations are feasible, the reporting changes even if the underlying math is similar.

You want your predictions to be understandable. Often point odds in American Football center around 3 & 7 points. Why? Those are the easiest, most likely ways to score points. Maybe an expert in discrete predictions can chime in.

Re:Not how statistics works

[khallow]

They're apparently his continually updated forecast.

You want your predictions to be understandable. Often point odds in American Football center around 3 & 7 points. Why? Those are the easiest, most likely ways to score points. Maybe an expert in discrete predictions can chime in.

I'm chiming in. Even if he really could measure his estimate of the likelihood that Obama would win to three places (and he can't), it's not useful to us to have that much precision.

Re:Not how statistics works

[WaywardGeek]

I'm surprised no one else is talking about Gallup here. They screwed up, big time. There are variations between elections which are impossible to correct for through polling science, but Gallup made unforgivable mistakes. For example, three percent of the population have no phones. Every pollster but Gallup used population data to take them into account, while Gallup computed their predictions as if these people did not exist. Every Obama voter without a phone who voted contributed to Gallup's error. This probably threw Gallup off by 1.5%. Then, Gallup under-estimated the black and Hispanic voting populations, because they changed how they ask about race in a way that increased the likelihood of a voter saying they were black or Hispanic by around 2%. This meant their samples consistently had more blacks and Hispanics than there should be according to population data, so they reduced the weight of their votes. Add up these two mistakes, and you get most of Gallup's 4% error in the national vote. The remaining error was due to Gallup "twiddling" weighting factors to reduce outliers, which they felt were the data points that consistently said minorities would vote in higher numbers than they were predicting. These three mistakes explain Gallup's crappy job at estimating Obama's approval rating as well. A 4% error! How do you interview 20,000 people and get a 4% error? By being morons. They were worse than any automated crappy poll that didn't even call cell phones.

Not only were they total morons, but evidence strongly suggests that they purposely manipulated published polling data in order to create the impression of more momentum for Romney than there was. Before the first debate, Gallup published only registered voter data, and the day after, they switched to "likely voters", which they claimed would cause a 7% swing towards Obama, rather than the 2-4% estimated by other pollsters. Gallup and Rasmussen's incredible swing caused a 1-2% error in RealClearPolitic's polling average of the popular vote. They used Sandy as an excuse to stop polling, and the day before the election they seem to have rewritten their likely voter model to make their prediction less wishful for Romney. The dropped Romney's advantage in the popular vote from 7% to 1%, mostly over the Sandy outage. The other polls showed Sandy having far less impact. This points to willful manipulation of the likely voter model by Gallup.

In contrast, Pew Research, who uses very similar methods as Gallup, but without the dumb errors, guessed Obama would win the popular vote by 3%. They were right. They never had major swings that could only be explained by either wishful thinking or deliberate poll manipulation. They were consistently within sampling error of polling averages (minus Gallup and Rasmussen). I've followed Gallup for years, and I'm sad to see them fall so low. They're practically synonymous with public polling, and it's heartbreaking to see them fall apart. Since we obviously can't trust them anymore, I'll have to get my polling data elsewhere.

Let's here it for Nate Silver. I doubted him when he said Gallup was smoking dope, but he was right. I'll certainly take him more seriously going forward.

Re:Not how statistics works

[swalve]

No it doesn't. Each prediction stand on its own. Statistical confidence is not the same thing as probability.

Re:Not how statistics works

[j-beda]

Excellent explanation. It at least sounds pretty good. Hopefully it reflects a correct understanding, and that I have understood it correctly - it at least matches my vague understanding of the issues.

The Monty Hall problem is an interesting example - as it is entirely unfocussed on thinking about probabilities about our knowledge of something that really is not probabilistic at all - the prizes and locations are established before the show. The reality is that one door has a prize (100%) and the other doors do not have prizes (0%) - but the contestant does not know which door is which, so can only assign a probability to the doors based on their ignorance. Coin flips, dice rolls, and quantum results are more properly probabilistic, as there is nobody with the knowledge of what their actual values are until after the fact.

Re:Not how statistics works

[YodasEvilTwin]

That's true, and I'm sure that's a fair argument to make; my point was more that siding with the 80 side of a 80-20 probability and ending up correct doesn't imply the probabilities were incorrectly evaluated. Silver *could* be poorly calibrated, but the fact that his predictions were all correct doesn't mean that he certainly was.

Re:Not how statistics works

[YodasEvilTwin]

Score:5 Fucking Hilarious

Re:Not how statistics works

[Anonymous Coward]

I get what you're saying, I just don't think that is the case if making electoral count (3 digits) prediction which is based on a sum of binary outcomes (R or D, R or D, R or D...) in a limited number of swing states. That said, in the link provided - thanks, I agree that 3-digits are a detraction. That said too, I think trimming significant digits is one of the final steps for presentation. Helpful, yes - necessary, not always.

Sounds like Psychological Projection

[Anonymous Coward]

Joe Scarborough called someone else a "joke"?

Does MSNBC even cover Joe Scarborough's paycheck or do they let Starbucks foot the bill?

All?

[superdave80]

I don't think Florida has been called yet (although Obama currently has the slight edge there). And I could have sworn that he had Florida leaning slightly towards Romney for quite some time, but now his website shows a slight lean towards Obama?

Not to say that he still didn't do a hell of a job predicting the outcome (just like last election), but to say 'all' at this point seems to be jumping the gun a bit.

Re:All?

[Gerald]

The outstanding absentee ballots are from areas that lean Obama, which is why most places have at least unofficially called the state for Obama.

Re:All?

[Anonymous Coward]

He changed florida to be for Obama before the election started. If I recall, he was the only one to do so. As he said he was always updating his numbers based on latest information.

Re:All?

[Missing.Matter]

Last minute polls on the last day of the race brought the state to 50 - 50 odds. Given the fact the state is still too close to call two days after the election, Nate seems to have called it no matter which who ultimately gets the electoral votes.

Re:All?

[ChrisGoodwin]

About 2-3 days before the election he switched Florida from light pink to light blue.

Re:All?

[Daetrin]

As others have pointed out, he switched Florida a couple days before the election. Also, he posted some exact numbers the day of the election:

"In the final pre-election forecast at FiveThirtyEight, the state of Florida was exceptionally close. Officially, Mr. Obama was projected to win 49.797 percent of the vote there, and Mr. Romney 49.775 percent, a difference of two-hundredths of a percentage point."

Yes, it'll be a few days probably before we know for sure if he called it correctly, but he was certainly 100% correct about how close it was going to be, which personally i think is good enough to call his prediction true at the moment.

Re:All?

[AK Marc]

I don't get why people focus so much on whether a media outlet calls it. It's done. FL doesn't matter, and even if it did, it looks to be going Obama. They have until the 20th to certify the results, so it won't be "called" until then, regardless of what the media outlets claim.

Re:All?

[DragonWriter]

I don't think Florida has been called yet (although Obama currently has the slight edge there). And I could have sworn that he had Florida leaning slightly towards Romney for quite some time, but now his website shows a slight lean towards Obama?

Switched to a slight Obama lean in the last update.

Re:All?

[swalve]

The monkey wrench in that sort of result watching is that there is far more data available than just "what's the current result". If all the ballots of the state were shuffled and randomized, then yes, you could do like Karl Rove and say "but the current count shows Romney winning!" However, it isn't random and votes come in county by county. Each county has certain demographics that have been exhaustively polled. So when you look at the current vote count, you have look at where the votes came from and weigh that against the polling you've done. I'll use Virginia as an example because it is a simpler state: its rural counties usually go republican, and the couple of counties in the northern part usually go democratic. So results start pouring in, and they see that the rural counties are going for Romney as expected. It's 50,000 votes to 10,000 votes. Romney is going to win, no? No. Because there are 300,000 votes in Northern Virginia, and they are going to trend 200,000 to 100,000 for Obama. Even though they only have small percentage of the votes in, they know that because the rural counties are coming in as expected, the urban counties are going to as well. So even though they've only counted 20% of the votes, they have all the data they need to call it for Obama.

Why Nate?

[MyLongNickName]

Why does Nate get so much attention, when other sites like electionprojection.com and electoral-vote.com do a similar service, are open on their methods and have had almost perfect results for the past two elections. This past election, those two sites only missed on Florida and that one was truly too close to be 90% confident on one way or another.

Re:Why Nate?

[d23tek]

Two reasons: Nate is a person with a face (and a catchy name). A generic site like electionprojection.com doesn't have a personality, doesn't do interviews, and can't be ridiculed or praised for personal characteristics. Secondly, it's precisely because other sites' methods are open. Once you see how the magic trick is done, it's not interesting anymore.

Re:Why Nate?

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably because he was subject to personal attacks from some Very Loud People condemning him for predicting the result they didn't want to get.

Re:Why Nate?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because he was targeted by analysts who disputed his results.

Re:Why Nate?

[Missing.Matter]

He made a name for himself in 2008, and is now on one of the most viewed news sites out there. electionprojection.com isn't exactly the New York Times. Because of this he got appearances on the Daily Show, Morning Joe, Real Time, and other TV shows; now he's kind of a personality, especially among uber nerds who identify with his nerdy demeanor.

Re:Why Nate?

[mewsenews]

I'm guessing the likely explanation is that Big Media only cares about other Big Media and this Nate Silver guy has the NYT as a patron

Re:Why Nate?

[mattie_p]

Nate gets so much attention because he is right. A lot. In 2008 he got 49 of of 50 states correctly as well as all 35 senate races. In 2012 he got 50 out of 50 states right (he did, in fact, call Florida). As an exercise to the reader, I leave it to you to figure out how many senate races he correctly called.

Re:Why Nate?

[scumdamn]

It's because of what he offers in addition to the model. The color commentary, explanation of why things change from day to day and analysis of individual polling firms after the fact. I was paying attention to him from the start (2008 primaries on Daily Kos) and he does a great job of explaining things to the layman.

Re:Why Nate?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently your reading skills are weak. OP indicated that the two sites are also very accurate and have a good track record.

Re:Why Nate?

[Anonymous Coward]

All Silver was doing what aggregating the polls of others. His "predictions" were the same as realclearpolitics with the exception of Florida. And Silver's prediction of Florida was made at the very last minute. His projection was basically 50-50 and he chose Obama based on minor movement in the national polls in Obama's favor. It won't matter who won Florida now. Silver's defenders won't care even if it turns out he was wrong.

Re:Why Nate?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never heard of the guy before a few days ago and I haven't understood why all the ridiculous praise since the election, either. I mean, he predicted the outcome of the election; it's not like he *caused* the outcome of the election. Further, I don't think everyone would be jerking each other off on twitter and everywhere else, with Nate Silver comments every five minutes since election night, if he had predicted a win for Romney that had come reality (and, no, I don't favor Romne even in the slightest --- but let's be frank here -- most of his popularity is because he reassured a win for the left and that proved out).

It kind of strikes me like those people who only pay attention to politics for about two weeks every four years. Or who suddenly start tweeting and facebooking about a soccer player or football player -- by name -- during the championships, when they don't otherwise follow or know anything about said sport or that person.

At any rate, I find the skill to predict the outcome of an election to be utterly useless. I'm sure it serves a purpose for someone, but for 99.99% of us . . . it hardly matters. Unless you're wagering on it, I guess.

Re:Why Nate?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been reading electoral-vote.com daily and it's a very different site. He only aggregates past polls; he doens't use them to make future projections the way Nate does. Also commentary there is more politcally wonky and less stats geeky.

Re:Why Nate?

[todd.gardner]

Was about to post the same. I've been reading his posts since '08, and you learn a wealth of information on polls, like house effects, difference between likely/registered voters, effects cellphone only households and the strategies of the campaigns. Honestly, even if he was off by 5 points and Romney won in a landslide, I'd still be reading his stuff next election.

Re:Why Nate?

[Stickybombs]

That is precisely why it is claimed that he is so accurate. Election results will change right up until the day of the election. No one can make a prediction months out that isn't just a wild ass guess.

The fact that he changed Florida to leaning left (based on minor poll movements), and it appears that Florida is indeed leaning left, validates his model quite well. If that changes, and he is wrong on Florida, then maybe his model isn't any better than any of the other sites.

Re:Why Nate?

[Anonymous Coward]

Until recently, I only heard about him from conservative news sources. They seemed to hate the guy, because he didn't agree with their story. You know, "Romney's got the momentum and everyone obviously hates Obama."

Re:Why Nate?

[Anonymous Coward]

If he gave Obama a 51% chance of winning FL and Romney won it it doesn't mean he was wrong. That's not how odds work.

Re:Why Nate?

[darkmeridian]

Because Nate Silver was PERFECT. ElectionProjection.com went 49/50 while Silver went 51/51. Furthermore, he was insisting that Obama was winning months and months ago when everyone was insisting that it was a toss up. Also, he's a gay Jew. I can't help but to think that this brought him into the crosshairs of many of his right-wing critics, most notably, that of Dean Chambers of unskewedpolls.com, who said that Nate Silver was "effeminate."

Re:Why Nate?

[Anonymous Coward]

No mod points when I need them.

This is exactly the reason we have #natesilverfacts trending vs. #drewlinzerfacts or #simonjackmanfacts. Those two, among many others were pretty accurate which isn't a surprise because... well science. In fact Drew Linzer has called 332 EV for Obama since June.

However, Nate does a lot more than math. He's also a teacher and an explainer. I've been following his posts for quite a while and while I'm no statistician, I've learned a lot about how polls work, how poll analysis works and what role factors like poll history, jobs and economy, incumbency, etc. play in elections. He's one odd nerd whose articles I find a joy to read.

Re:Why Nate?

[TimFenn]

Its also worth pointing out that his commentary tends to be unbiased, honest and refreshing in a world of pundits that will say just about anything with little to no conviction or evidence. Take away all the statistics, and I'd still read his site just as a reassurance that yes: there are other rational thinkers out there.

Re:Why Nate?

[Anonymous Coward]

sure, if you ignore the fact that he started out as an independent blogger, who moved from sports statistics to politics, made a name for himself by being accurate and then got picked up by the times. However, if you ignore all those facts, it works perfectly as a big media elite conspiracy.

Re:Why Nate?

[T.E.D.]

Nate explains his model in detail, and regularly explains clearly what facets of the latest data and his model caused the various shifts that occurred.

So basically its because he's a better writer. Turns out that, even for nerds, communication skills matter.

Re:Why Nate?

[NeutronCowboy]

Note though that on Nov 5th, Florida was a very weak win for Romney (a bit above 50%). Heck, the probabilities for Florida kept changing until the election was over. It turned to blue (with a whopping 50.6%) only in the afternoon of Nov 6. As someone else said, it's pretty easy to figure out what's going to happen the day before or the day of an election.It's much harder to do so 2 months in advance - and he was very close to the actual result even that far in advance. The other important bit: he called out Romney's lack of momentum long before anyone else, based on actual statistics.

So no, Nate doesn't just get attention because he is right on the day of the election. It's because he is right months in advance, and correctly identifies subtle trends that escape pretty much every talking head out there.

Re:Why Nate?

[swalve]

I think the fact that he works for the Times is all the shouters need to proclaim a media conspiracy. The New York Times has always been the paper of record in the minds of a lot of people. So the best way to change the record is to start a campaign of denigrating them as often as possible.

Re:Why Nate?

[swalve]

I think the point is that he IS able to make the predictions that far out. Because he looked at previous races and saw how early polling was correlated with late polling.

Just looked at the real world and called it

[Attack DAWWG]

Some of the things people said about him were nuttier than that. This guy called him "a man of very small stature, a thin and effeminate man with a soft-sounding voice that sounds almost exactly like the “Mr. New Castrati” voice used by Rush Limbaugh on his program." So that is supposed to have some sort of effect on his analysis?

All he did was take polls that already existed--lots of them--and do statistical analysis on them. Just ran the numbers, and didn't speculate. Contrast that with sites like this one, which, although quite pompous, was stuck in its own alternate reality and ended up being quite wrong.

Re:Just looked at the real world and called it

[MyLongNickName]

I've never seen the unskewedpolls site before, but it is funny. The take a Rasmussen poll which have consistently skewed toward Republicans in the past two elections, accuses it of liberal bias and then insists on changing the Rasmussen result by 3 points in favor of Romney. Only then can it say that Rasmussen has predicted a Romney win. This would be like the KKK having a bias in favor of black men.

Re:Just looked at the real world and called it

[Anonymous Coward]

That quote is from the Unskewed Polls nut. He's admitted he was wrong, but hasn't admitted that that he's a complete lackwit who was denigrating his betters in an attempt to draw attention and ad dollars from the Conservative alternate-reality crowd. Conservatives will pay big bucks to be lied to.

Re:Just looked at the real world and called it

[xevioso]

The best one was natesilverwrong.com.

I actually read this a few days before the election,and it was full of detailed analysis of why he'd be wrong. Very harsh on him.

It went offline the day after the election. My suspicion is the domain if probably available now if you want it...

Re:Just looked at the real world and called it

[Nimey]

It'd be classy if someone bought the domain and presented it to Mr. Silver.

Re:Just looked at the real world and called it

[AdamWill]

to be fair, reading the site now, I see a fairly sincere apology to Nate Silver and an article where he acknowledges his methodology was wrong, congratulates Nate Silver on being right, and seems to say he won't be continuing with the site in future.

so in marked contrast to many political nutbars of various stripes, he actually appears to acknowledge when he's wrong, instead of frothing at the mouth about media bias and whatnot.

PECOTA didn't help the Yankees

[alen]

Baseball Prospectus had the Yankees and Nationals as PECOTA favorites to win almost every game they lost. even after the Yankees lost Jeter.

Giants vs Tigers you didn't need PECOTA to predict that SF would crush the kitties

i was actually expecting Romney to win

How can he be right?

[Dionysus]

But, but, according to conservative pundits, he's too "effeminate" to be right

Re:How can he be right?

[Kyusaku Natsume]

Thank you for a good laugh :). A pathetic attempt at ad hominem from The Examiner.

Facts never trump belief and/or tradition

[erroneus]

There are ample examples of how provable and testable facts are unable to trump belief and tradition. Belief and tradition are parts of who people are. Facts are independant of people and no one owns them. To have a fact conflict with belief is literally to loose a part of one's identity and most are far too egotistical to allow any part of themselves to be lost or cast into doubt.

Re:Facts never trump belief and/or tradition

[ChrisGoodwin]

Then they should get used to being wrong.

Failure to defraud

[sir_eccles]

One wonders if it is possible to draw the conclusion that the because his model was so accurate then the majority of voter suppression efforts must have been ineffective? Or the corollary, if his model had been wrong would that have indicated large scale successful voter suppression?

Re:Failure to defraud

[paiute]

One wonders if it is possible to draw the conclusion that the because his model was so accurate then the majority of voter suppression efforts must have been ineffective?

In a close election such as most of the last few have been, you don't need a lot of voter suppression to win - you just need a tad in the right places.

Pundits aren't there to provide accurate data.

[mosb1000]

Pundits are there to draw people to a news organization, not provide accurate information. How many people would tune into the election if they said "Obama's got this one in the bag" (which we've known ever since Romney was nominated). Of course they will say you don't know who's going to win! Otherwise no one will watch their show.

Re:Pundits aren't there to provide accurate data.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure how you got a +4 Insightful, since your argument contradicts the point you are arguing against. If you say they lied and made it look a close race because that would draw more viewers, then how is that supposed to explain pundits saying it would be a landslide Romney victory? If the claim is that an Obama slam dunk would be bad for ratings, then wouldn't a Romney slam dunk be equally bad for ratings?

Re:Pundits aren't there to provide accurate data.

[TaoPhoenix]

"Pundits are there to draw people to a news organization, not provide accurate information. How many people would tune into the election if they said "Obama's got this one in the bag" (which we've known ever since Romney was nominated). Of course they will say you don't know who's going to win! Otherwise no one will watch their show."

However, Media might have burned a bridge on this one. I'd vaguely heard about Nate Silver and the 538 corner of the political world a year or so ago,and somehow forgot about it until the very night of the election after it was already over, when some other site (Yahoo?) included a link to it. I'm no fan of Fox News, but I hadn't considered that other entities would artificially drive up the closeness of the race for drama-revenue reasons.

A lot of life happens in four years, so we're all hyped up about this now, but possibly the meme will get around that next election without an incumbent, everyone will just head over to Nate Silver land and skip the entire rest of the media empire as junk.

Re:Pundits aren't there to provide accurate data.

[smpoole7]

> (which we've known ever since Romney was nominated)

Ummm ... no. I popped in here to give kudos to Nate Silver, give credit where due, but ... no. That is just not true. This election could have easily gone the other way if Romney had made a few less mistakes, and if that hurricane hadn't hit New England. In that case, Nate Silver would have looked as silly as Dick Morris does today (Morris was one of the "pundits" predicting a Romney landslide).

NO ONE can predict an election more than a few weeks in advance. You can predict probabilities (and give Silver credit, that's what he was doing), but assurances? No way.

The stories we were getting, some of it from people inside both campaigns, was that it was NOT a done deal. As Chris Matthews himself said (if rather crudely), "thank god for [that storm] (i.e., Sandy)." In fact, the week before Sandy hit, Romney DID have the momentum, and state polls in Ohio were starting to show Romney taking a slight lead.

(As one pollster correctly explained it one time: unless there's a 5-10 point lead, don't look at the actual numbers, look at the TRENDS. Romney was trending upward until Hurricane Sandy hit, then started sliding back down.)

One of the reports we got (VERY reliable) was that even Obama himself was unsure of the result on the morning of Nov 7th and had even crafted a concession speech. After the exit polls came out, his campaign started relaxing, but I assure you, it was not a "done deal" or a given.

And give the Obama campaign all the credit in the world; see the other story here on Slashdot about Obama's "data machine." They deserve a world of credit. But believe me, they worked their butts off the weekend before the election. And if they hadn't, Romney WOULD have won and Nate Silver would have been WRONG. Trust me.

Re:Pundits aren't there to provide accurate data.

[mosb1000]

I'm sorry, but this was all just smoke and mirrors. Romney never had the kind of support he'd need to win. I never saw a poll that firmly put him in the lead in any battleground state, or on the national level. The people who were saying he had a chance were the people with a vested interest in saying that. The two political parties were saying it in order to get their voters to the polls, the news agencies were saying it to earn viewers. No one who was being totally honest about it wold have thought Romney had a chance. His base hated him, and the opposition hated him even more.

Re:Pundits aren't there to provide accurate data.

[Anonymous Coward]

Individual pundits skew heavily one way or the other, but in aggregate they are completely inconclusive. It's the Central Pundit Theorem: there are no pundits in the center, but they push/pull in both directions equally enough that the rest of us are forced into the middle wondering what the heck is wrong with these idiots. Corollary: immunity to the effects of the pundits from one side results in pundit propagation, turning those affected into mindless repeaters. Immunity to the effects of pundits from both sides results in laughter, followed by the sad realization that so many people buy into what the pundits are selling.

Re:Pundits aren't there to provide accurate data.

[mosb1000]

Some of them had to say Romney was going to win, or else people would realize he didn't stand a chance. So you put a mix in there of Republicans saying Romney will definitely win, Democrats saying Obama will definitely win, and "objective" analysts saying it could go either way. It's like watching a sports game. If you get toward then end, and one team is way behind, everyone will leave. You have to preserve the notion that it's close and either team could win or everyone will lose interest.

Re:Pundits aren't there to provide accurate data.

[smpoole7]

> I'm sorry, but this was all just smoke and mirrors. Romney never had the kind of support he'd need to win.

So in other words, you're not going to give the Obama campaign any credit for that last month, when they frantically did a superb job after his fairly-dismal showing in the first debate? They didn't need to do any of that door-knocking, or campaignin' in Ohio and Pennsylvania, is that it? Heh.

Good on ya, mate.

Re:Pundits aren't there to provide accurate data.

[mosb1000]

I'm sure if Obama had just given up he wouldn't have won, but that's not the point. Working extra hard to make up for a poor debate performance is just part of the job, the same way you might stay late at work to fix a mistake you made earlier in the day. It's not like Romney and friends weren't working their butts off the whole time either. They just don't get any credit for it because they lost in the end. Saying that Romney could win is also a part of campaigning. If they said "don't worry about it, there's no way this asshole can win," which is what they were thinking, not enough of their voters would have seen fit to go to the polls.

Re:Pundits aren't there to provide accurate data.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why Obama phoned in the debates. No need to be present, really. Romney/Ryan was only a marginal step above Mccain/Palin - doomed from the start because they appealed to the old and dying. Obama appeals to all the young-uns and minorities not bright enough to see he is no different, except in race, than any other politician. His 8 years will milk the country just as bad as Bush before him, helping prove he's neither better or smarter. 2012 will be a Republican president again because people will finally see this.

What honest-to-God scares me out of all this is not Obama - he is no better or worse than Romney - is Biden. One heartbeat from being President. Sweet baby Jesus how I root for the Secret Service.

Re:Pundits aren't there to provide accurate data.

[DragonWriter]

NO ONE can predict an election more than a few weeks in advance. You can predict probabilities (and give Silver credit, that's what he was doing), but assurances? No way.

Well, to be fair, all of Silver's predictions back to June on the electoral vote result were correct to within their stated margin of uncertainty. Of course, even the update the morning of the election had a narrow Romney victory as within the stated margin (the prediction was 313-225, +/- 48.) Now, calling every State correctly (and each congressional district in the States that use them to split EVs) was still impressive, because few people -- even if they predicted the overall outcome -- would have done that, even just before the election. Note that even Silverm though, only did that with the last update (when Florida flipped from slightly favored for Romney to slightly favored for Obama.)

And give the Obama campaign all the credit in the world; see the other story here on Slashdot about Obama's "data machine." They deserve a world of credit. But believe me, they worked their butts off the weekend before the election. And if they hadn't, Romney WOULD have won and Nate Silver would have been WRONG.

Maybe if the Obama team had done less impressive of a job, they would have lost, but presumably that "less impressive of a job" would also have showed up in the results that Silver was tracking. Its not like Silver's model is independent of the actual support the candidates are receiving.

Re:Pundits aren't there to provide accurate data.

[BasilBrush]

Romney WOULD have won and Nate Silver would have been WRONG. Trust me.

Given that I've been following Nate Silver off and on since early on in the 2008 campaign, I won't trust you any more than I'd trust a TV pundit. Which coincidentally is where you seem to have got your opinions from.

At every stage throughout the campaign, there was always a percentage chance of either candidate winning. The closest Romney got at any stage was a 41% chance of winning, back at the beginning of June.

By the end of the race Romney's chance of winning was down to 9.1%.

That's the reason Democrats kept on campaigning, because at no stage was Romney's chance of winning zero. His chance could have been pushed down to 5% or allowed to increase to 15%. So they kept working.

You mention Hurricane Sandy. It had little or no effect (contrary to the opinions of pundits.) Obamas chance of winning was already trending upwards since Oct 12th, and the slope of that didn't change all the way to the election.

Re:Pundits aren't there to provide accurate data.

[BasilBrush]

So in other words, you're not going to give the Obama campaign any credit for that last month, when they frantically did a superb job after his fairly-dismal showing in the first debate? They didn't need to do any of that door-knocking, or campaignin' in Ohio and Pennsylvania, is that it? Heh.

The post first debate campaigning improved Obamas chances from 56% to 91%. So it was well worth doing. (Well, strictly speaking: their campaigning and everything else that happened in that month.)

Romney was never the most likely candidate to win, at any point of the campaign. That's not the same thing as saying he didn't have a chance. Even the day before, he still had a 9% chance of winning.

Re:Pundits aren't there to provide accurate data.

[rodarson2k]

I don't get this.

We don't HAVE to watch the election news on TV. They don't even have to broadcast it. (At least not as much as they do)

They don't broadcast it, three years out of four. They manage to make up plenty of other useless content to fill their troughs. If it's a foregone conclusion, let it be.

Re:Pundits aren't there to provide accurate data.

[s73v3r]

Ummm ... no. I popped in here to give kudos to Nate Silver, give credit where due, but ... no. That is just not true. This election could have easily gone the other way if Romney had made a few less mistakes, and if that hurricane hadn't hit New England. In that case, Nate Silver would have looked as silly as Dick Morris does today (Morris was one of the "pundits" predicting a Romney landslide).

If Romney hadn't been Romney, and the storm hadn't hit, wouldn't polling have been vastly different? In which case, wouldn't Nate's model come out differently?

He didn't guess who was going to win. He looked at data and extrapolated conclusions from it.

Re:Pundits aren't there to provide accurate data.

[mosb1000]

It's a big event, like Christmas. They make a bunch of money airing all the pollitical adds.

Re:Pundits aren't there to provide accurate data.

[goodmanj]

Romney was trending upward until Hurricane Sandy hit, then started sliding back down.)

Factually wrong. Every poll I've seen, and every forecast model, shows a gradual trend toward Obama over the last six months of the year, a short spike for Romney after the first debate, followed by a continued slide toward Obama, which accelerated after the second and third debate -- at least a week before Sandy hit.

Check out Nate Silver's model data for confirmation, since you seem to appreciate it.

Re:Pundits aren't there to provide accurate data.

[Anonymous Coward]

The hurricane clearly had little to no effect on the election considering that the election was correctly predicted long before it hit, and the polls just didn't show any movement after it hit. In other words, there's absolutely no data supporting that idea. It's just a nice excuse so one party doesn't need to admit it's a systemic problem, rather than a fluke.

I wonder if I can buy the domain unskewedpolls.com

[Anonymous Coward]

Should go for a song now that its faith-based math was proven to be ineffective. At least they should get something out of the time and money they spent on the site. Sadly, I guess we never will know Romney's plan to lower taxes by 20% AND lower the deficit. He seems to be taking the details of *that* plan back to Utah with him without revealing them,

They are used to being wrong all the time

[bussdriver]

Pundits are entertainers they need no skill or brainpower; when they fuck up they just have to be entertaining to keep their job. They are just another form of a reality TV "star" and things have been so bad for so long an airhead pundit type character ran for VP in 2008... and is now with her people, as an airhead pundit.

I know a dittohead and he is a master at rationalization either from being wrong all the time or because his talent allowed him to live in a bubble without knowing it.

Big data PROVED 2000 and 2004 elections stolen too

[leftie]

The opinion polls entering election day and exit polls proved the Karl Rove and the GOP stole both the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections for George W Bush.

Not so good in the Senate

[Anonymous Coward]

He missed 2 in the Senate (Montana and North Dakota) Both were projected to go Republican but ended up going Democrat. By the colors it looks like ND was 90% probability.

The pundits' derision backfired

[Anonymous Coward]

Nate was the most visible, to the point where his predictions were most vociferously derided by the pundits (well, mainly those who didn't like his conclusions.)

The apotheosis of Nate Silver

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

They are making a veritable God out of him: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/11/08/1158776/--NateSilverFacts-now-trending

Re:Big data PROVED 2000 and 2004 elections stolen

[i kan reed]

I'm not sure if this is legitimate crazy or faking it to make people you don't agree with look bad crazy, but you're crazy.

You had to cherry-pick polls to really think Kerry was going to win in 2004(and boy did I)

In 2000, on the other hand, Gore pretty clearly won the popular vote, and pretty much every state fell into predicted categories for electoral votes.

Quit while you're ahead

[hahn]

Silver should probably just retire now because the expectations of him in 2016 are going to be unrealistic. If he misses even one state, pundits will point out how flawed he is.

Re:Quit while you're ahead

[nitehawk214]

Silver should probably just retire now because the expectations of him in 2016 are going to be unrealistic. If he misses even one state, pundits will point out how flawed he is.

You underestimate pundits. They can point out flaws in someone even when they are 100% correct.

National Popular Vote

[jemenake]

I'm going to make a plug for National Popular Vote (http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/), here.

Part of why the election prediction is tricky is because of the electoral college. It doesn't matter what the mean and standard deviations of the nationwide polls are, since the states aggregate their votes and (with the exception of Nebraska, I think) give all of their electoral votes to one candidate. So, people like Nate have to look at the probability curves for all 50 states (let's leave out Puerto Rico and military bases for this) and work through each probability of either candidate winning any of the states. Basically, they run through 2^50 permutations, starting with the probability that Romney wins all 50 and (since that would result in Romney winning the election) adding that probability to his probability of being elected. Add to that the probabilities of him winning 49 states P(Romney wins everything but Alabama), P(Romney wins everything but Alaska), etc. through to P(Romney wins everything but Wyoming), and then do that for all 1225 combinations of him winning 48, etc..

When you get down to him winning about 35-40 states, you have to just limit yourself to the combinations of states which would give him enough electoral votes, of course. Then, when you've added all that up, you've got his percent chance of winning (which is the number on the red line on the top graph on Nate's blog). Now, you go and do all that for Obama.

But this is all much more messy than it needs to be, and state-by-state electoral voting just leads to a few states getting a disproportionate amount of gov't pork (and political advertising) as politicians try to buy the votes of a few swing states. However, no state wants to switch to Nebraska's model of proportional electoral votes, because that would dilute the votes that go to their probable candidate. For example, California (which voted about 60% Obama, and usually votes Democrat) doesn't want to see 40% of it's 55 electoral votes go to a Republican. Same goes for Texas not wanting any of their electoral votes going to Democratic candidates. What you get is a stand-off where the red and blue states look at each other and say "You go first!".

So, some enterprising individual figured out a nice solution: ignore your own state vote and just give all of your state's electoral votes to whomever wins the national popular vote. Some states have already adopted legislation for this, but the legislation doesn't kick in until there are enough states on-board to give 270 electoral votes. Turns out that they're already half-way to the 270 target. At that point, the NPV-participating states will guarantee that the winner of the popular vote wins the election, no matter what the non-NPV states do.

Re:National Popular Vote

[j-beda]

Wikipedia has a nice writeup:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact

California has already passed this bill.

Rush will be all over this tomorrow

[SpaceLifeForm]

Today it was that Obama suppressed the vote. Tomorrow it will be that Nate Silver suppressed the vote. Soon after, it will be that it was all conspiracy. Hopefully he then will attack the banks for making him waste 300 million.

Verified via multiple sources

[hrbrmstr]

The dataviz in this one is pretty cool (with links to source data and R scripts): http://beechplane.wordpress.com/2012/11/07/the-95-confidence-of-nate-silver/ Basically, missed three (which is in line with expectations)

Re:Big data PROVED 2000 and 2004 elections stolen

[Anonymous Coward]

If by stolen, you mean gamed the electoral college system to get the magic number of EV votes (popular vote be damned), then yes, they stole it.

Of course, Obama did something similar in how he targeted certain states and left others alone. I don't have a problem with the method in either case (campaign-wise, not commenting on either president). It is the smart move, that's all.

If you want that to stop, don't blame the campaigns. Change the rules (no winner-take-all states, for example).

Congratulations Nate!

[jamesoutlaw]

I applaud Nate's effort to use mathematics to effectively make fools of all the talking head "pundits" in the media. I have followed him since 2008 and am looking forward to many more years of his work. I hope he continues to be successful in the future.

Metaphor

[ZombieBraintrust]

Voting was a metaphor for warfare. The military with the largest army usually wins. Only men fought in wars back then. Landowners raised militias, food, and money for wars. Simply counting who had the most support was a good proxy for who would win in a civil war. With industrialization landowners became less important to war efforts. The side with the most solders and rifles would win.

Taking averages. I'ts complicated.

[Anonymous Coward]

I watched Nate on a Colbert episode. I found it funny when he basically said "just look at the polls, take an average, and...... It's not really that complicated, but people treat it like it's Galileo or something. It's not that complicated." Duh, but then again, I find increasingly a scary number of people that cannot do math of any kind. I guess we just call people who can actually do math now, nerds.

psychohistory/Jon Stewart/Electoral College

[mbaGeek]

so when is he announcing his new branch of mathematics

the link the Jon Stewart interview. Two very smart men, one of them is funnier than the other, you can decide :-)

I start wondering (every 4 years when people talk about getting rid of the electoral college) if we still teach United States History in high school. Sure let's reform it, take the rubber stamp "electors" out of the process - but you still have the fundamental "big states vs small states" issue (the reason we have a bicameral legislature) and not to mention some other big problems

Nate Silver deserves all of the plaudits he is receiving, I have nothing bad to say about Mr. Silver. I'm going to hunt up a copy of his book. #prepareToDuckAndRun do you know the difference between Nate Silver and God? Nate Silver wouldn't get booed at the Democratic convention #duckAndRun

Re:psychohistory/Jon Stewart/Electoral College

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you really just call Jon Stewart a very smart man? I think that would make even him laugh.

Re:psychohistory/Jon Stewart/Electoral College

[Anonymous Coward]

the link the Jon Stewart interview. Two very smart men, one of them is funnier than the other, you can decide :-)

Colbert had a great intro for his interview.

Re:psychohistory/Jon Stewart/Electoral College

[guises]

We have the bicameral legislature because when the country was first formed the colonies really were separate entities and the smaller colonies refused to join without a bigger say in federal policies. It doesn't have much purpose now (other than the long term vs. short term difference between the house and the senate), it contributes to voter apathy (why vote if it isn't going to count anyway?), and is contrary to the one man, one vote principle upon which we were founded (an Alaskan voter gets, effectively, three votes for every one that a Californian gets).

The "big states vs small states" issue is no longer very important, we are now a unified country rather than a collection of colonies, and tyranny of the minority is not an improvement over tyranny of the majority. The courts exist to prevent tyranny, not the legislature.

Any apologies to Nate? (hah)

[fahrbot-bot]

From TFA:

Joe Scarborough of MSNBC called him a “joke,” while an op-ed in the LA Times accused him of running a “numbers racket.” The Examiner dismissed him as a “thin and effeminate man with a soft-sounding voice.” Even the legendary David Brooks claimed that his work was “getting into silly land.”

I'm sure they will all apologize to Nate for their rude behavior and comments in 3... 2... 1... /sarcasm

Re:Any apologies to Nate? (hah)

[bhiestand]

From TFA:

Joe Scarborough of MSNBC called him a “joke,” while an op-ed in the LA Times accused him of running a “numbers racket.” The Examiner dismissed him as a “thin and effeminate man with a soft-sounding voice.” Even the legendary David Brooks claimed that his work was “getting into silly land.”

I'm sure they will all apologize to Nate for their rude behavior and comments in 3... 2... 1... /sarcasm

TBF, at least one of them did actually apologize. The apology was a bit convoluted, but it's there nonetheless.

Granted, a few articles later he was going on about "riding the Long Black Train" into some financial apocalypse after Obama was re-elected, but hey.

Re:I wonder if I can buy the domain unskewedpolls.

[desdinova 216]

you're presuming he even had a plan

Nate Silver == Hari Seldon?

[Anonymous Coward]

Discuss!

No facts please

[Anonymous Coward]

Republicans don't need facts they need to feel good about how things will turn out.

Vegas 2016!

[Yakasha]

Reliable statistics brings reliable odds brings legal betting.
I'm watching the next election from the floor at the Wynn! See ya there!

June 7th, 2012. That's when.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nate had Obama winning from the beginning. This is his first post unveiling the model. The mean result was 290 EV for Obama, as it would be if Obama had lost Florida and Virginia. As we know, both states were extremely close and the model did eventually come around to calling them for Obama.

Drew Linzer at Votamatic.org arguably did better than Nate, calling the electoral vote count essentially dead on in June and never moving far from that prediction. Just look at this graph. Linzer used a different Bayesian method that was more resistant to short-term fluctuations in the polls and didn't place as much weight on economic factors.

Not to rain on his parade

[lilfields]

Not to rain on Nate Silver's parade, but Real Clear Politics's state by state average was also correct on every single state. So, you know.

Re:Not to rain on his parade

[Jon_S]

That doesn't rain on his parade at all. He would be the first to point out that anyone can take data points and make forecasts from them. He mentions other projection outfits in his posts quite frequently in fact.

Anyon els not believe

[Anonymous Coward]

That Democrats selected president D senators D local D House Ah well let me see R.
I know when I employ a carpenter I dont get him a cement truck instead of a hammer.
I think something is bullshit.

He's not the only one

[genfail]

Professor Sheldon H. Jacobson Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois also achieved stunning success with a Bayesian model. Those numbers were 50 out of 51 states (including DC) determined correctly. Reported here Here

Math

[Sloppy]

Arithmetic and statistics are just lies straight from the pit of hell.

It's too late

[PopeRatzo]

Today, a national conservative radio talk show host, used Nate Silver's accuracy in predicting the election outcome as proof positive that there was enormous voter fraud, because otherwise how could Nate Silver have known in advance who was going to win each state.

By the time of the next election, I predict the American Right will start accusing Nate Silver of sorcery and satanic geomancy.

I am not joking.

Credit Where Credit is Due

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe Five-Thirty-Eight just aggregates poll numbers then builds a pretty basic CDF from it. This is like stochastics 101. The credit should more go to the pollsters who are apparently good enough to produce accurate mean and error estimates.

Average error?

[DeadCatX2]

It's great that Nate called all the states, but I'm more interested in how far off his estimates were.

For instance, he considered Florida very close, but just slightly Obama. Had it been won just slightly by Romney, Nate's model would have still been quite accurate.

However, if Nate's model was off by 10% in California, that would be quite inaccurate.

Has anyone done an analysis to see how far off Nate was on average when calling a state?

MSNBC really??

[davydagger]

MSNBC is a fucking joke.

All the news microsoft sees fit to print.

Re:MSNBC really??

[Anonymous Coward]

It's NBCNews now. Microsoft and NBC split their venture.They are still a free-market infotainment channel so caveats still apply, but MS is not calling the shots.

After many, many years at /. ...this might be the

[rootrot]

This is the price of allowing 10,000 independent journalistic voices to be consolidated into 2 or 4 mega-media-conglomerates who's infotainment is supposed to pass for a free and responsible forth column.

You are badly mixing the "fourth estate" and "fifth column" metaphors, neither of which actually fit your claim. Your post is like watching David and Goliath paint the Sistine Chapel.

The funniest thing I've seen here. Bravo, AC. Bravo.

Mass media vs. con$ultant$

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

Generic News Network is all about ratings, but people like Karl Rove get paid immense amounts to provide information to their customers. There was a different failure mechanism at work for that set of pundits.

Models

[phlegmofdiscontent]

Ok, so he predicted the outcomes of two elections. A laudable achievement, to be sure. However, as the collapse of the financial system (due in part to exotic instruments) showed us, a model works until it doesn't.

Predictions - that's wrong

[ChronoFish]

I thought the whole deal is that he WASN'T predicting the outcome... he was merely stating the odds of candidates success.

In this way, no matter what happened, his statements could not be disproved by the outcome.

For instance. If Obama had a 85% chance of winning (or 95% which I think is what he stated), had Obama lost, that alone does not disprove his calculation. Because there is still a 15% (or 5%) chance of Romney winning.

The pundits hated this, not because he was making a bold prediction, but because they interpreted his statement as "a landslide" - while also using weasel words to hedge his bets.

If you understand logic, theory, and statistics, you'd probably go along with his hypothesis. Otherwise you were probably a Republican who distrusts liberals, numbers, and science.

-CF

They

[Anonymous Coward]

The scary thing is not the fact that he was able to predict the outcomes for most scientists know that with enough accurate data statictical math provides very accurate results but that some blogger had access to that much accurate data about so many americans that that he was able to do this. Now this is the really scary thing: what are "they" doing with their more all encompassing and detailed collections.

Silver is Bill James of SABRE -- in a bad way

[Anonymous Coward]

Bill James of SABREmetrics is ... notorious for studiously not looking at clear indications of rampant steroid abuse during the Steroid Era of baseball. This included career bests by Barry Bonds in HR in his late thirties, when every other ballplayer equivalent had basically 1/4 or less of his mid twenties averages; the HR record single season being broken TWICE in the same year, buy guys having something like 2X their career bests ... in their late thirties. And an epidemic among those guys of backne, sudden rages, radical transformation of physiques, and giant heads, all in their mid-late thirties. At a time when performance declines. Roger Clemens comes to mind. You don't need to look at drug test results to see the obvious and say something is really, really weird and a major outlier.

NO President has ever won reelection with a lower percentage than his first election. No President since FDR has won reelection with unemployment over 7%. No President for the Democrats has won with a lower turnout than the prior election. No President has won when his opponent bested his party's prior performance in all demos. Latino voters have historically underperformed in turnout, and turned out poorly in 2010. Young people historically and every election but 2008, vastly underperform in turnout. Meanwhile all but one poll showed a slight Romney lead of 1/2 percentage points and that with a D overweighting of 6 points in the sample size compared to the 2010 turnout rate of even for both parties. Obama played to crowds 1/4 of what he did in 2008, Romney had record crowds. Exit polling (and internals from both campaigns) showed Romney victories in Ohio, VA, FL, NH, and CO. Exit polls had respondents give Romney a 30 point lead on the economy, and the economy as the number one factor in voting.

It costs, street estimate, about $50 a vote to get someone to vote illegally. Assume Obama needed about 4 million votes, that's a cost of about $200 million. Assume further that each illegal voter would vote five times, for a payout of $250, you'd need 800,000 illegal voters. That's definitely doable. Its cash basis and non-documented. You'd probably need about another 80,000 guys to supervise those street voters, at a ratio of 1 supervisor to 100 street voters. They'd probably demand something like $20,000, cash money, half up front and half upon delivery. That's about $160 million. Total cost to ballot stuff and win the Presidency: $360 million.

Considering that you could dole out hundreds of billions if not trillions of win/lose regulations, subsidies, enforcement actions, that's not trivial. Obama took no public money, faces no public audit, and raised reportedly $1 billion (CCV for web donation was turned off, testing people from the Republicans were able to donate under foreign IPs and addresses, with names like Osama bin Laden). Obama had a strange burn rate of spending money very early, opening offices in places like South Dakota, which his public campaign statements revealed.

None of this is definitive proof. But how much did you need in the mid 1990's to know that Jose Canseco, Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Mark McGwire, and Sammy Sosa were all on the juice? The backne, the domestic violence arrests, the sudden rages, the vastly altered physiques, the sudden giant heads? James sought actively not to see this. Just as Nate Silver has actively sought not to see the extreme unusual nature of Obama's victory.

Which is very likely more fraud than anything else. No one is that lucky or good consistently.

Silver's legacy will be like James. James failed to speak out on juicing, and now Baseball is just a contest to see who can evade testing the best, like the Tour de France. Its a joke, an exercise in chemicals. Silver's legacy is that in failing to say hey, "my guy is likely cheating" he ensures that it will be a simple matter of whoever is the most efficient at stuffing the ballot box (or shredding opposition votes).

Voting in America is now forever something akin to that of the late Roman Republic. With the same results. And yes, Silver knowing and keeping his mouth shut like Bill James is a disgrace. All James did was help ruin baseball. Silver's the bigger crime.

Re:Silver is Bill James of SABRE -- in a bad way

[goodmanj]

None of this is definitive proof.

None of it's even evidence.

define, "illusion"

[Anonymous Coward]

because 50.4% to 48.x% still seems close to me. I know know...electoral college dynamics...still, it was close.

Re:define, "illusion"

[Sique]

It isn't. With such large numbers like the U.S. electorate, 50.4% to 48.x% is a solid result and the margin of error is somewhere around 0.1% - far away from any ambiguity. Single events might change the outcome within certain groups of people, but with such a large electorate, most of them cancel out each other, and the overall outcome is pretty well determined already, or better: the likelihood of it to stray far away from the predictions is very small.

Re:define, "illusion"

[samkass]

It isn't. With such large numbers like the U.S. electorate, 50.4% to 48.x% is a solid result and the margin of error is somewhere around 0.1% - far away from any ambiguity. Single events might change the outcome within certain groups of people, but with such a large electorate, most of them cancel out each other, and the overall outcome is pretty well determined already, or better: the likelihood of it to stray far away from the predictions is very small.

It's 51.2% to 48.x% and counting, last I checked, as vote-by-mail which were posted by the deadlines continued to come in.

It's the biggest re-election margins in recent history, and a blowout in both the electoral college and, compared to most elections in the last few decades, a blowout in the popular vote as well. Especially considering just how many voters there were, the outcome was quite decisive.

So no, you appear to be just as challenged with numbers as Nate's detractors.

Re:define, "illusion"

[samkass]

(Whoops... meant to reply to the parent!)

Re:define, "illusion"

[swalve]

Yes. Even Reagan's massive landslide in 1984 was only 58 - 40 in the popular vote. 51 to 48 is pretty decisive in an environment where one can lose the popular vote and still win.

how is that in Rove's interest

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe I'm only playing this 10 D chess in 8 dimensions, but please enlighten me how this helps Karl Rove's position for him to help stage the appearance that he's a delusional moron who wasted 400 million dollars on his PR campaign?

[citation needed]

[Hognoxious]

The restrictions where there because white landowners had a very high chance of having a solid education.

I didn't see you observing the deliberations in Philadelphia.

Re:Good for jr, daddy & spooky

[Hognoxious]

He did.

In three, obviously.

Best of a clown show

[SgtChaireBourne]

The best clown of a clown show is still a clown. Yet they got 48% of the popular vote. Seriously, what kind of victory did they throw away by not running a serious candidate? By running a serious candidate they could have had a major landslide.

Looks at accuracy of %, not just majority

[Blue23]

The article really should say that he was correct on which way the states went. But if you read 538 they will talk about how a 5 point swing but still the same party is a failure of the math, even though it doesn't change the state result. And the same deal that a half apoitn change that swings D to R to vice versa isn't something big when it comes to the math.

The article is cheering the thresholds - was the highest for which party. But to really cheer for Nate's ways, you need to praise the accuracy of the %s. I haven't checked 538 today, yesterday they said they were taking a break and then interested in just that - to see the accuracy, not just a simple which-had-more.

Can I get a "whoosh"?

[danaris]

Then they should get used to being wrong.

This is seriously missing the point.

People like this, for whom tradition and emotion are more important than fact, will not "get used to being wrong"—because they're not wrong. Ever. There's some other explanation for why the things they believed would happen did not. Many of them (who are of the die-hard conservative stripe) simply revert to the old standard "liberal conspiracy" theories.

This wouldn't be nearly as much of a problem if there weren't now a large media faction dedicated to telling people that these theories are true.

Dan Aris

more delicious roman_mir hypocrisy

[Anonymous Coward]

I predicted that Obama won in August

Barely twenty minutes prior to this post, you stated in another post
 

No, when you put your money where your mouth is that is when you can call something a prediction.

Prediction can come true or it can fail to materialise, but if you are willing to put a bet down, then it's a prediction and not just running off the mouth.

However, you never put any money on your prediction. Hence, you are "just running off the mouth".

The rest of your comment is the usual nonsense:

Romney decided to declare himself a bigger Democrat than Obama.

You are exactly backwards there. Obama is the most conservative president the US has had in generations. Obama has moved so far to the right that he left very little room for Romney.

And if you want a prediction - and I'm willing to put money on this one - I'll give you one. I predict that the fascist dream state that you keep preaching for with your ron paul videos would lead to the restoration of human slavery in the US. That is what happens when you take away all the rights of the working class as you propose. Of course they have hardly any in the US currently, but you propose taking away what few they have left.

Another possibility

[Anonymous Coward]

One other option is that he has a source of information from the people who rig the elections (you don't think they're real do you?) and so his predictions appear to be right. He may well have called it all correct, but since there is so much election fraud going on (multiple voting, voting machines switching votes, etc.) it might be somewhat hard for even the best mathematical formulas to take into account the rampant fraud. Using math to predict the election may well be possible without the fraud, but wouldn't the fraud make it damn near impossible to predict accurately?

For rest of the world

[NewYork]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nate_Silver

Yeah, science kicks ass compared to anything else

[Anonymous Coward]

And the idiotic thing about ALL other pundits is they only needed to increase their polling sample size to increase the confidence intervals if they were 1) so sure of their own interpretations of the their favorite polls, or 2) wanted to disprove Nate Silver's predictions objectively.

Oh, but that would be science again. Basically most pundits are post-modern, neo-medeval hacks who failed even high school algebra and want the world to conform to their pet theories by shear will. This is why pundits are worth even the shit-stain on underwear.

The pundits aren't stupid.

[Arancaytar]

(Well, except for the partisan ones who were driven by wishful thinking, and broke down in tears at the outcome. Glenn Beck, looking at you.)

The ones who kept claiming the race was "too close to call" knew exactly what they were doing. Do you think they get paid for being right? They get paid for being watched. If all news commentators come to a consensus in early October and say "Romney can pack it in", then that's an entire month of people bored of following the Electionbowl on TV. The ratings would have plummeted.

The only idiots in this case were the Republican campaign managers, who bought so deeply into their own propaganda that they failed to see where their campaign was headed.