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

Math by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-08 07:33 · Score: 5, Interesting

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

Re:Math by YodasEvilTwin · 2012-11-08 07:38 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.
Re:Math by alphatel · 2012-11-08 07:49 · Score: 5, Insightful

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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When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
Re:Math by explosivejared · 2012-11-08 07:54 · Score: 2, Insightful

; 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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I got a catholic block.
Re:Math by sjames · 2012-11-08 08:00 · Score: 4, Insightful

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.
Re:Math by coldfarnorth · 2012-11-08 08:03 · Score: 5, Funny

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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Lets start refering to The War Against Terror by it's initials. . .
Re:Math by mcgrew · 2012-11-08 08:03 · Score: 5, Interesting

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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Free Martian Whores!
Re:Math by jhoegl · 2012-11-08 08:05 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.
Re:Math by MightyMartian · 2012-11-08 08:09 · Score: 4, Insightful

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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The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Re:Math by halfEvilTech · 2012-11-08 08:11 · Score: 4, Informative

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.
Re:Math by MightyMartian · 2012-11-08 08:11 · Score: 5, Insightful

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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The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Re:Math by Artraze · 2012-11-08 08:18 · Score: 3, Interesting

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.)
Re:Math by Genda · 2012-11-08 08:26 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.
Re:Math by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-08 08:29 · Score: 5, Interesting

"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).
Re:Math by alva_edison · 2012-11-08 08:41 · Score: 2

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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He effected a bored affect.
Re:Math by xevioso · 2012-11-08 08:41 · Score: 5, Funny

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. :-)
Re:Math by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-08 08:42 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.
Re:Math by ibsteve2u · 2012-11-08 08:44 · Score: 2

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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Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
Re:Math by Solandri · 2012-11-08 08:55 · Score: 4, Insightful

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.)
Re:Math by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-08 09:01 · Score: 5, Funny

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.
Re:Math by alexander_686 · 2012-11-08 09:03 · Score: 3, Insightful

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.
Re:Math by nitehawk214 · 2012-11-08 09:05 · Score: 3, Informative

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.

--
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Re:Math by Ambitwistor · 2012-11-08 09:09 · Score: 4, Insightful

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.
Re:Math by TWX · 2012-11-08 09:10 · Score: 3, Interesting

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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Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Re:Math by alexander_686 · 2012-11-08 09:12 · Score: 2

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.
Re:Math by composer777 · 2012-11-08 09:14 · Score: 5, Informative

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.
Re:Math by jpvlsmv · 2012-11-08 09:21 · Score: 4, Funny

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 by fahrbot-bot · 2012-11-08 09:23 · Score: 4, Interesting

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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It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Re:Math by Dahamma · 2012-11-08 09:28 · Score: 5, Interesting

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 by fahrbot-bot · 2012-11-08 09:32 · Score: 3, Interesting

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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It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Re:Math by Jon_S · 2012-11-08 10:06 · Score: 2

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.
Re:Math by BasilBrush · 2012-11-08 10:11 · Score: 5, Informative

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.
Re:Math by careysub · 2012-11-08 10:20 · Score: 2

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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Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Re:Math by elfprince13 · 2012-11-08 10:23 · Score: 2

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.
Re:Math by sribe · 2012-11-08 10:23 · Score: 4, Informative

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%!
Re:Math by fahrbot-bot · 2012-11-08 10:25 · Score: 4, Informative

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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It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Re:Math by DragonWriter · 2012-11-08 10:26 · Score: 4, Insightful

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 by TsuruchiBrian · 2012-11-08 10:27 · Score: 2

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 by NatasRevol · 2012-11-08 10:28 · Score: 4, Informative

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.

--
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Re:Math by realityimpaired · 2012-11-08 10:47 · Score: 4, Funny

Yeah... but a Hurricane is pink and fruity... A straight drink it ain't....
Re:Math by ceoyoyo · 2012-11-08 10:54 · Score: 3, Funny

The fourth column would be a large group of pissed off Spanish revolutionaries, just like the first, second and third columns.
Re:Math by hondo77 · 2012-11-08 10:59 · Score: 5, Insightful

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".

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I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
Re:Math by Hognoxious · 2012-11-08 11:22 · Score: 2

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

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Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Re:Math by jbeach · 2012-11-08 11:28 · Score: 2

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.

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The Invisible Hand of the Free Market is what punches workers in the nuts.
Re:Math by schnell · 2012-11-08 11:31 · Score: 2

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.

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"95% of all Slashdot .sig quotes are incorrect or completely fabricated." -Benjamin Franklin
Re:Math by ae1294 · 2012-11-08 12:15 · Score: 4, Funny

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 by Rod+Beauvex · 2012-11-08 12:28 · Score: 2

There is now Dr. Pepper on my monitor.
Re:Math by Mike+Buddha · 2012-11-08 12:38 · Score: 2

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

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by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
Re:Math by Daniel+Dvorkin · 2012-11-08 12:47 · Score: 2, Insightful

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.

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The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Re:Math by ChronoFish · 2012-11-08 13:20 · Score: 2

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 by westlake · 2012-11-08 14:17 · Score: 2

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 by AdamWill · 2012-11-08 16:09 · Score: 4, Informative

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 by sunspot42 · 2012-11-08 18:12 · Score: 2

>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 by goodmanj · 2012-11-08 18:29 · Score: 5, Insightful

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 by kasperd · 2012-11-08 19:42 · Score: 2

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?

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Re:Math by guanxi · 2012-11-09 02:35 · Score: 2

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 by Thugthrasher · 2012-11-09 04:52 · Score: 2

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 by sunspot42 · 2012-11-09 09:26 · Score: 2

>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 by couchslug · 2012-11-09 14:50 · Score: 2

"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....

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But when? by metrometro · 2012-11-08 07:33 · Score: 4, Insightful

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? by Latentius · 2012-11-08 07:44 · Score: 4, Insightful

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? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-08 07:49 · Score: 2, Informative

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? by bluefoxlucid · 2012-11-08 07:52 · Score: 4, Insightful

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!

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Re:But when? by rhsanborn · 2012-11-08 07:55 · Score: 5, Insightful

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? by sjames · 2012-11-08 08:15 · Score: 2

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? by metrometro · 2012-11-08 09:17 · Score: 2

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).

Seriously... by sunking2 · 2012-11-08 07:33 · Score: 5, Insightful

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... by explosivejared · 2012-11-08 07:46 · Score: 4, Informative

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

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Re:Seriously... by T.E.D. · 2012-11-08 09:56 · Score: 2

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. :-(

Just to be clear, these are statistics. by mosb1000 · 2012-11-08 07:34 · Score: 4, Insightful

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. by Colonel+Korn · 2012-11-08 08:03 · Score: 2

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.

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Re:Just to be clear, these are statistics. by professionalfurryele · 2012-11-08 10:19 · Score: 2

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!

Not how statistics works by GofG · 2012-11-08 07:35 · Score: 3, Interesting

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.

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Re:Not how statistics works by YodasEvilTwin · 2012-11-08 07:40 · Score: 5, Informative

...that's not how statistics work either. A result does not alter the underlying probabilities.
Re:Not how statistics works by khallow · 2012-11-08 07:51 · Score: 3, Insightful

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 by VAElynx · 2012-11-08 08:00 · Score: 3, Insightful

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 by radtea · 2012-11-08 08:11 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.

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Re:Not how statistics works by GofG · 2012-11-08 08:30 · Score: 2

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.

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Re:Not how statistics works by Odin's+Raven · 2012-11-08 08:34 · Score: 4, Funny

...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.

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Re:Not how statistics works by tgibbs · 2012-11-08 09:01 · Score: 2

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 by AvitarX · 2012-11-08 09:31 · Score: 3, Informative

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.

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Re:Good for him by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-08 07:36 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.

Why Nate? by MyLongNickName · 2012-11-08 07:39 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.

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Re:Why Nate? by d23tek · 2012-11-08 07:48 · Score: 2

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.

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Re:Why Nate? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-08 07:49 · Score: 2, Informative

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? by mewsenews · 2012-11-08 07:53 · Score: 2

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? by scumdamn · 2012-11-08 07:55 · Score: 5, Insightful

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? by darkmeridian · 2012-11-08 08:42 · Score: 2

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."

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Re:Why Nate? by TimFenn · 2012-11-08 08:51 · Score: 2

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.

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Just looked at the real world and called it by Attack+DAWWG · 2012-11-08 07:40 · Score: 2

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 by MyLongNickName · 2012-11-08 07:51 · Score: 3, Funny

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.

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Re:Good for him by FilmedInNoir · 2012-11-08 07:42 · Score: 4, Insightful

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?

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Re:Good for him by Latentius · 2012-11-08 07:42 · Score: 4, Informative

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 by superdave80 · 2012-11-08 07:44 · Score: 5, Insightful

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:All? by Missing.Matter · 2012-11-08 07:47 · Score: 3, Informative

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:Good for him by ArcadeMan · 2012-11-08 07:48 · Score: 2

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?

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Re:All? by ChrisGoodwin · 2012-11-08 07:49 · Score: 2

About 2-3 days before the election he switched Florida from light pink to light blue.

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Re:Good for him by ArcadeMan · 2012-11-08 07:49 · Score: 2, Insightful

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?

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Pundits aren't there to provide accurate data. by mosb1000 · 2012-11-08 07:49 · Score: 5, Insightful

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. by mosb1000 · 2012-11-08 08:55 · Score: 3, Interesting

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. by mosb1000 · 2012-11-08 09:03 · Score: 2

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. by BasilBrush · 2012-11-08 10:46 · Score: 2

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:Facts never trump belief and/or tradition by ChrisGoodwin · 2012-11-08 07:50 · Score: 2

Then they should get used to being wrong.

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Re:Good for him by Tridus · 2012-11-08 07:51 · Score: 3, Insightful

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

How is this NOT representative?

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Re:Good for him by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-08 07:52 · Score: 2, Interesting

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 by Ziggitz · 2012-11-08 07:52 · Score: 5, Insightful

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

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Re:Good for him by rhsanborn · 2012-11-08 07:53 · Score: 5, Insightful

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 by Tridus · 2012-11-08 08:08 · Score: 4, Insightful

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.

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-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates

Re:Good for him by superdave80 · 2012-11-08 08:08 · Score: 2

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 by MightyMartian · 2012-11-08 08:13 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.

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Re:Good for him by AK+Marc · 2012-11-08 08:17 · Score: 2

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

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Re:Good for him by Jah-Wren+Ryel · 2012-11-08 08:19 · Score: 2

How is this NOT representative?

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

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Re:Good for him by CannonballHead · 2012-11-08 08:22 · Score: 5, Insightful

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 by mrsquid0 · 2012-11-08 08:25 · Score: 3, Insightful

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

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Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.

Re:Big data PROVED 2000 and 2004 elections stolen by i+kan+reed · 2012-11-08 08:26 · Score: 2

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.

Re:Good for him by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-08 08:29 · Score: 3, Informative

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 by tomhath · 2012-11-08 08:29 · Score: 3, Interesting

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 by amicusNYCL · 2012-11-08 08:35 · Score: 2

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?

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"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black

Re:Good for him by mrsquid0 · 2012-11-08 08:36 · Score: 2

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.

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Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.

Re:Good for him by fustakrakich · 2012-11-08 08:38 · Score: 2

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.

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Re:Good for him by kelemvor4 · 2012-11-08 08:39 · Score: 2

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 by mdielmann · 2012-11-08 08:41 · Score: 5, Insightful

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!

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Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?

Congratulations Nate! by jamesoutlaw · 2012-11-08 08:45 · Score: 3, Insightful

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.

Re:Good for him by Hatta · 2012-11-08 08:49 · Score: 2, Funny

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

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Re:Good for him by tomhath · 2012-11-08 08:50 · Score: 2

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 by tgd · 2012-11-08 08:55 · Score: 3, Interesting

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 by Ziggitz · 2012-11-08 08:55 · Score: 5, Funny

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

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Re:Good for him by dkleinsc · 2012-11-08 08:55 · Score: 4, Informative

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.

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Re:Good for him by tgd · 2012-11-08 08:59 · Score: 3, Insightful

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 by mspohr · 2012-11-08 09:01 · Score: 2

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.

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Re:Good for him by alva_edison · 2012-11-08 09:02 · Score: 2

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.

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psychohistory/Jon Stewart/Electoral College by mbaGeek · 2012-11-08 09:07 · Score: 2

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

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Re:Good for him by TubeSteak · 2012-11-08 09:17 · Score: 2

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

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o0t!

Re:Good for him by rsborg · 2012-11-08 09:32 · Score: 2

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.

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Re:Good for him by ohnocitizen · 2012-11-08 09:35 · Score: 2

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 by ohnocitizen · 2012-11-08 09:36 · Score: 2

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

Re:Good for him by Raenex · 2012-11-08 09:47 · Score: 2

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 by superdave80 · 2012-11-08 10:29 · Score: 3, Interesting

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 by tgd · 2012-11-08 10:40 · Score: 2

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 by cbhacking · 2012-11-08 10:43 · Score: 3, Informative

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.

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Re:Good for him by porges · 2012-11-08 10:46 · Score: 3, Insightful

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.

Average error? by DeadCatX2 · 2012-11-08 11:51 · Score: 2

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?

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Re:Good for him by ceoyoyo · 2012-11-08 13:14 · Score: 2

"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:define, "illusion" by samkass · 2012-11-09 03:10 · Score: 2

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.

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