The Art of Elections Forecasting 101
ideonexus writes "Years ago Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com, a blog seeking to educate the public about elections forecasting, established his model as one of the most accurate in existence, rising from a fairly unknown statistician working in baseball to one of the most respected names in election forecasting. In this article he describes all the factors that go into his predictions. A fascinating overview of the process of modeling a chaotic system."
Educating the Public? (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't Matter (Score:1)
I, the amazing Karnac, predict a Repubmocrat will preside over the United States once again, as it was, so will it be, ad nauseum.
Re:Doesn't Matter (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, he is. But he is still the best republican president we have had in a century.
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WTF? Where'd you get that utterly insane idea? There's tons of Presidents who have been better this century, including Bill Clinton, and in fact almost all of them except possibly LBJ (who did both good and bad, bad being Vietnam and good being passing the Civl Rights Act). Obama has been about as bad as George W Bush. And I'd rate him worse, because at least with Bush, you knew what you were getting if you voted for him, a dumb neocon monkey. With Obama, it was all lies, because he gave speeches about
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You missed the keyword. Best REPUBLICAN president. Clinton wasn't a republican.
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Oh shit. Sorry about that, I completely missed that!
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Nor is Obama, unless by Republican you meant best President for Republicans.
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I don't think it was lies with Obama, I think it was something i consider worse: naivete. Obama came in promising everything to everyone and their mother, because that's what populists do. But when he got into office he realized that he couldn't actually do all that he set out to do, and that Bush's policies in many cases were the best choice of a series of bad options. Case in point: he promised on the campaign trail to close Guantanamo Bay prison, and when he came into office he wrote an Executive Orde
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The problem is, you can't claim he is naive either, he is a constitutional scholar, how could he not have known how little the president can accomplish on his own?
Re:Doesn't Matter (Score:5, Interesting)
Historically, people have been willing to cross the aisle on important policies, especially if you meet them halfway. Obama's health care proposal, cap and trade, and the DREAM act (i.e. citizenship through military service) were all Republican ideas that they would have loved to support as recently as 2006. No one could have predicted the scorched earth tactic they'd employ to bring the president down.
Obama's greatest fault was how long it took him to realize what was going on. Most people had realized all the Republican "negotiations" were a stalling tactic by the summer of '09, the fall at the latest. Obama didn't seem to get it until after the 2010 elections.
Re:Doesn't Matter (Score:5, Insightful)
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Obama's greatest fault was how long it took him to realize what was going on. Most people had realized all the Republican "negotiations" were a stalling tactic by the summer of '09, the fall at the latest. Obama didn't seem to get it until after the 2010 elections.
He may have thought that voters would punish the Republicans for blocking progress, rather than punish the Democrats for attempting it.
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I don't think it was lies with Obama, I think it was something i consider worse: naivete
Reminds me of a line from the movie "The Rock".....
"Great. We're not gutless, we're incompetent"
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Repubmocrats all the way back past the New Deal.
No Deal.
No Deposit
No return
I think Lee Ving sang it best:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6aZynalcvc [youtube.com]
No more peace talks
No more disarmament
No more Mr. Nice Guy
No more nothing
No more nothing
No more nothing
No more Playboy
No more Newsweek
No more Walter Kronkite
No more watered down television crap
No more nothing
No more nothing
No more nothing
No more f**kee
No more s**kee
No more nothing
No more nothing
No more nothing
No more nothing
No more nothing
No more Scientology
No mo
Re:Educating the Public? (Score:5, Insightful)
I hope that includes "don't vote according to forecasts". I mean, it'd be nice if more people voted for the candidate they actually want instead of the one they think will win.
An educated public would realize that voting for who you want in today's election environment is not optimal strategy.
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An educated public would realize that voting for who you want is today's only way to ever break the rep-dem-oligopoly. If you vote tactically, all you do is playing into the hands of the strategists. They plan. They are strategic. You react. You stay tactical.
Start local. Vote people into office you trust, independently of any party affiliation. Be a candidate people can trust, independently of any party affiliation. Focus on issues, not on ideologies. Get things done instead of paying lip service on things
It's all about the money (Score:5, Insightful)
Ever since the Republican members of the supreme court overturned our campaign finance laws, elections have become an epic bribe-fest where money almost always wins.
You tell me which side is outspending the other 10-1 and I'll tell you who is most likely to win the election.
Let's just save ourselves alot of time and aggravation, and ask the America's 10 most bigoted and bribe-happy billionaires who they would like to win.
Re:It's all about the money (Score:4, Insightful)
Even if what you say about 10-1 outspending is true (and it probably is), you haven't established causation, only correlation. Wouldn't you expect a better, winning candidate to be able to get more money as well as more votes than the other guy?
Re:It's all about the money (Score:4, Insightful)
Democracy = one man one vote.
Capitalism = one dollar one vote.
Only an idiot or a libertarian (but I repeat myself) fails to understand that you can't "vote with your wallet" unless everyone has about the same size wallet.
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Libertarians fail in the same way communism fails (in that they are both really good ideas on paper). It does not correlate to the jerk factor. All it takes is one jerk to ruin it for the rest of us... Capitalism has a similar failing but can be blunted 'by the masses' by not buying their junk anymore... Each has its ups and downs. But libertarians fail to realize that 'live and let live' can only be upheld in small communities or someone who enforces it...
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In Soviet Union , Libertarians start on YOU!
Re:It's all about the money (Score:5, Funny)
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No, we can't b/c both parts of the statist duopoly(D, R) are most threatened by the libertarians. To the collectivist technocrats, libertarians are evil, greedy, selfish pricks that want to deny the technocrat his confiscatory powers to improve the world. To the puritanical fascists, libertarians are degenerate libertines who want to undo all o
Re:It's all about the money (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's all about the money (Score:4, Insightful)
To a certain extent, this is true.
It must be remembered, however, that there are other ways to "advertise".
The "incumbent advantage" is an obvious one - it's pretty easy to get your name in the news just by proposing a new law, even if you have no intention of following through on it. And the evening news is just more advertising for a candidate.
Likewise, if a candidate is preferred by the various news organizations, he/she/it tends to get better coverage than a candidate that is actively disliked by the media. Again, free advertising....
Do remember that it's actually pretty hard to limit campaign spending without tripping over the First Amendment (face it, if a candidate is rich enough, he can just buy a TV station and BECOME part of the media)....
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Well, we could start with banning all corporate financing and advertising. A corporation, not being human, has no claim to human rights.
Yeah, yeah, don't get me started on ridiculous laws and SCOTUS rulings to the contrary.
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A corporation, not being human, has no claim to human rights.
But the people who make up the corporation do, especially when those people have formed the corporation for the explicit purpose of exercising the right to free speech. As did Citizen's United.
Yeah, yeah, don't get me started on ridiculous laws and SCOTUS rulings to the contrary.
Yeah, that pesky first amendment. What a pain. Why can't we just ban all speech that we don't agree with?
Re:It's all about the money (Score:4, Insightful)
A corporation, not being human, has no claim to human rights.
But the people who make up the corporation do, especially when those people have formed the corporation for the explicit purpose of exercising the right to free speech. As did Citizen's United.
The people who make up the corporation have their rights, and they are welcome to exercise those rights to the fullest. However, they don't deserve extra rights just because they have more money.
As an individual, I am allowed to donate $2500 to my favorite candidate. A single cent more and the feds haul me off to jail.
But if I form a corporation, I can donate all the money I want to a super PAC. By forming a corporation, I suddenly have more free speech rights than anyone in the country who don't currently control a corporation.
Sure, there are laws prohibiting super PACs from coordinating with campaigns, but the candidate can just have his lawyer form the super PAC and the communication between them will be protected by the attorney–client privilege. (for the interest of partisanship I won't name that candidate)
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As an individual, you can also donate to a PAC or form one, if you wish.
As an individual, I am allowed to donate $5000 per election to a PAC. A single cent more and the feds haul me off to jail. You might notice $5000 is quite a bit lower than the contribution limit for corporations. The corporations and I each have our First Amendment rights, but I can't shake the feeling that their rights are a lot stronger than mine...
...or form one, if you wish.
Of course if I form my own corporation and super PAC I can get as set of extra rights as all the other corporations. But what about everyone in the country wh
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However, they don't deserve extra rights just because they have more money.
They don't get any. "More money" has nothing to do with anything, it's just flamebait.
As an individual, I am allowed to donate $2500 to my favorite candidate. ... But if I form a corporation, I can donate all the money I want to a super PAC.
Candidate vs. "super PAC". Different things. Different laws.
By forming a corporation, I suddenly have more free speech rights than anyone in the country who don't currently control a corporation.
Keep telling yourself that and maybe it will be true someday.
Sure, there are laws prohibiting super PACs from coordinating with campaigns, but the candidate can just have his lawyer form the super PAC and the communication between them will be protected by the attorneyâ"client privilege.
Now you really show you don't know what you are talking about. Attorney client privilege does not protect criminal actions participated in by both. And you as an individual have just as few limits on donating to a PAC as a corporatation, so the difference you are complaining about is all in your hea
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Certainly the individuals within the corporation are human, and as individuals they are welcome to exert those rights. The corporation is not some sort of composite organism, it is a tool created to focus diffuse stockholder wealth into a more concentrated, versatile structure that can more readily generate profit. To claim it should get human rights is quite akin to claiming that a schoolbus or apartment building should get human rights because they contain humans.
It's also worth clarifying as an inciden
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You can say that more money yields more advertising and more advertising yields more votes but as far as I've seen there has not yet been one study that showed a causative effect. I understand that it's definitely worth looking into but there are plenty of feasible confounding factors that would easily disrupt the causative effect. The GP succinctly posted the most obvious one:
Wouldn't you expect a better, winning candidate to be able to get more money as well as more votes than the other guy?
No they don't. (Score:2, Informative)
Exit polls showed that 88% of Wisconsin voters had already made up their mind before the Democrats had put forward a candidate (in May).
The Governor and friendly PACs had been advertising since before January when they knew the recall was coming.
88% of voters made their call when the spending was completely one-sided. Only after the Democratic primary put forth a candidate did they have targeted supportive advertising.
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88% of voters made their call when the spending was completely one-sided. Only after the Democratic primary put forth a candidate did they have targeted supportive advertising.
88% of people didn't vote for Governor Walker. So that "one-sided" spending didn't have a one-sided result.
The Governor and friendly PACs had been advertising since before January when they knew the recall was coming.
There are two things to note here. First, if the Democrat side really was that short-sighted, then they deserved to lose. That's more a criticism of your erroneous viewpoint than a criticism of the Democrats. For the second thing to note is that the Democrats have run a heavy campaign against Walker since he started his controversial tactics against the public unions. This wasn't a one-sided fight by a
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Exit polls showed that 88% of Wisconsin voters had already made up their mind before the Democrats had put forward a candidate (in May).
Well, when the election is a recall, it seems reasonable for people to be able to judge whether the incumbent should be recalled or not independent of who the "opponent" is. The fact that 88% of the voters had decided that no recall was necessary should tell you something about the recall effort.
Hint: you don't vote to recall just because you don't like who got elected, it is supposed to be for gross malfeasance or other significant reason. If you're just calling for another election because you didn't li
Re:It's all about the money (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's all about the money (Score:4, Insightful)
Not if the better candidate is advocating against the billionaire's personal interests (such as paying his share of taxes) while the corrupt candidate obeys his billionaire owner.
Re:It's all about the money (Score:4, Interesting)
Correlation != causation.... but only up until you demonstrate the causal connection. The fact that money leads to advertising is self-evident, and the fact that advertising influences opinions and behaviors is also very well established.
Also, then notion that a vastly more popular candidate will attract vastly more money overlooks human psychology. Other than big donors buying access, why would most donors bother giving money to a shoo-in? What attracts money to a contest (as demonstrated most recently in Wisconsin) is a deeply and relatively-evenly divided electorate.
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Actually the 10-1 figure is quite misleading. The Walker Campaign and supporting PACs spent ~$30 million, and the Barrett Campaign and supporting PACs spent ~4 million. Unions, both in Wisconsin and outside of Wisconsin spent ~$20 million in support of Barrett, but it doesn't count as Barrett spending in the 10:1 figure obviously. Still a healthy 33% advantage for Walker.
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That's why, according to noam chomsky, the business press celebrated the campaign of Obama, because it was a whole new level of slick and neo-whatever.... suuuure.
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Seems to have worked for Obama, in spite of the pre-existing campaign finance laws.
Do remember that he was the first (and so far only) Presidential candidate to forgo Federal matching funds for his campaign, since skipping those funds meant he didn't have to abide by the campaign finance limits.
Which left him spending three or four times what his opponent spent...
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Without checking for sure where the funds came from, I believe it was the 5 bucks here, 10 bucks there from everyone vs 1,000,000 bucks and more from 30 folks that helped with that. Since the Republicans cozy up to the millionaires and billionaires, they needed the campaign finance laws changed so they could get the same amount of money the Democrats were getting.
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Any source for that comment? Because I'm pretty sure it's extremely misleading.
Clooney held a fundraiser in which other people donated something like $40k a head. Now, that is a lot of money. But it's chump change compared to the amount raised by the Republican Super PACs. Romney's personal Super PAC has brought in around $52 million. Karl Rove's has brought in another $28 million. Newt Gingrich has another $24M. Santorum's got a little over $8M. There's another $30M among the smaller Republican Sup
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Without checking for sure where the funds came from
A big problem with Obama's campaign contributions is how much of it is anonymous because it is "small" donations. "5 bucks here, 10 bucks there from everyone" looks very similar to a few wealthy groups providing the same funding through small, untraced donations.
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Not really.
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Just to be clear, he's the only candidate who declined the funds for the general election. McCain also declined them for the Republican primary.
It doesn't really matter, though -- the offical spending by the campaigns is sure to be eclipsed by PACs who don't need to disclose their donors. It's
Re:It's all about the money (Score:5, Informative)
I don't believe that is accurate. This [google.com] suggests that Steve Forbes skipped on matching funds in 1996 and 2000. G. W. Bush skipped on matching funds in 2000 and 2004, which caused Howard Dean and John Kerry to forgo in 2004 as well. Over the last decade, everybody who wins, forgoes matching funds, as well as a significant number of the losers.
There are valid reasons to say Obama is doing things that are bad, but I think we have a real tendency to say "He's the first to do this!" when he's doing stuff that has been the trend for quite some time.
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Data doesn't support this statement. At least according to the Washington Post.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-wisconsin-recall-vote-outside-spending-may-have-influenced-very-few-voters--trail-mix-june-6/2012/06/06/gJQA5I6PIV_video.html [washingtonpost.com]
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Noisy and unpredictable system, not chaotic. (Score:3)
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turn off the TVA
What!! But then who would power my TV?
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Seems to me I read something that said exactly this same thing recently....
electoral tracking (Score:5, Interesting)
Andrew Tanenbaum (of Minix fame) does a good job of tracking state-by-state polling results and what they predict about the Electorial College outcome at http://electoral-vote.com/ [electoral-vote.com]
Compared to Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball (Score:2)
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Educating the people? (Score:2, Insightful)
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politicians that have been elected so far are against the idea of educating people as this will destroy the system as exist today and they will have to get real jobs
Most people, even politicians, aren't so evil that they would deliberately try to destroy the educational system. Moreover, most people don't have the foresight to do that. Part of the prob
intrade.com (Score:2)
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Enough with the intrade promos already. Intrade is good at showing the summed wisdom of amateurs who pay attention. It's pretty darned at predicting election results ... after it's already clear who is going to win. Go look at the price history for Gingrich.
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I think the real problem is that there's not enough money in Intrade, even on something big like Republican Nomination to attract the real smart guys. The price of Gingrich, for instance, shot up pretty high right before Iowa due to his status as the current Not-Romney, but really his chance of winning was never higher than a couple of percentage points.
Those of us who knew it could look at Intrade and calculate that by shorting Gingrich we might be able to make a couple thousand over a few weeks or months
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Oh yeah, and let me also predict that Intrade's numbers for the coming election will swing several points more than the pro numbers from Nate Silver and the like. That won't prove anything, but at some point the variability means that Intrade is reacting to noise too much.
The Art of Electronics (Score:2)
Art (Score:1)
More concerned (Score:2)
You now have to have a photo ID to vote, meaning for all practical purposes, those without a drivers license need an entire day to waste to run through the rabbit maze to get an approved alternative ID. Oh, and in most large, red, square states? The voting stat