All of Nate Silver's State-Level Polling Predictions Proved True 576
kkleiner writes "For the last few months, the political pundit class has been at war with NYT/FiveThirtyEight blogger Nate Silver. Joe Scarborough of MSNBC called him a "joke," while an op-ed in the LA Times accused him of running a "numbers racket." But last night, Silver triumphed: every one of his state-level presidential predictions proved true. "
Math (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.xkcd.org/1131/
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Math (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.
Re:Math (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."
Re:Math (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah... but a Hurricane [wikipedia.org] is pink and fruity... A straight drink it ain't....
Re:Math (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah... but a Hurricane [wikipedia.org] 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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, 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.
Re:Math (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: (Score:3)
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.
Re:Math (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 (Score:4, Funny)
The fourth column would be a large group of pissed off Spanish revolutionaries, just like the first, second and third columns.
Re:Math (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Math (Score:5, 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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
No, the only states that can split their electoral votes do it winner-take-all by district [wikipedia.org], 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 (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 (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".
Re:Math (Score:5, 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)
Re:Math (Score:5, 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 ...
Re:Math (Score:5, 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.
Re: (Score:3, 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 th
Re:Math (Score:5, 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 (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 [fivethirtyeight.com]
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 (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: [usatoday.com]
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.
Re:Math (Score:5, 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 (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.
Re:Math (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 (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: (Score:3)
Re:Math (Score:5, 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 (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 [princeton.edu] goes into all of the gory details of their model, which is pretty cool...]
Re:Math (Score:4, 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.
Re:Math (Score:4, 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 (Score:5, 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 (Score:5, 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 (Score:4, 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 (Score:5, Funny)
The fantastic, insightful website http://natesilverwrong/ [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 (Score:4, Informative)
The fantastic, insightful website http://natesilverwrong/ [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 [natesilverwrong.com]. Guess someone was embarrassed. The cache [googleusercontent.com] still exists, though the site seemed to be completely devoid of content anyhow.
But when? (Score:5, 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? (Score:5, 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.
Pundits aren't there to provide accurate data. (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. (Score:4, 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:But when? (Score:5, 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!
Re:But when? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
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.
Seriously... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Seriously... (Score:5, Informative)
Just to be clear, these are statistics. (Score:5, 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: (Score:3)
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.
Not how statistics works (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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not how statistics works (Score:5, Funny)
That's only true for dusty old fuddy-duddy classical Newtonian statistics. These days quantum statistics is where it's at. Everyone knows that reading poll results can fundamentally alter data, even data that wasn't tabulated for that specific poll. (Something to do with bell curve entanglement and the spin/charm of pundits - gets kind of technical at that point.) Why just yesterday I glanced at a USA Today that someone had left behind on the subway, saw the usual 57-color pie chart about whether readers thought giraffes tasted great or were less filling, and next thing I knew the first president of the USA was George Washington instead of Herbert Whistlefjord.
Re: (Score:3)
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 [princeton.edu] 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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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: (Score:3)
Yes, it does work like that.
Nate Silver made more than a hundred predictions at around 80% confidence. 100% of those predictions came true. Therefore he is undercalibrated.
Unless you are saying he made one prediction, that the polls were not biased in favor of democracts, and gave this prediction 80% confidence... in which case, yes, that's a fair point.
Re:Not how statistics works (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.
Why Nate? (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.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Why Nate? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
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."
Just looked at the real world and called it (Score:3)
Some of the things people said about him were nuttier than that. This [examiner.com] 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 [unskewedpolls.com] 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 (Score:4, 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.
Congratulations Nate! (Score:4, 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 (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.
Re: (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 wa
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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 righ
Re:Good for him (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?
Re:Good for him (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Jesus Fucking Christ ran in 2000? How did he not split the evangelical vote?
Re:Good for him (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Good for him (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes! Given what a disaster Little Bush turned out to be it Al Gore would probably have been a significant improvement.
Re:Good for him (Score:5, 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 [google.com]
Re:Good for him (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:Good for him (Score:4, Interesting)
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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 (Score:4, 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.
Re:Good for him (Score:4, 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 (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!
Re:Good for him (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.
Re:Good for him (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (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 (Score:5, 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.
Re:Good for him (Score:4, 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.
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Source: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0876793.html [infoplease.com]
That's half a million voters whose votes basically did not count, and THAT is why the electoral college system is a problem.
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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 (Score:4, 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 (Score:4, 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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How is this NOT representative?
Because the people that voted for Obama are not real Americans. [politico.com]
Re:Good for him (Score:5, 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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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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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 s
Re:Good for him (Score:4, 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.
Re:All? (Score:4, Informative)
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About 2-3 days before the election he switched Florida from light pink to light blue.
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Then they should get used to being wrong.
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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.