NYT Nate Silver Doubles Down: 75% Chance Obama Wins

Baba Booey · Nov 2, 2012

is there anything jopatmc cannot do? this guy sounds like a real superstar. i mean, it's not arrogance if you really are that good at everything.

were you also in the special forces, jopatmc?

jopatmc · Nov 2, 2012

mc mark said: ↑

The poster in question stated yesterday his only objective is to troll the board. He is not interested in honest discussion.

The best course of action is to ignore him until he leaves next week.
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no, you stated that. I just let you get away with it.

Who is going to win this election mc mark?

jopatmc · Nov 2, 2012

qwerty said: ↑

Why is that so difficult to understand?

Silver gives Obama an 80% chance of winning Ohio, and therefore, essentially an 80% chance of winning the election. He gives Romney a 20% chance of winning Ohio, and essentially a 20% chance of winning the election. Yes, "if Romney takes one state," Obama's odds go down, but the chances of Romney taking that one state are low themselves. That's not an out. That's statistics.

It's the equivalent of the Rockets having James Harden at the free throw line with 1 second left, down by 1. He is a good free throw shooter, and has an 80% chance of making them. If so, the Rockets have a 97% chance of winning the game, barring a last second miracle for the other team. If he misses them, the other team has a 97% chance of winning the game barring a last second miracle for the Rockets. Yes, either could happen, but the odds are in the Rockets' favor when you look at Harden's free throw percentage.

Now, I get that you are arguing Silver's model is wrong, and the shooter the Rockets have at the free throw line is not nearly as good a free throw shooter as Harden. (Since this is a make believe scenario not based in reality, and we want a poor free throw shooter for this example, let's just use... oh, I don't know... Dwight Howard.) Now the Rockets need two free throws from Dwight Howard to win the game. If he makes them both, they almost certainly will win. If he doesn't, they will almost certainly lose. But since he is such a terrible free throw shooter, his odds of making the free throws and the Rockets' odds of winning both go down together. They are directly related.

Is Silver's model correct or wrong? That's up for people to debate. But comments like the one above claiming that Silver has created some sort of "out" show a general inclination to avoid actual analysis and understanding.
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qwerty,

who is going to win this election?

Baba Booey · Nov 2, 2012

Obama is going to win and you are going to leave, and there will be much rejoicing.

Buck Turgidson · Nov 2, 2012

Baba Booey said: ↑

is there anything jopatmc cannot do? this guy sounds like a real superstar. i mean, it's not arrogance if you really are that good at everything.

were you also in the special forces, jopatmc?
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<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/WK_zuizyWwU" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

jopatmc · Nov 2, 2012

Baba Booey said: ↑

is there anything jopatmc cannot do? this guy sounds like a real superstar. i mean, it's not arrogance if you really are that good at everything.

were you also in the special forces, jopatmc?
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Here's arrogance

<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/7EjqnX51lyM" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

gifford1967 · Nov 2, 2012

jopatmc said: ↑

Here's arrogance

<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/7EjqnX51lyM" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
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Hmm. Still ignoring this-

Major said: ↑

No, that's really not what you said. Or more accurately, that's only what you said after you were shown to be wrong when his model started ticking upwards less than 12 hours after your initial prediction. Here's what you actually said:

Oct 30, 11:33am:

Frankly, I'll be shocked if his predictor model is still showing Obama at greater than 60% on election day. I am predicting he winds down Obama's chances to close to 50% or he may even flip and have Mitt at over 50% come election day.

Oct 30, 11:39am:

We will see. I am predicting he winds down to close to 50/50 on election day.

Oct 30, 11:56am:

The point of this thread was discussing Nate and the accuracy if his predictor model. I have stated I am predicting he winds down his model to reflect a much closer election. I have stated if his model is over 60% Obama on election day, I'll be shocked. I have stated that he will wind down to close to 50/50 or may even wind down to favor Mitt over 50%. So, from all that you can deduce that I am predicting that Nate will wind down his predictor to either favor Mitt over 50% or to favor Obama less than 60%, somewhere in that range. And I'm also predicting Mitt wins the election and takes over 300 electoral votes.

Notice no caveats there. It wasn't until Oct 31, 6:38am - after Silver's model started ticking upwards again, that you added your new little caveat:

Yeah, Silver is the latest and the greatest. I'm predicting he winds down his predictor model to close to 50/50 come election day or he'll be so way off that he'll go back and make excuses for his model saying the polls that went into it were off because of the "huge republican turnout" of this election that was an "anomaly".

We already know you don't understand polls or elections, but now you've added that you don't even understand your own posting history, or maybe the fact that your posts are timestamped.
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I wonder why.

qwerty · Nov 2, 2012

jopatmc said: ↑

qwerty,

who is going to win this election?
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I'm not in the business of making grand statements and predictions. You have that market cornered.

I do have the ability to analyze data that I am given and understand what conclusions it is making. This has nothing to do with a value judgment about the quality of the data. I pretty overtly stated that the credibility you give to Silver's model has very little to do with whether his percentages make sense.

However, you do seem to like making accusations of spin. Where did I spin? I asked you already but you seemed to answer my question with an irrelevant question. And you still haven't addressed the original point about how Silver's percentages don't involve a nefarious "out."

Let me answer your question (which itself was an answer to my question, while simultaneously trying to divert attention from my original question) with another question that is as relevant to the discussion as yours was:

What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?

GladiatoRowdy · Nov 2, 2012

qwerty said: ↑

What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?
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Let me answer your question with a question...

Is that an African or a European swallow?

jopatmc · Nov 2, 2012

I will be shocked at the blatent ignorance of a man that is supposedly so smart if he doesn't tick is predictor down to 50/50.

Haven't come off that.

I'll still be shocked at his willful, blatent ignorance.

GladiatoRowdy · Nov 2, 2012

jopatmc said: ↑

I will be shocked at the blatent ignorance of a man that is supposedly so smart if he doesn't tick is predictor down to 50/50.

Haven't come off that.

I'll still be shocked at his willful, blatent ignorance.
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The funny part about this is YOUR willful, blatant ignorance. It will be even funnier when Romney is forced to concede before 11 p.m. EST Tuesday night.

RocketMan Tex · Nov 2, 2012

jopatmc said: ↑

I will be shocked at the blatent ignorance of a man that is supposedly so smart if he doesn't tick is predictor down to 50/50.

Haven't come off that.

I'll still be shocked at his willful, blatent ignorance.
Click to expand...

I'll be shocked if you've ever heard of spellcheck! :grin:

jopatmc · Nov 2, 2012

RocketMan Tex said: ↑

I'll be shocked if you've ever heard of spellcheck! :grin:
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12t 8eally d4esn't matte8 how y4u spell 12t. 4bama 12s s4 d4ne.

A_3PO · Nov 2, 2012

jopatmc said: ↑

I will be shocked at the blatent ignorance of a man that is supposedly so smart if he doesn't tick is predictor down to 50/50.

Haven't come off that.

I'll still be shocked at his willful, blatent ignorance.
Click to expand...

Guys, it's official now that he's trolling. Have fun jopat.

B-Bob · Nov 2, 2012

Buck Turgidson said: ↑

(Tiger Woods song)
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Sometimes a youtube can make my day, make my day, make my day.

Buck Turgidson · Nov 2, 2012

B-Bob said: ↑

Sometimes a youtube can make my day, make my day, make my day.
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Bob, it ain't braggin' if it's true.

Nolen · Nov 2, 2012

Hey, Nate wrote this post just for you. No, seriously.

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytime...simple-case-for-saying-obama-is-the-favorite/

(follow the link to see all the graphs.)

Nov. 1: The Simple Case for Saying Obama Is the Favorite
By NATE SILVER

If you are following some of the same people that I do on Twitter, you may have noticed some pushback about our contention that Barack Obama is a favorite (and certainly not a lock) to be re-elected. I haven’t come across too many analyses suggesting that Mitt Romney is the favorite. (There are exceptions.) But there are plenty of people who say that the race is a “tossup.”

What I find confounding about this is that the argument we’re making is exceedingly simple. Here it is:

Obama’s ahead in Ohio.
A somewhat-more-complicated version:

Mr. Obama is leading in the polls of Ohio and other states that would suffice for him to win 270 electoral votes, and by a margin that has historically translated into victory a fairly high percentage of the time.
The argument that Mr. Obama isn’t the favorite is the one that requires more finesse. If you take the polls at face value, then the popular vote might be a tossup, but the Electoral College favors Mr. Obama.

So you have to make some case for why the polls shouldn’t be taken at face value.

Some argue that the polls are systematically biased against Republicans. This might qualify as a simple argument had it been true on a consistent basis historically, but it hasn’t been: instead, there have been some years when the polls overestimated how well the Democrat would do, and about as many where the same was true for the Republican. I’m sympathetic to the notion that the polls could be biased, statistically speaking, meaning that they will all miss in the same direction. The FiveThirtyEight forecast explicitly accounts for the possibility that the polls are biased toward Mr. Obama — but it also accounts for the chance that the polls could be systematically biased against him.

Others argue that undecided voters tend to break against the incumbent, in this case Mr. Obama. But this has also not really been true in recent elections. In some states, also, Mr. Obama is at 50 percent of the vote in the polling average, or close to it, meaning that he wouldn’t need very many undecided voters to win.

A third argument is that Mr. Romney has the momentum in the polls: whether or not he would win an election today, the argument goes, he is on a favorable trajectory that will allow him to win on Tuesday.

This may be the worst of the arguments, in my view. It is contradicted by the evidence, simply put.

In the table below, I’ve listed the polling averages in the most competitive states, and in the national polls, across several different periods.

First are all polls from June 1, the approximate start of the general-election campaign, until the start of the party conventions.

Next are the polls between the conventions and the first debate in Denver in early October.

Finally are the polls since that first debate in Denver. It’s been roughly 30 days since then. If Mr. Romney has the momentum in the polls, then this should imply that his polls are continuing to get better: that they were a little better this week than last week, and a bit better last week than the week before. So these polls are further broken down into three different periods of about 10 days each, based on when the poll was conducted.

What type of polling average is this, by the way? About the simplest possible one: I’ve just averaged together all the polls of likely voters in the FiveThirtyEight database, applying no other weighting or “secret sauce.”

If you evaluate the polls in this way, there is not much evidence of “momentum” toward Mr. Romney. Instead, the case that the polls have moved slightly toward Mr. Obama is stronger.

In 9 of the 11 battleground states, Mr. Obama’s polls have been better over the past 10 days than they were immediately after the Denver debate. The same is true for the national polls, whether or not tracking polls (which otherwise dominate the average) are included.

In the swing states, in fact, Mr. Obama’s polls now look very close to where they were before the conventions and the debates. Mr. Obama led by an average of 2.3 percentage points in Ohio in all likely voter polls conducted between June 1 and the debates; he’s led by an average of 2.4 points in Ohio polls conducted over the past 10 days. He trailed by an average of 0.5 percentage points in Florida before the conventions; he’s trailed by an average of 0.2 percentage point in the most recent Florida polls.

Mr. Obama’s polls are worse than they were in the period in between the conventions and the debates. But they’re better than they were immediately after Denver; he’s gained back one percentage point, or perhaps a point-and-a-half, of what he lost.

What about the national polls? Aren’t those still worse for Mr. Obama than they were before the conventions?

Actually, that isn’t so clear. The one “trick” I’ve played is to look only at polls of likely voters. Mr. Obama’s national polls looked superficially better before the conventions because many of them were polls of registered voters instead, which do tend to show more favorable results for Democrats. (You’re welcome to say that polls of registered voters have a Democratic bias.) We alerted you in August to the prospect that there was a “gap” between the state polls and the national polls, which was concealed by the fact that many of the national polls at that time were reporting registered-voter results, while most of the state polls were using likely voter numbers all along. However, our method adjusted for the tendency of registered-voter polls to be biased toward Democrats by shifting them in Mr. Romney’s direction. Some of what is perceived as “momentum” toward Mr. Romney is in fact a fairly predictable consequence of the national polls having flipped over to applying likely voter screens at various points between August and October.

But now we’re getting into all these complications! All these details!

I am aware — and you should be too — of the possibility that adding complexity to a model can make it worse. The technical term for this is “overfitting”: that by adding different layers to a model, you may make it too rigid, molding it such that it perfectly “predicts” the past, but is incompetent at forecasting the future. I think there is a place for complexity — the universe is a complicated thing — but it needs to be applied with the knowledge that our ability to understand it is constrained by our human shortcomings.

This critique fails, however, since the simplest analysis of the polls would argue that Mr. Obama is winning. He’s been ahead in the vast majority of polls in Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and all the other states where the Democrat normally wins. These states add up to more than 270 electoral votes. It isn’t complicated. To argue that Mr. Romney is ahead, or that the election is a “tossup,” requires that you disbelieve the polls, or that you engage in some complicated interpretation of them. The FiveThirtyEight model represents a complicated analysis of the polls, but simplicity is on its side, in this case.

Thursday’s Polls

The polls published on Thursday ought not to have done much to change your view of the race. The national polls showed little overall trend toward either Mr. Obama or Mr. Romney, but they also had Mr. Obama just slightly ahead, on average, in contrast to what we were seeing immediately after Denver.
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ROXTXIA · Nov 2, 2012

jopatmc said: ↑

I will be shocked at the blatent ignorance of a man that is supposedly so smart if he doesn't tick is predictor down to 50/50.

Haven't come off that.

I'll still be shocked at his willful, blatent ignorance.
Click to expand...

Blatant. Not "blatent".

Damn.

Nook · Nov 2, 2012

jopatmc said: ↑

I will be shocked at the blatent ignorance of a man that is supposedly so smart if he doesn't tick is predictor down to 50/50.

Haven't come off that.

I'll still be shocked at his willful, blatent ignorance.
Click to expand...

Speaking on blatant ignorance....

I can see you in a week still posting after Obama is reelected and claiming you never said Romney would win or that the election was sabotaged. Regardless please have a CT Scan of your brain, I think you have a tumor or growth in there.. Serious stuff..

B-Bob · Nov 2, 2012

ROXTXIA said: ↑

Blatant. Not "blatent".

Damn.
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jopa is an expert at statistics, as he said -- not spelling. That's why I for one believe him when he says 538 is bunk! Becaus of statesticles!

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NYT Nate Silver Doubles Down: 75% Chance Obama Wins

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