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Well the aggregators could adjust the polls for their own turnout estimates.
But, it's not a systematic error, to my way of thinking. You're asking the pollsters to know the unknowable.
I meant to do this yesterday but I have way too many windows open and never got back to it.
This is my prediction for the 2012 presidential election:
Romney - 315
Obama - 223
I've been predicting a Romney win for months and feel increasingly confident that he'll win. I know the polling is slightly adverse for him right now, but I just can't see Obama overcoming all of the headwinds he faces, from the economy to unemployment to the enthusiasm gap.
(By the way, I know my map is the same as Michael Barone's. I thought about changing a state or two just to be different, but I really don't want to.)
So if Nate said something like OBama has roughly a 75 to 85% chance of winning the election based on the polls he would deserve a pat on the back instead of deserving a beating in a back alley?
Nate can explain his model a thousand times, and some people are going to think that that 83.7% means that Obama is going to win 83.7% of the vote, rather than winning 837 out of 1000 elections where the data are where they are at this point. Of course the micro-precision is to an extent a gimmick, but it's also what his computer model projects. Should he then change that number just to please people who don't understand what he's doing?
EDIT:
I guarantee you some people will wake up Wednesday, if Obama wins with 50.1% of the vote to 49.9%, and say "Hah! That fanboy Nate Silver said it would be 83 to 17!"
Exactly. As if the fault there lies with Nate, rather than with people too clueless (or too lazy, or too ideologically blind, or all of the above) even to grasp what he's patiently explained over and over again.
It's over-precise to be sure, but I doubt it's stupid. Silver demonstrated back in his PECOTA days that he's got a good feel for the kind of #### that the sophisticated-but-not-too-sophisticated fan loves to see (90th percentiles! breakout rates! collapse rates!). It's eye candy really, but from my standpoint it's an educational opportunity for how to present lots of numbers in a way that doesn't make the target audience's eyes glaze over.
There's got to be some way to make fun of the typo here.
If I were to lower myself to predicting elections instead of baseball stats, the way I'd do it is show an electoral map and the projected EC totals for each candidate, and leave the percentages off entirely.
Time. You can do what I did for half a morning, look up the poll numbers in 50 states, put them in a spreadsheet, and run the math yourself. If you have few hours. Or you could just take a few seconds, look at his site, and see pretty much the same conclusion.
Now what value does he add over RCP? Nothing that I can see. As I compared earlier, the only difference is that Nate's model has Virgina going democrat and RCP has the state going republican by a margin of 0.1 percent. So there's a 50/50 shot that if another poll is done in Virginia, all else being equal, the two models will be saying the exact same thing. As it is, Virginia by itself doesn't come close to swaying the election.
One difference though is that RCP is using a simple average of polls, and Nate has all the black boxy adjustments. If you get pretty much the same result, I prefer the simpler method, sort of like some of the recent articles about using FIP or even kwERA (just strikeouts and walks) instead of some complex ERA estimator like SIERA.
It's not just the simplicity though. If a specific poll has shown a bias in one direction in the past, don't you think the people who run that poll will see it and try to correct it? Probably more likely now than in the past, as poll aggregating has become more prevalent (which of course Nate is responsible for a lot of that.) Whatever adjustments worked 4 years ago may not work today.
Even better, knowing about significant digits could help him not fail lab courses in college. Seriously, this is basic stuff in statistics, he should know better.
Taleb would probably still think that he was a fool though.
At some point, I'm hoping McCoy will explain how an LV screen projecting 96 percent turnout isn't really an LV screen projecting 96 percent turnout.
If you talk to 1,000 RV and then pass through 960 of them as LV, then you're projecting a 96 percent turnout. This is basic math.
I think of 538 as an experiment. We're trying to find out if we have enough data to accurately predict election results based solely on the poll data. What's the harm in trying?
Excellent point - in addition to the lack of available generators, difficulty in turning a gas station to generator power, and difficulty in getting a generator to a site, you'd also have ot pay some pretty significant up-front cost that a gas station owner likely wouldn't just have lying around. And then there's the fact that your window would only be a few days - as soon as the city powers up your competitors your generator is useless.
But you are then also asking the aggregators to know the unknowable as well. The aggregators are taking the data as supplied by the polls to come up with a number that incorporates all of the polls. If the polls make the wrong assumptions then the aggregators make those same wrong assumptions. Thus if the aggregators get it wrong, and they are all pointing to an Obama win, that means the majority of the polls got it wrong. It isn't like the aggregators are saying Obama is going to win while the majority of polls are saying Romney is going to win.
It might very well be a coin toss but it is a coin toss that almost all of the polls say Obama is going to win. That is something that is going to get picked up on by the aggregators and it is also why the aggregators are even more important during close elections like this one. People think this election is a toss up and in all probability it is not.
I see what you did to distort the issue. Going along with that, though, democracy is as much a natural right (as nebulous as that is) as self-defense if we see democracy as having a right to a say in one's destiny. Actually, they become inextricably intertwined. Thus it was so, even at the tribal level.
Intrade almost certainly is influenced by the polling aggregators. Maybe Silver could build a model for it.
The biggest difference is that on the page that 95% of its visitors likely look at, RCP's average reflects only the national polls. They may wind up in roughly the same place, but they're not really the same thing at all.
So how would you handle a state where the two candidates are seperated by a point or less? This is what Nate is doing. He's taking hard to read states and information and crunching the numbers to come up with a probability of the candidate winning the state and the whole enchilada.
No harm in trying. It just makes you look silly to evince false precision while you're trying to figure it out.
Here are the differences between your map and Silver's, followed by the RCP poll margins:
CO D+1.0
IA D+2.0
NH D+1.8
OH D+2.9
PA D+4.6
WI D+4.6
If that happens it pretty much means the polls are too f***ed to be useful in any semi-close state.
Not really. We prevent a 16-y.o. from voting, but he still has the right to kill an assailant in self-defense.
The vast, vast majority of societies in history have not been "one-man one-vote" democracies, yet they still, almost universally, recognized the right of self-defense.
The only people who think of it as false precision are the people who know the number isn't really precise while the people who think it is precise are too stupid (about math and probability) to grasp a less precise number.
Just like elections, and turnout are likely influenced by polls. We've got a big observer effect going on.
See, I think he only looks silly if it turns out he's wrong. Once that happens, feel free to heap abuse on him. But in the last couple elections, he's been pretty close.
And you don't know it's false precision. You're just asserting that it is.
They're too stupid to understand "likely Obama victory"?
Christie just said that he is allowing early voting this weekend due to the crisis.
Also, he said that the real problem in northern NJ is that too many of those gas stations aren't equipped to handle a generator. He said the ones that are equipped, are getting generator help, not sure if that's state or federal.
So the supply indeed is here, and the issue isn't having enough generators as much as stations having the current capability to have one brought in, if I understood it all correctly.
The topline poll numbers might be wrong, but that doesn't mean the polls were useless. People laugh at "poll truthers," but all they do is take a set of polls and play with the party ID split and/or the turnout rate.
Beyond that, in four of the above states, the polling is within the margin of error. If Nate feels confident enough to make projections based on such thin polling margins, then he shouldn't complain about bad polling data afterward, especially if an Obama +1.0 poll turns into a Romney +1.0 victory.
I.e. change the results so the polls show what you want them to show.
How is that any different than pollsters claiming a 96 percent LV screen is representative of the entire electorate?
Yes. Hell, I'm too stupid to grasp what that would actually means.
They're reporting the results of the polls. You're reporting what you think the results of the polls should have been. Maybe the polls really are wrong, but they're clearly different approaches.
Are they coming up with that screen before or after their model spit out the results?
So "poll truthers" are dumb to theorize that the 2012 electorate will be a couple points less Dem than 2008, but it's OK for pollsters to claim there will be 96 percent turnout despite turnout in 2008 being ~72 percent? Who's taking the bigger statistical leap here?
Yes
Most of them don't screen by party. They screen based on race, age, and gender.
I didn't call anyone dumb. You asked how what the pollsters were doing was different from what you're doing. The answer is: they're asking people who they're going to vote for and if they're going to vote, and then basing their reports on that. And you're regressing the answers much more heavily, based on historical results. Do you not see how there's a fundamental difference in your approaches?
There's not a standard LV screen. For PPP, their entire LV screen is the statement, "If you don't plan to vote, please hang up now." For Gallup, it's much more intricate.
I have a hard time believing that you're actually so dense and so hyper-partisan that you can't/won't understand why 96% of poll respondents a few days before an election are labeled as likely voters. If it's not party ID it's LV screens or biased polling or whatever, anything to argue that Romney is actually leading the race. Never mind that the reason that Obama might be outperforming fundamentals is that Romney is a terrible candidate running on a terrible platform of more money for the rich, less help for the poor, more wars in the Middle East, interference in women's healthcare, and regression in social progress. If the fundamentals were neutral for Obama he would be crushing Romney because the right wouldn't be able to use scary economic doom-saying to hide how their platform is crap for the majority of Americans.
I know. I used your comment as a jumping-off point for a more general reply. "Poll truthers" have been a hot topic here, as evidenced by other replies.
No. If a pollster asks 1,000 RV if they plan to vote and 96 percent of them say yes, and the pollster knows that 2008's very high turnout was only ~72 percent, then the pollster is taking a huge leap of faith. Again, there's a big difference between a poll being accurate for those specific people and pretending that the sample is representative of the entire electorate.
No matter how you slice it, an LV screen that passes 96 percent of RV respondents is projecting a 96 percent turnout rate.
You do realize that Silver runs hundreds of thousands of (I assume Monte Carlo method) election simulations, right?
That's why his numbers have significant digits.
He's not saying that someone is going to win a fraction of an elector seat. He's saying that the "average" result is xx.x% or xxx.x EV.
I really thought that was obvious for anyone that paid even a small amount of attention to what Silver says/does.
I'm guessing Joe said this. 96% LV screen does not mean there will be a 96% turnout or even that the poll thinks there will be a 96% turnout. It is either beyond stupid to think that or Joe trolling again which is why I ignore his posts.
Every single person who takes part in a poll is a data point.
Is there a math argument in there or just a general rant?
For about the tenth time, the only way a poll with an LV screen that passes 96 percent of RV through as LV is representative of the entire electorate is if the pollster is projecting 96 percent turnout.
Please explain the math of a 96 percent LV screen not translating into 96 percent turnout.
You can't be this dense.
He can run a billion simulations of a coin flip, and he won't get exactly 50%, but it's not particularly useful to publish a number to five decimal places.
Yes, yes he can.
Obama wins the popular vote by 2-4 points and the Electoral College with 304-307 votes.
I determined the EC number through the scientific means of "looking at FiveThirtyEight, which currently says 305.3, and adding an arbitrary two-vote margin." I am aware that the votes come in bigger chunks than that, but this was as much work as I was willing to do.
Oh! Also, I think the voter turnout will be higher than 2008 (due to more vote-by-mail possibilities), but probably not 96%.
Please explain how a poll with a 96 percent LV rate is representative of the entire electorate when turnout is only ~72 percent. Thanks in advance.
That was a general rant. The math argument is what McCoy keeps saying, that a few days before the election not many RVs who aren't going to be LVs are responding to polls. The fact that it's a poll call right before the election IS AN LV SCREEN IN ITSELF! Nobody is claiming that the poll respondents who make it through the screen as LVs are 96% of registered voters, everyone who bothers to think about it knows that the percentage is irrelevant because of the damned obvious underlying factor of the election being days away.
You know this though, you have to know. You're just ignoring it because you can use horribly faulty logic to twist it into another claim of poll bias and ignore the fact that your candidate is losing.
I like this post!
If he said that heads came up 499,998,992 times out of a billion flips, is it wrong to say that heads came up 49.9998992% of the time?
In Silver's simulations, there are LOTS of different results (not a coin flip) about the amount of EV.
If he runs a million simulations, is it better to list all million results, or group them together (175,392 of them had Obama winning 302 EV, 169,232 of them had Romney winning 271 EV, etc), or can he list the average/median/whatever of the entire set?
And if 80.3% of those simulations have Obama with 270+ EV votes, is it wrong to say that (based on these simulations) Obama has n 80.3% chance of winning the election?
If the whole "simulation" thing bothers you, then why even visit/care about Silver's results?
And didn't Gallup wind up projecting an 82% white electorate based on that more intricate screen? That seems pretty loopy to me.
If the number is far enough from 50% I'd think a close look at the coin might be in order.
He does something like that in a sidebar.
Anyone else read his book yet?
This is another rant without any math. I agree that an LV is much more likely to participate in a poll than an RV, but the idea that only LV are answering their phones right now is silly. With ~28 percent of RV not voting, the pollsters should be getting more hang-ups or non-responses than they seem to be getting.
A note on RCP. They have a mostly arbitrary, possibly somewhat partisan poll screening method that gives them a rightward lean in their averages compared to Pollster, TPM, and 538. They don't include about 25% of publicly released polls, and their selection methods appear entirely subjective. I think that by making use of every existing poll not released by a campaign, the other poll averages are better options. If there were an RCP that handled all polls equally, I'd be interested to see how it compared to the more complex aggregation models at 538 and Pollster.
Plant your flag. Which is it: voting or democracy. They are not coextensive. Just because you cannot vote doesn't mean you can't have rights. Moreover, someone who can vote can be voting on your behalf. You know, like parents voting in the interest of their children. Not only is your standard a floating one, it doesn't comport with an avowed (I believe) interest in the inviolability of the family, and of individuals as their rights relate to the family. Modern democracy isn't the only kind that ever existed, and tribal comminities are heavily democratic.
And simply because self-defense with guns is not exactly on par with other rights doesn't diminish or negate those other rights. They don't have to be the same to have value, value essential to the vibrancy of a community.
He does, but it's a bar graph without any detailed numbers, so it only gives a feel of where the results landed.
I'd love it if he released his full set of results in a spreadsheet/text file. I don't need to see his black box calculations, but the list of all million random runs (including state-by-state results that lead to the EV totals) would be interesting (for me) to pour over.
16-year olds can own guns in the US?
Yikes.
That's why his numbers have significant digits.
He's not saying that someone is going to win a fraction of an elector seat. He's saying that the "average" result is xx.x% or xxx.x EV.
I really thought that was obvious for anyone that paid even a small amount of attention to what Silver says/does.
You can run hundreds of millions of Monte Carlo simulations, but that doesn't make your results and more accurate than the underlying data they are drawn from.
MBS and ABS CDOs that were rated AAA based on 100,000 Monte Carlo simulations (sometimes without a single loss in the 100,000 runs), ended up worthless b/c the underlying assumptions (no worse than 0% housing appreciation) were off by about -30%.
If you have a sample size of a few dozen elections, you can't get to even one decimal point of precision.
I wonder what he'd say if someone asked?
The only major polls not being used by RCP are polls that didn't exist in 2008 or 2010 (or even, in RAND's case, in June 2012).
Because if Romney loses the long knives will be out for some RINOs to purge. It just won't occur to the party faithful that they lost because a majority disagreed with them.
But you never know how they vote, so that data is useless. All we have as real data is actual vote totals vs. projected vote totals for the X number of elections that are still relevant.
Yikes.
Yes. In most states, they can not purchase them, but can own them if gifted to them (usually by their parents).
I bet more 16-year olds kill people with cars than guns.
It's really funny that, on a site like this, the concept of challenging assumptions is mocked as outlandish and even "stupid."
And we can compare projected to real which is what we also do in sabermetrics. Thus the data isn't useless. Are you trying to argue that there is no correlation between polling data and election numbers?
What's corresponds with the sophisticate urbanite to "provincial"?
If you are from a big city, that might seem scary, but where I'm from--the rural south--many boys get their first shotgun when they are about 8.
Man, doesn't anyone ever get tired flagellating those polls?
So you're saying that Nate Silver's predictions could be wrong because of the data (polls) that he gets might be wrong?
Isn't that the start of this whole argument in the beginning, that Silver's excuse of "bad data" was a cop-out?
Yet here, you're saying that it is an excuse.
And simply because self-defense with guns is not exactly on par with other rights doesn't diminish or negate those other rights. They don't have to be the same to have value, value essential to the vibrancy of a community.
I'm sorry, I don't get your question/complaint.
All I said is that certain rights are "natural rights" that everyone, everywhere has, and any law that restricts them is unjust (e.g. self-defense, freedom of speech, freedom of worship, property ownership). Voting/democracy is not one of those rights. A monarchy can be a completely legitimate form of gov't.
I simply used the example of the 16 y.o. to show that even a highly free democracy restricts voting rights, while we do not restrict the rights to speech, religion, self-defense, etc.
Nah, this site just has a different set of sacred cows. Try challenging OBP or something and see how far you get.
I'm a Canadian, so the whole idea of teenagers with guns scares the crap out of me.
Out of all demographic age groups, teenaged boys seem the least mentally stable of them all.
With hormones, peer pressure, sexual awakening, and educational stress, giving those guys a gun seems like a bad idea.
I remember being a teenager. I wasn't the most rational person...
So you're saying that Nate Silver's predictions could be wrong because of the data (polls) that he gets might be wrong?
Isn't that the start of this whole argument in the beginning, that Silver's excuse of "bad data" was a cop-out?
Yet here, you're saying that it is an excuse.
I'm not criticizing Silver for potentially being wrong; the nature of the beast is that any prediction is only an educated guess in a close election.
All I'm criticizing is the overly false precision he is claiming (implicitly or explicitly) when he's working from a data sample of 4 or 5 Presidential elections. There's just no way to get better than 50:50, likely, highly-likely, with that sort of base data.
Probably by orders of magnitude.
Interestingly, the same pollster polling Virginia during the same time frame had 89% of RV pass the LV screen. Basically, I have no idea what any of this is supposed to mean.
That's why his numbers have significant digits.
He's not saying that someone is going to win a fraction of an elector seat. He's saying that the "average" result is xx.x% or xxx.x EV.
My whole ####### point is that those are not significant digits, they're noise. And he's publishing them, no error bars in sight. That's creating an impression of precision that simply isn't there.
In both cases it was Romney +1.
Yikes.
I realize it's not the same thing, but BITD half the 8 year olds on my block in DC owned "Daisy / Red Ryder" BB guns that were advertised on the back cover of comic books. They're not deadly or anything, but they can sure put some kid's eye out. They still make them, and I have no idea whether or not gun laws apply to them, but they sure didn't back then.
Unless we're talking about turnout, in which case using polls with a 96 percent LV rate (compared to ~72 percent turnout) is perfectly acceptable.
I also don't think kids should be driving at 16, either.
Thanks; perfect example of what we've been discussing: An 8-point Obama RV lead becomes a 3-point LV lead, and that's with turnout still projected to be ~5 points higher than 2008.
And all I'm saying is that you are wrong. And I've explained why you're wrong. They are either both natural rights or neither is. And, moreover, they are related. Insisting on a myopic, horse-blinders view of "democracy" as only having a political sense allows you to evade seeing this connection. Voting (or democracy) has larger philosophical import. What you're really talking about is having a say in your existential condition. If that isn't a natural right, there are none (well, they are none-but). That's the first step in a bedrock social contract. And that exists even in monarchies or dictatorships.
So I've heard.
Correct. We can compare them, and assess a correlation. My only point is that with a working sample of 4 or 5 elections, maybe 20 if you bring in Gubernatorial and Senatorial races, the correlation just can't be that strong.
Any estimate of likelihood is going to have a huge error bar around it, maybe +/- 10% (i.e. a 65% likelihood means somewhere between 55 and 75%). So, to express that in decimals is simply ridiculous and misleading.
The criticisms I've seen of those analyses seem to hinge on very personal and anecdotal views of turnout. We'll see on Tuesday, but my bet is that the pollsters know what they are doing.
Personally, I think this is one of the least important elections of my lifetime. The power of the executive is generally overstated, and both of these guys seem like pragmatists who know how to pander to their base but govern largely from the center.
Listen, strange women lyin' in ponds distributin' swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
That's cloud talk. All those rights are restricted.
Exactly. Kings and tyrants have been known to be deposed.
Don't worry, not knowing what you are talking about hasn't stopped people before.
There's a major difference between "participating in a poll" and "answering the phone." Are you really claiming that almost 100 percent of the people who aren't going to vote have been not answering the phone for the past three months?
Interestingly, the same pollster polling Virginia during the same time frame had 89% of RV pass the LV screen. Basically, I have no idea what any of this is supposed to mean.
Ispos wasn't also conducting these polls 3 months ago so we can't compare them to past numbers. These are also online polls which will result in lower LV numbers.
I have no idea what "having a say" means.
All I'm talking about is the explicit form of gov't. Living in a representative democracy is not a natural right.
When people talk about human rights violations in China, they're almost universally talking about forced abortions, and religious persecution, and displacement of peasants from their land, not the lack of representative democracy.
Of course, the other point is that it's still an Obama lead, and in line with his lead in most other polls of LV. Including the ones that you say are passing too many of the respondents.
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