Nate Silver( smart ppl are trouble!)

[rivll]

http://news.yahoo.com/people-cant-math-mad-nate-silver-134213248.html
I couldn't resist posting this as a tag on to a post Mike sent a few days ago about the election
My math isn't great so I really didn't follow it but this article clarifies it a bit for me and it is very funny to me to see how many ppl don't get it and blame the messenger.
What is wrong with saying, " I cannot dispute what I cannot understand?"
:)

[MrsPincince]

"You can't have it both ways, MrsP."

Yes I can.... but like I said: I've always said that the most important poll is on Nov 6th..You guys post polls and we debate them. We post polls and you debate them...We are all guilty of it".

[orphanedhawk]

Please go eat some cookies and leave Mrs P alone.
Thanks.

[el_em_en_oh]

And THAT was my point.

When good Obama poll numbers are published, you gloat and the numbers are awesome and he's on a roll, and here comes the 'Obama express'.

When bad Obama numbers are published, you discount them as being fabricated, or garbage, or fake.

You can't have it both ways, MrsP.

~ELMO~

[MrsPincince]

Well I gloat!.....Yes SM that is what I'm saying....

[el_em_en_oh]

I don't recall any one of us (here on the Right) "gloating" because of a favorable Romney poll.

If saying "this is gonna be a close one" is gloating, then I think I may have the definition of the word incorrect, because that's about the only thing I can recall any one of us saying, when positive numbers about Romney come out.

Quite honestly, Brice, R Glass, SM, NG and myself DON'T gloat, like I said, unless you call "It's gonna be a close one" gloating.

[specialmom]

Okay, I think I'm reading mrsp to be saying that the dems get excited about the polls they post and we debate them and that the repubs get excited about the polls that we post and we debate them.  Kind of like a draw.  

and she goes on to say that we are all guilty of wanting a favorable poll for our guy to be a good one and an unfavorable poll of our guy to be a bad one.

Is that what I'm reading mrs.p?  I think we can all say that is true, can't we?

[brice1967]

You can't have it both ways.  You were gloating when the President was ahead in every poll out there. Now that Romney is ahead in some polls, you want to disallow the right to celebrate with a bit of glaoting as well?

I guess that's fair....

[MrsPincince]

"You're incredible MrsP."

Thx...Jason and lot of other people think so too:)

[MrsPincince]

Obviously you didn't read my whole comment..Here it is again

"
Mike, we just have to stop posting anything that has to do with polls because no one wants to hear it.....

"Have you noticed that when Obama is ahead in the polls, the polls mean EVERYTHING to the Democrats and are the bible.

"But when Obama is behind in the polls, the polls mean absolutely NOTHING to the Democrats and shouldn't be looked at because they're meaningless."

I've always said that the most important poll is on Nov 6th..You guys post polls and we debate them. We post polls and you debate them...We are all guilty of you above statement"....

[el_em_en_oh]

"...Mike, we just have to stop posting anything that has to do with polls because no one wants to hear it..."

Aren't YOU the one that said that polls don't matter?!?

You're incredible MrsP.

When the polls are in your favor, they're awesome.
When the polls aren't in your favor, they're garbage.

Make up your mind, MrsFlip-Flop

[brice1967]

I do get it.... and I appreciate his analytical approach.  I find it interesting, even.

[mikesimon]

I understand that and am fine with it.
I know it's still up in the air. I just enjoy reading the analysis even if it doesn't look exactly like I would like it to.
After all - it's just numbers.

[specialmom]

I have a head cold.  That is my excuse for not fully getting what Nate S. does.  (although I kind of did) Statistics was a long time ago for me . . .   college is a distant memory especially for all the classes I didn't like.  The marble analogy helped me.  LOL  

  I really don't pay much attention to them as who knows what way the wind will be blowing on Nov. 6th.  

[MrsPincince]

Mike, we just have to stop posting anything that has to do with polls because no one wants to hear it.....

"Have you noticed that when Obama is ahead in the polls, the polls mean EVERYTHING to the Democrats and are the bible.

But when Obama is behind in the polls, the polls mean absolutely NOTHING to the Democrats and shouldn't be looked at because they're meaningless."

I've always said that the most important poll is on Nov 6th..You guys post polls and we debate them. We post polls and you debate them...We are all guilty of you above statement....

[mikesimon]

It is obvious to me that either you haven't read Nate Silver's blog or you have read it and have failed to comprehend it.

You definitely don't understand what Nate Silver does and how he does it. His forecast about the outcome of the Presidential election is based on the likelihood of the candidate getting the requisite number of electoral votes.
He doesn't inflate nor deflate the polls (except that he does weight them in terms of historic accuracy, polling methodology, number of interviews and trends within the polls themselves and the degree to which they differ from the consensus) numbers or percentages to arrive at a predetermined result.

You just don't get it and without some effort you're not likely to get it.

[brice1967]

Mr. Silver is sure giving hope a chance here and I respect what he is saying.  However, he is touting the unimportance of polls (number of votes/popularity) in regards to the republican candidate while aggrandizing the ultimate importance of the numbers collected in similar fashion for the President.

One thing I've noticed in this election cycle is that people will go to extraordinary measures to find anything that can bolster their opinions regarding political candidates.  Further more, they will also will turn a deaf ear to factual information.... not so much the twist on words, but the facts.

[mikesimon]

I'll address this to you for several reasons, none of which I'll bother to mention.

Nate Silver is not a pollster. He takes into consideration all of the available polls - both state and national - and weights them and incorporates their results into his model. He is not saying that Obama is way ahead or that Obama has it locked up. What he is saying is that his model tells him that Obama has a roughly 73% chance of winning enough electoral votes to win the election. And he also forecasts the odds of both candidates winning the popular vote. It's like if you had a bag of marbles with 3 black and 7 red marbles in it. If you were to pick out one marble the odds of it being red would be 70%. That doesn't mean that you couldn't pull out a black one and it certainly wouldn't be astonishing if you did. But, it would go against the odds and normally you'd be more likely to chose a red one. Likewise that is what Nate is saying about the probable outcome of the election. And, not surprisingly, the odds makers who take bets on this stuff (outside of the US, of course) have the odds slightly lower than Nate's but in the ball park with Obama a 62 to 68% chance of winning. Nate Silver is a statistician and not a pollster. I find his blog very interesting and if I were to bet I'd bet with Nate on the election. But, I have list money betting with the odds in my favor so I know how things can go. I had a bookie friend of mine on the table about to undergo a heart catheterization and when the doctor told him there was a 5% chance of problems he bolted upright on that table and screamed - Doc I've been buried by 5% too many times to hear that kind of $hit.
So basically, it's just odds and you can like them or not but I'm sure there is a strong statistical basis for his forecast.

Mike

[el_em_en_oh]

Have you noticed that when Obama is ahead in the polls, the polls mean EVERYTHING to the Democrats and are the bible.

But when Obama is behind in the polls, the polls mean absolutely NOTHING to the Democrats and shouldn't be looked at because they're meaningless.

Most polls show Romney ahead in a lot of areas, but those polls are garbage, and we'll have to wait until the ultimate poll on November 6th...

Nate Silver's poll however (posted above), because it shows Obama in the lead, should be taken as LAW.

Once again... the double-standard, oxymoronic Left, in this forum, are hard at work trying to wish & dream & will their guy into office.

Oh yeah, and since he's doing such a good job with Sandy, I think he DESERVES a 2nd term, don't you? I heard that on the radio this morning, spewing from the mouth of a Democrat.

Gimme HALF a break.

~ELMO

[specialmom]

???  My head starts to spin with all this polling information.  I've looked at the fivethirtyeight blog since Mikesimon posted it (hadn't heard of it before that.)  He has had Obama WAY ahead.  Who  knows.  I can't keep up with it.

I did hear something interesting on NPR just a minute ago.  They talked about what traditionally happens with a second term president.  Usually, historically, their second term comes in with more people voting for them than the first election.  They were talking about how that is not the case in this election at all.  They talked about states that McCain narrowly winning last election and that the expectation that Obama would be way ahead in those states this go round and he isn't.  I hadn't heard that before in terms of the history of second elections for sitting presidents.  

[mikesimon]

There has been some odd polling in Michigan this year, but the Detroit News polls have not been a big part of the problem. Instead, its surveys have usually come pretty close to the polling consensus in the state. Furthermore, this survey suggests tightening in the race in Michigan since earlier this month, when a poll by the same firm had Mr. Obama ahead by 6.7 percentage points instead.

Nonetheless, Michigan is probably not as close as two or three points right now: most polls released after the first debate in Denver suggested a lead for Mr. Obama in the mid-to-high single digits. Usually, states do not shift all that much relative to others in their region. The fact that Mr. Obama’s polling has held up reasonably well in Ohio and Iowa, for example, is reason to suspect that some of the movement in the poll represents statistical noise, even if it comes from a good polling company.

Perhaps more important, we’re at the stage in the race where getting a relatively good poll does not matter all that much: the question is which candidate is ahead outright in enough states to secure 270 electoral votes. Michigan deserves to be monitored over the final week of the campaign, but in all probability Mr. Romney’s more likely paths to victory will run through Ohio instead.

Mr. Obama had a somewhat above-average day in national polls on Tuesday, which had him up in the race by about one percentage point on average. Part of this is because the Gallup poll, which has shown very poor results for Mr. Obama, did not publish results on account of Hurricane Sandy.

Perhaps the most intriguing result from this group is the poll from Google Consumer Surveys. (Yes, Google has begin to conduct surveys online.) That poll had Mr. Obama ahead by four percentage points, an improvement from a roughly 1-point deficit for Mr. Obama in their prior survey last week.

The Google survey could be an indication that the effects of the hurricane will play somewhat to Mr. Obama’s political advantage. But it will probably be Thursday or Friday, once power and some of the national tracking surveys that have been discontinued have come back online, before we can say so with much confidence.

In the meantime, the state polls continue to hint that Mr. Obama remains the favorite to win the Electoral College — and if the state polls are right, he may well be the favorite in the popular vote as well.

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/31/oct-30-what-state-polls-suggest-about-the-national-popular-vote/

[mikesimon]

You can see that the various projections strongly agree with another, for the most part, in making “calls” about individual states. The only state where different sites show different candidates ahead right now is Florida, where Talking Points Memo gives Mr. Obama a nominal 0.2-percentage point lead while the others (including FiveThirtyEight) have Mr. Romney slightly up instead. There are also four states — New Hampshire, Iowa, Colorado and Virginia — in which some methods show an exactly tied race while others give Mr. Obama the lead.

Although I hope that this chart serves as a useful reference point — and as a reminder that other data-driven sites that look at the polls with the same philosophy that FiveThirtyEight applies are achieving largely the same results — I’m more interested in looking at this data in a macroscopic way.

Suppose, for example, that you take the consensus forecast in each state. (By “consensus” I just mean: the average of the different forecasts.) Then you weigh it based on what each state’s share of the overall turnout was in 2008, in order to produce an estimate of the national popular vote.

Do the math, and you’ll find that this implies that Mr. Obama leads nationally by 1.9 percentage points — by no means a safe advantage, but still a better result for him than what the national polls suggest.

What if turnout doesn’t look like it did in 2008? Instead, what if the share of the votes that each state contributed was the same as in 2004, a better Republican year?

That doesn’t help to break the discord between state and national polls, unfortunately. Mr. Obama would lead by two percentage points in the consensus forecast weighing the states by their 2004 turnout.

Or we can weigh the states by their turnout in 2010, a very good Republican year. But that doesn’t help, either: instead, Mr. Obama leads by 2.1 percentage points based on this method.

(In each of these examples, you’d get almost exactly the same outcome if you used the FiveThirtyEight forecast alone rather than the consensus. We’re on the high end and the low end of the consensus in different states for Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama, but it pretty much balances out over all.)

Whether the state polls or the national polls characterize the election correctly could well determine its outcome.

Mr. Obama’s lead in the Electoral College is modest, but also quite consistent across the different methods. The states in which every site has Mr. Obama leading make up 271 electoral votes — one more than the president needs to clinch victory. The states in which everyone has Mr. Romney ahead represent 206 electoral votes. That leaves five states, and 61 electoral votes, unaccounted for — but Mr. Obama would not need them if he prevails in the states where he is leading in the polls.

But perhaps national polls tell the right story of the race instead — meaning that the state polls systematically overrate Mr. Obama’s standing?

It’s certainly possible. (It keeps me up late at night.) If the polls in states like Ohio and Wisconsin are wrong, then FiveThirtyEight — and all of our competitors that build projections based on state polls — will not have a happy Nov. 6.

With that said, our decision to cast our lot mostly with the state polls is not arbitrary. In recent years, they’ve been a slightly more unbiased indicator of how the election will play out.

Bias, in a statistical sense, means missing consistently in one direction — for example, overrating the Republican’s performance across a number of different examples, or the Democrat’s. It is to be distinguished from the term accuracy, which refers to how close you come to the outcome in either direction. If our forecasts miss high on Mr. Obama’s vote share by 10 percentage points in Nevada, but miss low on it by 10 percentage points in Iowa, our forecasts won’t have been very accurate, but they also won’t have been biased since the misses were in opposite directions (they’ll just have been bad).

In a previous article, I examined the history of bias in public polls based on whether they’ve tended systematically to overrate the standing of the Democrat or the Republican. (The answer is that they don’t exhibit either bias on a consistent basis, as long as you’re using likely voter polls; registered voter polls will tend to overstate the vote for the Democrat.)

This article also contained a comparison between state and national polls in the presidential race: which have been more free of bias?

In recent elections — since state polling data became more robust — it’s the state polls that have done a bit better. This was especially so in 1996, when national polls implied a double-digit victory for Bill Clinton over Bob Dole (and Ross Perot) but state polls were more in line with the single-digit victory that he actually achieved. In 2000, state polls provided an accurate portrayal of a too-close-to-call race, while national polls missed high on George W. Bush vs. Al Gore.

There have been other years like 1992 in which the national polls did a bit better. But on average since that year, the state polls have had a bias of 1.1 percentage points — half as much as the national polls, which have had a 2.1-point bias instead.

We’re approaching the point where Mr. Romney may need the state polls to be systematically biased against him in order to win the Electoral College. And that certainly could turn out to be the case: if Mr. Romney wins the popular vote by more than about two percentage points, for example, he’ll be very likely to cobble together a winning electoral map, somehow and some way. (And he’ll be a virtual lock if the results are in line with Mr. Romney’s best national polls, like the Gallup survey, which put him four or five points ahead.)

But the historical evidence weighs in slightly more heavily on behalf of the state polls, in my view, when they seem to contradict the national ones. If the state polls are right, than Mr. Obama is not just the favorite in the Electoral College but probably also in the popular vote.

Tuesday’s Polls

Mr. Obama made gains in the FiveThirtyEight forecast on Tuesday, with his chances of winning the Electoral College increasing to 77.4 percent.

A fair amount of this boils down to Ohio, where three polls released on Tuesday gave Mr. Obama leads by margins ranging from three to five percentage points. Two of the polls, from Grove Research and the Mellman Group, generally show strong results for Democrats, which give them less impact in the forecast after applying our adjustment for pollster “house effects”. Still, the three polls taken collectively were enough to widen Mr. Obama’s projected lead in Ohio to 2.4 percentage points from 2.1 on Monday. Given how central Ohio is to each candidate’s electoral strategy — and how little time remains in the race — this was enough to improve Mr. Obama’s Electoral College chances. (The forecast does not yet account for the poll by Quinnipiac University for The New York Times and CBS News, which had Mr. Obama five points ahead in Ohio but which was released after we had run the model for the night.)

Another poll that received a lot of attention on Tuesday was one by Glangariff Group Inc. in Michigan, for The Detroit News. That survey had Mr. Obama ahead by only 2.7 points in Michigan.


http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/31/oct-30-what-state-polls-suggest-about-the-national-popular-vote/

[MrsPincince]

Back to the article....

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/

Mitt Romney and President Obama remain roughly tied in national polls, while state polls are suggestive of a lead for Mr. Obama in the Electoral College. Most people take this to mean that there is a fairly good chance of a split outcome between the Electoral College and the popular vote, as we had in 2000. But the story may not be so simple

For both the swing state polls and the national polls to be right, something else has to give to make the math work. If Mr. Obama is performing well in swing states, but is only tied in the popular vote nationally, that means he must be underperforming in noncompetitive states.

But polls of noncompetitive states don’t always cooperate with the story. Take the polls that were out on Tuesday.

Mr. Obama trailed by “only” eight points, for instance, in a poll of Georgia that was released on Tuesday. Those are somewhat worse results than Mr. Obama achieved in 2008, when he lost Georgia by five percentage points. But they’re only a little bit worse, whereas the national polls are suggestive of a larger decline for Mr. Obama in the popular vote.

Or take the poll of Texas, also out on Tuesday, which had Mr. Obama behind by 16 points there. He’s obviously no threat to win the state or come close to it, but that still represents only a 4-point decline for Mr. Obama from 2008, when he lost Texas by 12 points instead.

High-population red states like these, Texas and Georgia, are just the sort of places where Mr. Obama would need to lose a lot of ground in order to increase the likelihood of his winning the Electoral College while losing the popular vote.

Perhaps Mr. Obama is underperforming in deeply blue states rather than deeply red ones? Sometimes you’ll get numbers that check out with this assumption: Mr. Obama did get some mediocre polling in Oregon on Tuesday, for instance. But he also got a poll showing him ahead by 23 points in California. Another survey on Tuesday gave him a 31-point lead in Massachusetts.

Yes, I am deliberately cherry-picking a bit. But the discrepancy seems to hold if you look at the data in a more comprehensive way. Nor is it an unusual feature of the FiveThirtyEight model. Rather, pretty much every method for evaluating the election based on state polls seems to hint at a very slight popular vote lead for Mr. Obama, along with an Electoral College one.

In the table below, I’ve listed the current forecasts at seven different Web sites that use state polls, sometimes along with a modicum of other information like a state’s past voting history, to produce predictions of the popular vote in each state.

The first of these sites is FiveThirtyEight. The others, in the order that they’re listed in the table, are Electoral-Vote.com; Votamatic, by the Emory University political scientist Drew Linzer; HuffPost Pollster; Real Clear Politics; Talking Points Memo’s PollTracker; and the Princeton Election Consortium, which is run by Sam Wang, a neuroscientist at Princeton. These are pretty much all the sites I’m aware of that use state polling data in a systematic way.

[Vance2335]

OH did oyu know that actors and directors in Hollywood get blacklisted for being a Republican?

[specialmom]

I just reread what I wrote and when I say judgmental and intolerant, I mean that in a friendly way.  >)  I'm not trying to come down hard on you as i do appreciate your honesty but was just pointing out to you the way it feels to find out somene is contemplating not liking you because you have differing political beliefs.  You seem like a nice lady and will hopefully find a way to seperate out political beliefs from who a person is and understand that no one knows everything.  We ALL could be wrong.  The older I get the more I realize that and it helps me keep perspective on things like giving opinions.  anyway, just wanted to come bac as my first couple of sentences above came off harsher than I intended and you do seem to be a very nice lady and whether you like me or not for being Republican (sniff sniff), I like you.