That's just a journalist using the wrong vocabulary. If you ever listen to Silver, he's always really clear he's not making a prediction. It's like his mantra.Oh I agree completely, but as I said in my last post, Donald Jr thinks that's ok too, but it's completely not, and I think it could actually lead to serious trouble for him. Could that lead to him being impeached?
Ok, I am aware of that but this years race was characterized by a lot of uncertainty due to undecideds and high third party support so they were bound to do worse. Also, again doing worse or getting it wrong does not mean that it's not real science or even inherently flawed nor does getting it right mean that the history professors method is anything other than pseudoscience. I can make a one question model which would have accurately predicted this race while also characterising every president ever, though it would give a 50:50 prediction for all previous race. Is the candidate a man?
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Its not illegal but clearly a conflict of interest. At least that is what was discussed on a program.
Well I'd say hopefully, but then Pence
The biggest problem with Silver and his contemporaries is that in the U.S., ever four years more and more people vote early and there is a way to approximate how many people voted for each party, and deductively, the candidate of a party. None of the models are able to factor that sort of thing despite the fact that up to 40% of Americans vote before the actual voting day. This can severely mess with the accuracy of a probabilistic model. And that's before we even get to things like voters who are shy or not willing to express their true intentions for fear of being ostracized etc. Silver and his pals have a lot of work to do before the next cycle.
Thanks mate, I completely understand the blind trust side, just not so much the legalities or laws/rules of taking office as President and conflicts of interest and what can be done about it if the rules are ignored or breached?
Not actually going into the models because on the move, but theoretically the best he can claim is that the median of his state estimates were right. And I'll venture the journalist just means that his medians fell on the right side of Blue/Red, not that they even hit the final tally.
His probabilistic models from previous elections are still online if you don't believe me and want to check them out.
I would expect to see more stories like this as the press regain their mojo after being smacked down following the election results.
He has got a huge headache with his complex business interests.
Yeah, I hear you mate. No different to us here in the UK to be fair. Ending up with that witch May when we didn't vote for her. Feck me, what a state the world is in. only 2 years ago we had a coalition government with the Lib Dems doing a decent job of reigning the Conservatives in, we were in the EU and the USA had the greatest President of my lifetime. It was all looking so promising.
Me too, but what can actually be done about it though?
I don't see how he could possibly do so without access to the actual early votes.
The polls should factor in early voting directly in the questioning of voters. They should also try to tease out shy or hard to contact voters. These are what polls are there to do. Silver isn't a pollster.
What do you mean by a probabilistic model getting it wrong?
They were probably wrong.
I agree mate.
Just have to suck it up and take it and hope you guys vote well in 2 years time. Hope that the Supreme Court doesn't lose anymore judges in that time either, and then hope that the Dems get their shit together and a decent candidate is put forward in 4 years time, all the while hoping the Supreme Leader doesn't cause WWIII in the meantime. How can you possibly know that though? Do you think any model which didn't show Trump as the favourite has to have been wrong? That just doesn't make any sense, at all.
Nope. They track that sort of thing by actually counting ballots requested and turned in for each respective party. Very few polls go after people who have already voted. Its generally a random sample of anyone deemed a registered or likely voter.
Once early voting is open, most polls ask "Have you already voted, and if so who for?" as one of the first questions.
At the national level, the Dems gained seats in both house and Senate. I suspect Trump who is also from NY may actually work better with Schumer. The GOP only has a razor thin margin. Surely they will fillibuster a crazy SC nominee. But it sounds like he has removed his original list of judges.I agree mate.
Early voting is a bit of an incomplete picture as far as I know. What gets released varies state by state with Nevada being really the only one that releases raw data of who has how many votes. I think your second point is more where the problem lies, as the early voting picture is very incomplete and didn't help the people who looked at it this year, with the difficulty of predicting what demographic is going to surge in what state and who you are not reaching with your polling. Though those are not really Silver's problems to fix.
There has to be a way. If you followed Jon Ralston's twitter activity in Nevada, he was able to count/approximate the amount of turnout for each county during the early voting drives in the Clark County. That allowed him to approximate a significantly higher Latino turnout and thus deductively make a pretty accurate call that Hillary would be successful.
Yep, they're factored in to most polls.
I heard this on MSNBC a couple of days before the elections. They said in early voting Hillary already was well ahead in Florida and was certain to win the state.
I am liking your optimism mate. Seriously. I hope so, I worry more on a Global scale though, and my biggest worry at the moment is definitely the Climate Change issue and the Paris Agreement.
Our government can protect itself from its own Commander in Chief. Everyone is aware he has no experience. The business world certainly does not want a meltdown.
You're just ignoring everything people are telling you now.
No. Early voting data is incomplete and only gives you part of the picture (http://www.realclearpolitics.com/ar...voting_a_poor_predictor_of_final_results.html) so there is no real reason poll based models should bend over backwards to shoehorn it in. Plenty of people did look at it this year and came to the conclusion Clinton had it in the bag. It's incomplete nature means you might as well be reading tea leaves, you'll just see what you want to. Also, your preferred model from the history professor does not include early voting nor any other data.
Part of the picture is critical when constructing the picture. If for example Silver would've been able to incorporate the data Ralston researched in Nevada, the probabilities of a NV win would've soared. Ditto for other states.
And it would have been wrong for the odds of a Clinton win in Nevada to soar given that in the end she only won the state by 2%. It was marginal, and could have swung on election day.
http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/nevada/ http://www.nytimes.com/elections/results/nevada
Nevada's a little different as a heavy majority of people there vote early, and registration rates are predictive of results historically. Colorado is similar, though to a lesser extent. If 538 had been showing Trump as favourite there on election day then there would be cause to argue, as there was strong evidence that wasn't the case. But in the end, as they showed her narrowly up (which wasn't the case on the RCP average), as you say, you can't really pick fault.
I get what you're saying, but it really was close in Nevada. Put it this way, if just 1 in 75 voters had switched from Clinton to Trump, she would have lost. You can't go much beyond 60/40 odds in a situation like that I think, even if a big chunk are voting early.
I agree, I think Ralston mentioned that Trump would have to win election day by 10 points or something which was unheard of, but as we saw elsewhere, unheard of was happening quite a lot in rural areas. She was up in the EV by similar levels as Obama '12 but the final result was 4% closer, higher than the national swing, so something along those lines must've happened.
I don't see how it can be argued. Of cos plenty of people don't vote anyway, but the EC is still a big factor why many people don't vote.
I hope not, President Pence would be even worse than Trump with his archaic beliefs.
