NYT Nate Silver Doubles Down: 75% Chance Obama Wins

lol so much fail in this thread

 

Hit the road, jack, and don't you come back....

I would have reacted with grace and class if jopatmc had done the same, but he goes out saying we're all a bunch of idiots because we were mesmerized by that there colored feller.

I will miss him in the GARM.

 

What an ass... good riddance to that dude.

 

I think Mojoman owes Nate Silver and the D&D an apology

 

On that note, has anyone seen the triplets?

 

Silver picked Scott Brown to win back in 2009 and Scott Walker to win the recall, despite Dems being convinced they would win those elections. No Dems demonized his predictions.

 

Heck I owe Nate Silver and apology. I didn't think that Obama would win as convincingly as Silver did.

 

Nate was the clear winner last night. His book sales jumped 500% on Amazon last night!

 

It was smart of him to release his book shortly before the election.

 

Smell that, Clutchfans? Smells like someone lost.

In all seriousness, I'm sorry you became so ridiculous at the end. Sucks to see members spiral into insanity and become bombastic.

 

Here's the irony of it all. Most of the people getting these "hand outs" are poor whtie people who voted for Romney

 

Jopats fall from grace was one of the most epic ever. He was so sure that Romney was going to win and that Nate silver was completely wrong. In the process, he burned all bridges and made himself a prime target. He was abrasive and dismissive, arrogant and dense. Honestly I haven't seen a fall like this in a long time on the internet or real life.

I must say, him leaving not only is best for us but best for him. It is like a person enduring a public humiliation. can never return here again as his name is permanently tainted, synonymous with this massive failure.

 

Jopats should be seriously angry at whomever he gets his news from.

 

It is awful hard to stay mad at your gut.

 

Watching Nate Silver's popularity explode over the last few weeks has been incredible. I'm happy for him and hope he stays true to his methods in upcoming elections. His calm, reasoned voice the last 4-5 years amidst the shouting from both sides is refreshing.

I also hope he breaks off from the NYTimes and goes back to having an independent website.

 

An article about the accuracy of various pollsters: http://www.sfgate.com/business/bloo...-Stat-Men-Crush-Pundits-in-4015912.php#page-2

[rquoter]Nate Silver-Led Stat Men Crush Pundits in Presidential Election

Jonathan D. Salant and Laura Curtis, ©2012 Bloomberg News

Updated 7:19 a.m., Wednesday, November 7, 2012


Nov. 7 (Bloomberg) -- Nate Silver was right. The Gallup Poll was wrong.

Silver, the computer expert who gave Obama a 90 percent chance of winning re-election, predicted on his blog, FiveThirtyEight (for the number of seats in the Electoral College), that the president would receive 51 percent of the popular vote as he called each of the 50 states, including all nine battlegrounds.

“Nate Silver, right,” said Bill Burton, who moved from the White House to the pro-Obama super-political action committee Priorities USA Action.

Gallup’s daily national tracking poll put Republican nominee Mitt Romney ahead by five points until it was suspended for Hurricane Sandy, and a final national survey released Nov. 5 gave the Republican a one-point advantage.

“These polls are designed only to measure what is happening at the time of that poll in terms of the national popular vote” and are not “designed to be predictive,” Gallup editor-in-chief Frank Newport said.

With the count in Florida still to be finished, Obama was leading Romney nationwide by two percentage points, 50 percent to 48 percent, the Associated Press reported, and won a decisive Electoral College victory.


University Pollsters


Two university-based pollsters joined Silver in correctly predicting Obama’s win, and one of them will be dead-on about the electoral vote tally.

Drew Linzer, an assistant professor of political science at Emory University in Atlanta and a former pollster based in California, predicted yesterday morning on the website votamatic.org that Obama would end the race with 332 electoral votes and Romney 206.

Of Silver, Linzer wrote in that post, “his most likely outcome is still Obama 332, followed by 303 and 347, just like me.” Linzer also wrote that his model for votamatic.org had been been predicting since June the Obama win with 332 electoral votes.

Sam Wang, a Princeton University professor of neuroscience, posted his final prediction -- that Obama would likely receive 303 electoral votes to Romney’s 235 -- on the school’s election blog at 2 p.m. yesterday. He revised Obama’s total downward from 332 based on late polls yesterday.

Florida, with its 29 electoral votes, hasn’t been called by the Associated Press. Its outcome will determine which of those professors’ final forecasts was accurate.


Rasmussen Misses


The Republican-leaning Rasmussen Reports poll also had Romney winning the popular vote by one point. It missed on six of its nine swing-state polls. Rasmussen is an automated poll, meaning that it cannot call mobile phones and relies instead on an online polling tool to reach those without landlines. Rasmussen also adjusts data to reflect political party identification, which other pollsters say can change from survey to survey.

Rasmussen Reports had Obama winning Nevada and New Hampshire, tying Romney in Ohio and Wisconsin, and losing in the other five, including North Carolina.

“Nationally, we projected a toss-up and that’s what happened. We projected Ohio would be a tie, and it was very close,” president Scott Rasmussen said. “I believe that what happened is that the polls were right.” [Ed. lol, how are you ever going to get better when you have your head up your ass?]

National Polls


Among other national polls, Pew Research Center and ABC News/Washington Post put Obama up by three points, while the NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey had him ahead by one point.

Silver infuriated conservatives with his model, which uses a number of measurements and calculations, including attention to state polls.

Regardless of the national surveys, Obama maintained a steady lead in most of the swing states in the last month, most notably Ohio, without which a Republican has never won the presidency.

U.S. elections are won in the Electoral College, where each state receives votes equaling the total of their two U.S. senators and their number of House representatives. The aggregate data from Real Clear Politics and Pollster.com also showed an Obama advantage in all of the swing states except North Carolina.


“Unless America abandons the Electoral College, the national polls just aren’t meaningful, although we all love the horse race,” said Rogan Kersh, provost at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.


Swing States


Silver had Obama losing North Carolina, which the president won four years ago, and winning the other eight swing states. Silver also predicted Romney’s win in Indiana, the only other state that Obama won in 2008 and lost in 2012.

The NBC/Journal/Marist College poll called seven of the nine swing states, missing North Carolina, where it had Obama in a state that he lost, and Colorado, which it called a tie. The CBS/Times/Quinnipiac University survey predicted four of the five swing states it polled in, missing only in Colorado when a mid-October poll had Romney up by one point. CNN successfully predicted the winner in Colorado, Ohio and Nevada, though it had Romney winning Florida.

Quinnipiac had Obama ahead in Pennsylvania, as did Rasmussen. Romney made an unsuccessful last-ditch effort to compete in the commonwealth, which hasn’t backed a Republican presidential nominee since 1988. A poll by the Morning Call of Allentown and Muhlenberg College also had Obama leading.

Other automated polls correctly predicted most of the swing state results. The Democratic-leaning Public Policy Polling had Obama winning eight swing states and Pennsylvania, and tied in North Carolina. Another automated poll, SurveyUSA, had Obama winning Colorado, Nevada and Ohio, losing North Carolina and tied in Florida. Online poll YouGov didn’t poll in North Carolina, predicted a tie in Florida and had Obama ahead in the other seven states.


--With assistance from Julie Bykowicz in Washington. Editors: Leslie Hoffecker, Terry Atlas


To contact the reporters on this story: Jonathan D. Salant in Washington at jsalant@bloomberg.net; Laura Curtis in Washington at lcurtis7@bloomberg.net


Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/business/bloo...en-Crush-Pundits-in-4015912.php#ixzz2BYWte3h1[/rquoter]

One, why would a pollster predict a tie? They may see it as too close to call; I see it as they are automatically wrong because ties aren't possible. Pick one and get a 50% chance of winning.

Two, why is anyone looking at Gallup and Rasmussen? They suck. An assitant professor with a couple of underpaid graduate students can do a better job forecasting than a company full of professionals? Some of these other guys didn't do much better either.

Three, sure public sentiment jumps around and reacts to news in the real-time and all. But, the guys who earned the cred like Nate Silver have known for months what some pollsters wouldn't admit until election night. They'd like you to think it was a toss-up or these things can't be predicted. It's not true. The truth is there for people who actually want it.

 

I could be mistaken, but doesn't Silver et al. use Gallup and Rasmussen as inputs to his forecast?

Its interesting. It seems to me that all these pollsters are doing the heavy lifting in reaching out to voters and collecting the data. Taken individually, however, none of them are that reliable. But if someone comes a long and averages all their hard-earned results together (while applying a few other techniques to reduce the noise), that person will have a very reliable predictor and get most of the credit.

 

Well, pollsters don't really predict - they just report. So if their poll reports a tie, that's what they've got. Pollsters shouldn't be editorializing - that's one of the negatives of Rasmussen, who does exactly that.

Name brand, basically. But yes, they have a history of not being very accurate. But they are like FOX News - they confirm what people want to believe, so people choose to use them.

Absolutely. But you can be sure that, in 2016, if the circumstances are similar, the bassos of the world will come up with new reasons why the model won't hold this time around.

 

Yes. Silver said as much that his numbers are based on multiple poll result.

And I don't exactly feel bad for these pollsters. They make plenty of money doing them. But yes, they are getting short changed in national perception