Romney, Obama, Rasmussen

Kaosium said:
Now mentally move each poll you see that's not Rasmussen or Gallup 4% in Romney or other GOP candidates' direction and see what those electoral college maps look like.
...
Go ahead and go through those state polls and move the ones not Gallup or Rasmussen four points in Romney's favor and see just how that changes the picture.
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(facepalm)

Like I said: the polls would have to be consistently heavily skewed towards Obama. Look I get it that you really, really want Romney to win. I felt that way in 2004 about Kerry. That was my wake-up call about "ignoring what the polls were saying in favor of ideology". Eight years later, I know better, and that's why I look both at Silver (accurate methodology from someone who's very, very good at statistics) and the RCP raw poll data (not just averages) for the swing states.

When Obama tanked the first debate, I _was_ worried, because I felt he'd pissed away what was essentially a done deal at that point. After everything settled out a couple weeks later, it was obvious that it was nothing more than the trigger for a typical regression to the mean -- that Obama's post-DNC bounce had artificially extended itself beyond its proper lifespan and Republicans were just not answering the phones because they were pissed. Romney pretends he's moderate for a debate, Republicans get revitalized, the polling corrects itself back to where it probably was all along.

Finally, take a look at this particular discussion:

I've bolded the relevant one. It's not just a case of looking at one site. The consensus of the forecasters using state polls (generally more accurate than national polls, unsurprisingly) is that Obama's lead is insurmountable barring a November surprise. And 538 is the _conservative_ one.

The October jobs report is out now, and it's bad news for Romney. What else is left -- for Obama to be caught eating a baby on live television?

FTA said:
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.
...
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.
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Kaosium said:
Just take a look at a wide range of those state polling demographic data and ask yourself if the electorate doesn't turn out like that whether or not you'd expect to get the same result that the poll is suggesting. Not just one, but look at as many of them as you can...
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Silver already did. (same link as prior post, I missed this)

FTFA said:
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.
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ANTPogo said:
Why?



Yes, if you alter all the poll results to give Romney four more points than those poll results say he actually got, it totally changes the game and gives Romney the advantage in polling.

:boggled:
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Hrm. Not quite, it's that the poll doesn't give Romney the four points (or whatever) he'll probably get one election day, as the model being used by the pollster isn't likely to be a good indicator of turnout. Lemme put it this way: do you think if I were to poll and the respondents were disproportionally from Texas that might give Romney an advantage? If you underrepresent Texans that has the same effect, except as a disadvantage. It's actually more complicated than that, but that's the basic concept.

Some populations are more difficult to reach, thus they extrapolate from a smaller sample and 'weight' what they get going by more general data. However some of these firms have chosen demographic models that aren't likely to resemble the turnout very well, as they not only require 2008 to repeat itself, but to grow in the favor of the Democrats. Other firms like Rasmussen and Gallup have chosen not to, and they're getting significantly different results.

Some firms are just repeatedly getting demographic information that's at variance with known turnout history and with what other pollsters are getting. That might be because some states have been polled so much people just won't respond anymore and roughly ninety percent of the population they cannot reach. The ten percent left isn't all that representative of who will turn out, and it shows up in the particulars of the poll and it isn't being adjusted for.

Also since everyone these days knows there's a significant difference between 'registered voter' polls and 'likely voter' polls it appears that every polling company is trying to produce them, however just asking them is often not the best way to do it, as most will say they will vote. Thus some of these 'likely voter' polls aren't really. The one from Marquette that I posted must have been deliberately re-polling old respondents, you're not supposed to do that for a random sample for technical reasons as it introduces old data and fails to capture new data and polls are very time dependent.

Anyway I think many of these firms have made very dubious assumptions and that can be seen in the interiors of the polls, and as a result it's likely to be deceptive as to who is leading and who will win. The last time this happened was '96, when the (national) polls were way off, guess who worked on that campaign for Clinton? A fella by the name of Axelrod who specializes in massaging the media and who took such an interest in Gallup's 'faulty methodology....'
 
Oh, and in memoriam of applecorped:

"Friday, November 02, 2012

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Friday shows the race tied, with President Obama and Mitt Romney each attracting support from 48% of voters nationwide. One percent (1%) prefers some other candidate, and three percent (3%) remain undecided."
 
On Predictwise, Romney is down to 27.6% for WTA. Not even Intrade is holding up his numbers at this point.

And with the positive jobs report this morning, Romney and the GOP have little to hang their hats upon, it seems.

It's like watching a long, slow death...
 
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MattusMaximus said:
On Predictwise, Romney is down to 27.6% for WTA. Not even Intrade is holding up his numbers at this point.
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There's a general consensus that arbitrage opportunities between Betfair/etc. and InTrade would be extremely profitable right now, should one be so inclined and in a position to take advantage of it.

Just sitting on the spikes over at InTrade would be relatively profitable at the moment though, as they're still appearing every so often.
 
remirol said:
(facepalm)

Like I said: the polls would have to be consistently heavily skewed towards Obama. Look I get it that you really, really want Romney to win. I felt that way in 2004 about Kerry. That was my wake-up call about "ignoring what the polls were saying in favor of ideology". Eight years later, I know better, and that's why I look both at Silver (accurate methodology from someone who's very, very good at statistics) and the RCP raw poll data (not just averages) for the swing states.

When Obama tanked the first debate, I _was_ worried, because I felt he'd pissed away what was essentially a done deal at that point. After everything settled out a couple weeks later, it was obvious that it was nothing more than the trigger for a typical regression to the mean -- that Obama's post-DNC bounce had artificially extended itself beyond its proper lifespan and Republicans were just not answering the phones because they were pissed. Romney pretends he's moderate for a debate, Republicans get revitalized, the polling corrects itself back to where it probably was all along.

Finally, take a look at this particular discussion:

I've bolded the relevant one. It's not just a case of looking at one site. The consensus of the forecasters using state polls (generally more accurate than national polls, unsurprisingly) is that Obama's lead is insurmountable barring a November surprise. And 538 is the _conservative_ one.
Click to expand...

Heh, actually I'm just playing 'forum mafia' and I think I'm on to some scum! :p

I'm saying that the data being produced by (too) many of these firms is based on faulty assumptions, and it doesn't matter how many sites composite the bad info with the good they're still gonna get garbage out, and it will be seen at the state level as well as the national, though in different formulations due to the difference in the firms doing them and how often. Rasmussen and Gallup are more likely to be correct this election cycle, regardless of what they did before, which in Rasmussen's case is rather well anyway.

A four point difference only means the moving of two percent from one to the other, which is not that big a skew, but boy does it change the map! I read that Nate Silver cut his teeth on Sabermetrics, which brings back memories of me meticulously keeping score of Cub and Brewer games at the behest of Bill James in one of his abstracts in the mid-eighties so the stranglehold Elias held on situational baseball stats could be broken and the data free for everyone! What it appears to me that he's doing is not taking into account something as basic as park factor and pretending that Obama is a big slugger because he plays half his games in Wrigley and Romney is just an above average pitcher because his home park is Fenway (especially back in the Eighties) and not looking at their road stats which tell a different story.

What I'm saying is when Romney faces Obama in the all star game in the Astrodome he's gonna strike his ass out! :)

The October jobs report is out now, and it's bad news for Romney. What else is left -- for Obama to be caught eating a baby on live television?
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Err...wouldn't that mean the unemployment rate is again higher than when he took office? I dunno how you figure the unemployment rate going up is good for Obama, but I bet someone can think of a way to spin it--I can hardly wait to hear it! :)
 
Irony, Thy Name is GOP.

In the NYT - an interesting article on the deluge of money the GOP and its PACs are throwing at Pennsylvania.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/02/u...ush-in-pennsylvania.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0

They close with a discussion of how the GOP is now appealing to women and mention one organization dear to my heart - Americans for Prosperity - who are making a huge effort.

“This is perfect for women,” said Jennifer Sefano, the group’s director in Pennsylvania. “You don’t have to pay for a baby sitter. You don’t even have to leave the house.”
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Ah, woman's work.
 
Kaosium said:
Err...wouldn't that mean the unemployment rate is again higher than when he took office? I dunno how you figure the unemployment rate going up is good for Obama, but I bet someone can think of a way to spin it--I can hardly wait to hear it! :)
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The same way the right desperately spun it when the rate went down?
 
Foolmewunz said:
In the NYT - an interesting article on the deluge of money the GOP and its PACs are throwing at Pennsylvania.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/02/u...ush-in-pennsylvania.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0

They close with a discussion of how the GOP is now appealing to women and mention one organization dear to my heart - Americans for Prosperity - who are making a huge effort.



Ah, woman's work.
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Seems a little desperate to me. Maybe one campaign doesn't like their internals in Ohio and is trying to make a play for other states? Even Rasmussen had Obama leading 51-46 a week ago.
 
Kaosium said:
I'm saying that the data being produced by (too) many of these firms is based on faulty assumptions, and it doesn't matter how many sites composite the bad info with the good they're still gonna get garbage out, and it will be seen at the state level as well as the national, though in different formulations due to the difference in the firms doing them and how often. Rasmussen and Gallup are more likely to be correct this election cycle, regardless of what they did before, which in Rasmussen's case is rather well anyway.
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:confused: Except that Rasmussen did incredibly poorly in 2010 and just average in 2008. There's evidence all over the thread for this; I don't understand this need on your part to counterassert established fact.

What I'm saying is when Romney faces Obama in the all star game in the Astrodome he's gonna strike his ass out! :)
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Bet big, then. There's a predictions thread and a betting thread where people are just dying for someone to take Romney's side.

Err...wouldn't that mean the unemployment rate is again higher than when he took office? I dunno how you figure the unemployment rate going up is good for Obama, but I bet someone can think of a way to spin it--I can hardly wait to hear it! :)
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*sigh* Seriously? This is weak sauce, dude.

BLS report said:
Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 171,000 in October, and the unemployment rate was essentially unchanged at 7.9 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment rose in professional and business services, health care, and retail trade.
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It was 7.8 when he took office, and it was 7.8 last month. Of course, in Feburary of '09 it was 8.3 and spiked to 10 in October '09 as the recession hit full swing; you are welcome to assert that in a single month Obama was terrible for the economy, but let's be serious, shall we? We'll grant the non-representative cherry-pick of "7.8" for now.

Now, more importantly: do you know why it went up 0.1%?

The civilian labor force rose by 578,000 to 155.6 million in October, and the labor force participation rate edged up to 63.8 percent (from 63.6 percent before). Total employment rose by 410,000 over the month.
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People are starting looking for work again. It's a very good sign for the economy, in fact, because it represents confidence instead of discouragement, which is important. And the unemployment trend, of course, looks excellent for Obama.
 
remirol said:
Now, more importantly: do you know why it went up 0.1%?



People are starting looking for work again. It's a very good sign for the economy, in fact, because it represents confidence instead of discouragement, which is important.
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The unemployment rate is indeed trending in a good direction, but the data does not support your conclusion. The labor force participation rate is still trending down with todays tiny increasing looking like noise.
http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000
 
Obama +.03. There appears to be a trend and that is matched by predictwise (Obama 71.9%) and other sources.
 
JohnnyG said:
The unemployment rate is indeed trending in a good direction, but the data does not support your conclusion. The labor force participation rate is still trending down with todays tiny increasing looking like noise.
http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000
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FTL said:
2009 65.7 65.8 65.6 65.6 65.7 65.7 65.5 65.4 65.1 65.0 65.0 64.6
2010 64.8 64.9 64.9 65.1 64.9 64.6 64.6 64.7 64.6 64.4 64.5 64.3
2011 64.2 64.2 64.2 64.2 64.2 64.1 64.0 64.1 64.1 64.1 64.0 64.0
2012 63.7 63.9 63.8 63.6 63.8 63.8 63.7 63.5 63.6 63.8
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Year-over-year January to October numbers. First upward-looking October since the recession began. No, it's not a big trend upwards and the year's trend itself is more "even", but even having it flatten out at the bottom in preparation for going back up is good. As the jobs come back, the participation rate will also increase, of course.
 
SkepticalDrew said:
Seems a little desperate to me. Maybe one campaign doesn't like their internals in Ohio and is trying to make a play for other states? Even Rasmussen had Obama leading 51-46 a week ago.
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A little desperate?

It's extremely desperate, and it's full-on panic mode in the GOP, especially because the Dems are poised to actually gain seats in both the House and Senate.

Let the right-wing SuperPACs throw all the money they want. At this stage, they might as well burn their cash :)
 
MattusMaximus said:
A little desperate?

It's extremely desperate, and it's full-on panic mode in the GOP, especially because the Dems are poised to actually gain seats in both the House and Senate.

Let the right-wing SuperPACs throw all the money they want. At this stage, they might as well burn their cash :)
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The thing that astounds me is that you can spend so many billions of dollars on media and get nowhere with it.

This needs some careful analysis.
 
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