Romney, Obama, Rasmussen

BenBurch said:
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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It depends on how well the money is spent,how good the advertising is, etc.
This applies to advertising and marketing across the board.
For example, Disney spent 100 Million dollars marketing John Carter last March, and the film was still one of the biggest flops in movie history,In fact, most reporters said the marketing was so bad that is might have had a negative impact on people.
Hey, maybe Romney hired some of the marketing people Disney fired......
 
For you, Kaosium:

The argument that Mr. Obama isn’t the favorite is the one that requires more finesse. If you take the polls at face value, then the popular vote might be a tossup, but the Electoral College favors Mr. Obama.

So you have to make some case for why the polls shouldn’t be taken at face value.

Some argue that the polls are systematically biased against Republicans. This might qualify as a simple argument had it been true on a consistent basis historically, but it hasn’t been: instead, there have been some years when the polls overestimated how well the Democrat would do, and about as many where the same was true for the Republican. I’m sympathetic to the notion that the polls could be biased, statistically speaking, meaning that they will all miss in the same direction. The FiveThirtyEight forecast explicitly accounts for the possibility that the polls are biased toward Mr. Obama — but it also accounts for the chance that the polls could be systematically biased against him.

Others argue that undecided voters tend to break against the incumbent, in this case Mr. Obama. But this has also not really been true in recent elections. In some states, also, Mr. Obama is at 50 percent of the vote in the polling average, or close to it, meaning that he wouldn’t need very many undecided voters to win.

A third argument is that Mr. Romney has the momentum in the polls: whether or not he would win an election today, the argument goes, he is on a favorable trajectory that will allow him to win on Tuesday.

This may be the worst of the arguments, in my view. It is contradicted by the evidence, simply put.
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http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytime...simple-case-for-saying-obama-is-the-favorite/
 
not_so_new said:
Sounds like Nate Silver is getting a little PO'ed at people who don't understand statistics.

http://news.yahoo.com/nate-silver-joe-scarborough-wanna-bet-113615600.html
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Remember, he _did_ play online poker before he got into politics. :) He's shown remarkable restraint up 'til now at dealing with all the people who are blathering about "it's an even race, it's an even race, the math is wrong, the model is wrong, the polls are skewed, the turnout won't be the same, WHY ISNT ROMNEY WINNING"... :D
 
Rasmussen is I think the key indicator. As much as the republicans hate to admit it he does have a right wing lean and he uses this in the run up to generate a bit of buzz. As the election draws closer I always felt he gets a little more honest.

As the end draws near I would expect his polling to tighten up to nearer the truth. I am thinking Ras has Obama +2.5 for pv by Monday, mid 290s for EC
 
remirol said:
Remember, he _did_ play online poker before he got into politics. :) He's shown remarkable restraint up 'til now at dealing with all the people who are blathering about "it's an even race, it's an even race, the math is wrong, the model is wrong, the polls are skewed, the turnout won't be the same, WHY ISNT ROMNEY WINNING"... :D
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My favorite blather was the guy who criticized Silver's methodology with arm waving and then pulled a number out of his own butt.
 
I think Rasmussen doesn't wanted to be quoted as the least accurate poll of 2012. Gallup should follow suit, these polls of theirs that have Romney up 5-6 points are more than a little ridiculous.

Love this from Silver:

i am aware — and you should be too — of the possibility that adding complexity to a model can make it worse. The technical term for this is “overfitting”: that by adding different layers to a model, you may make it too rigid, molding it such that it perfectly “predicts” the past, but is incompetent at forecasting the future. I think there is a place for complexity — the universe is a complicated thing — but it needs to be applied with the knowledge that our ability to understand it is constrained by our human shortcomings.
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Unabogie said:
The comment section on Yahoo is a cesspool. Wow.
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All the polling and numbers and models flying around is starting to make my head hurt.

But I will put 100% odds on this: whatever the outcome, one side is going to be in for a nasty surprise on Tuesday. Both sides seem very confident in their chances, publically anyways.
 
mikedenk said:
But I will put 100% odds on this: whatever the outcome, one side is going to be in for a nasty surprise on Tuesday. Both sides seem very confident in their chances, publically anyways.
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The prediction markets/sites make an excellent measure of confidence.
 
mikedenk said:
All the polling and numbers and models flying around is starting to make my head hurt.

But I will put 100% odds on this: whatever the outcome, one side is going to be in for a nasty surprise on Tuesday. Both sides seem very confident in their chances, publically anyways.
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remirol said:
The prediction markets/sites make an excellent measure of confidence.
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If Romney's people think their odds of winning are close to 50% then they are hopelessly deluded and unwilling to consider the facts. Romney could win. It's unlikely.
 
RandFan said:
If Romney's people think their odds of winning are close to 50% then they are hopelessly deluded and unwilling to consider the facts. Romney could win. It's unlikely.
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And more unlikely with every passing day, at the moment. I don't vacillate because there's little point in doing so, _and_ because the "probability" of Obama winning in this case isn't a measure of which lever voters will pull at random, but the probability that the polling data we have is sufficiently representative of both how many people will turn out, and how those people are going to vote -- and there are very, very few undecided voters left.

Simply put, nobody has yet shown any credible evidence that voter turnout will be skewed (though Nate has shown why it wouldn't matter if it was at 2004 or 2010 levels), or that somehow the polls are "oversampling" or "overrepresenting" Democrats. If the polls are sufficiently accurate and turnout holds even anywhere near as close as expected, the chance of Obama winning is near-100%.
 
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remirol said:
Year-over-year January to October numbers. First upward-looking October since the recession began.
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True, but if you look at February to October numbers you could claim the opposite. Cherry picking January vs February does not make for a strong argument. My point is that the current number is not different enough from recent data to suggest there has been any change in the slight trend downward this year.

remirol said:
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.
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First, there is no evidence that it is even a trend upwards at all. Second, there is a huge difference between this
having it flatten out at the bottem in preparation for going back up
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and
do you know why it went up 0.1%?
People are starting looking for work again.
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As much as I'd like that to be true, the stats don't really show it. Not yet.
 
Regnad Kcin said:
If wishes were horses, beggars would release their tax returns.
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Unless the beggars own the horses, in which case you can wish all you want, they are above releasing their tax returns....

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:D
 
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