Romney, Obama, Rasmussen

Leanmussen has "weighed in" again :rolleyes:

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:dl:
 
BenBurch said:
Perhaps he does't understand the EC, though, Foolmewunz - Many otherwise intelligent people have no concept of how it re-weights the electorate.

Romney could rise to 60% of the popular vote and still lose if all those gains are in states he was already going to win, Brainster.
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You usually understand English quite well. Who wrote this?

....this is not a popular-vote contest, but a 50-state electoral college race.
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NotJesus said:
Silver weights polls according to various factors, including whether they tend to have a Democratic or Republican lean. He also uses data from state polls in estimating the popular vote.

Here's an article that might be helpful.

You can question his methods if you like, but he's not just making it up.
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I found this interesting:

In 2008, the Gallup poll put Mr. Obama 11 points ahead of John McCain on the eve of that November’s election.

That was tied for Mr. Obama’s largest projected margin of victory among any of the 15 or so national polls that were released just in advance of the election. The average of polls put Mr. Obama up by about seven points.

The average did a good job; Mr. Obama won the popular vote by seven points. The Gallup poll had a four-point miss, however.

In 2010, Gallup put Republicans ahead by 15 points on the national Congressional ballot, higher than other polling firms, which put Republicans an average of eight or nine points ahead instead.

In fact, Republicans won the popular vote for the United States House by about seven percentage points — fairly close to the average of polls, but representing another big miss for Gallup.
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So Gallup tends to get the winners right; it just tends to overestimate the margin of their wins.
 
Upchurch said:
Is this a trick question?

As of this writing, Silver predicts Obama winning 50.4% of the popular vote and 74.6% chance of winning the Electoral College on November 6.
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He's talking about the likelihood of wwinning the popular vote -- in the right column of Silver's blog, under "Scenario Analysis."
 
Brainster said:
Okay, here's a question for all the Nate Silver fans here. Ever since the first debate, Mitt Romney has held a pretty clear advantage in the RCP national poll index. He's currently at 47.7% versus Obama's 46.8, an advantage of 0.9 percentage points. In five out of the last six polls, Romney has been in the lead; the one poll in that half-dozen that Obama was leading had him up by only 1 percentage point.

Okay, so I can understand why Silver still rates Obama as more likely to win the election; this is not a popular-vote contest, but a 50-state electoral college race. But how is it possible that Silver rates Obama as 71.4% likely to win the popular vote?
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Are you sure Silver is giving Obama a 71.4% chance of winning the popular vote?

When I looked at his site just now, he has Obama at 50.4% chance of winning the popular vote. He has Obama at a 74.6% chance of winning the election, but as you know, that's not the same thing as the popular vote.
 
JoeTheJuggler said:
Are you sure Silver is giving Obama a 71.4% chance of winning the popular vote?

When I looked at his site just now, he has Obama at 50.4% chance of winning the popular vote. He has Obama at a 74.6% chance of winning the election, but as you know, that's not the same thing as the popular vote.
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See above. 50.4% is Obama's projected share of the popular vote. 71.4% is his chance of winning the popular vote.
 
NotJesus said:
He's talking about the likelihood of wwinning the popular vote -- in the right column of Silver's blog, under "Scenario Analysis."
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Oh--I see where that's coming from.

So then the chart Upchurch and I are talking about is not a probability, but rather a projected outcome (much like the EC map above). (So why does it differ from the RCP average of polls?)

So Brainster's question is comparing outcomes with probabilities. The RCP poll and Silver's chart shows that the outcome of the popular vote is likely to be very close. Silver's analysis says that Obama has just over a 2/3 probability of winning the popular vote (by any margin at all). I don't see any contradiction or incompatability.

(Remember, 71% probability is not equal to 100% probability.)
 
Ah, I see. Still...
JoeTheJuggler said:
Oh--I see where that's coming from.

So then the chart Upchurch and I are talking about is not a probability, but rather a projected outcome (much like the EC map above). (So why does it differ from the RCP average of polls?)
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Correct.

And more importantly:
JoeTheJuggler said:
So Brainster's question is comparing outcomes with probabilities. The RCP poll and Silver's chart shows that the outcome of the popular vote is likely to be very close. Silver's analysis says that Obama has just over a 2/3 probability of winning the popular vote (by any margin at all). I don't see any contradiction or incompatability.
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Me either. Just because one group's poll does not agree with an overall meta-analysis, that doesn't imply that there is anything inherently wrong with either the poll or the meta-analysis. (Although, that would at least imply that there is a systemic problem with the a good number of the polls in the analysis.)
 
The odds of Obama winning any percentage of the popular vote can be plotted and it will result in a bell curve.

The odds of Obama only getting 0% are not zero but virtually zero.
The odds of Obama getting 100% are not zero but virtually zero.

So, the odds of Obama winning 2% is greater than 1% and the odds increase until you reach the peak of the curve where it begins to decrease. Somewhere along that point between getting 0% of the vote and getting 100% of the vote is the 74% probability. Silver has determined that Romney's odds of getting more than 50% of the vote are 71.4% Romney's chance of getting more than 50% is less than Obams's chance at getting 50%.

71.4% and 47% don't have a necessary relationship. Getting 47% (in the Silver example it's >50%) of the vote could be very like or not very likely or somewhere in between.
 
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Foolmewunz said:
Yes, it's a trick question. Does anyone here actually believe that Brainster doesn't CLEARLY understand the EC process? Show of hands. Anyone? Anyone? Buehler?
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Certainly not me. I think that perhaps Brainster is allowing his Republican brainwashing/talking points cognitive dissonance to get the better of him.

It's the same reason that Fox leads with the RCP average only if it's in Romney's favor for the past ten days. When/if he falls behind, they'll lead with Gallup or Rasmussen. They're playing up the popular vote now over at RNC HQ Fox, because they're planning on becoming the group they most abhor... the 2000 Whiny Democrats who wouldn't shut up about winning the popular vote yet losing the election. Wasn't the GOP rejoinder back then your basic "STFU, everyone knows the Ellectoral College elects the President. Didn't you libs read your Constitution? Sour Grapes because you lost!"
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I've been wondering about this myself over the last few days. I have wondered why exactly it is that Republican-leaning outlets have seemed to be harping on the popular vote so much of late, and now this makes sense. Unfortunately, it has also filled me with a sense of dread because of what you wrote next...

I expect to see much of this posturing on election night. The Fox talking heads, be it O'Reilly, van Susteren, Kelly, Hannity or Huckabee... are not ignorant. (Well,... okay, "Hannity" is a bit of a stretch...) But they're going to be staring sincerely into those cameras absolutely aghast that "The American People have spoken, and they chose goodness and light, but the evil Founding Fathers have taken your right to be heard away from you!"
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I think you are being too optimistic in your outlook. The pessimist in me thinks that things could be far more nasty post-election than that if there is a Romney win of the popular vote but an Obama win in the EC. The GOP/Tea Party has such an intense dislike for President Obama that if they lose the presidential election, I'm sure it will lead to all manner of conspiracy mongering which will be endorsed, at least tacitly, by the GOP party leadership. I even expect that we'll see "formal hearings" in the U.S. House after the elections "investigating" the situation. Some of the most extreme voices on the right may even start asking for impeachment proceedings in the House.

And Fox News and all the other right-wing media outlets will jump all over this, because they'll have to have something, no matter how nutty, to get the ever-dwindling hardcore conservative faithful to tune in on a regular basis. And what better than a narrative of a vast, liberal conspiracy to undo the founding principles of the nation regarding voting rights? (In all of this nonsense, the fact that the Electoral College elects the president and not the popular vote will be conveniently ignored; not to mention, expect to hear nothing about the 2000 election)

Trust me, this will be the NEW BIG THINGTM on the hard-right for the next four years if/when Obama is re-elected. It'll be the new birtherism; I seriously expect a tie-in to that looniness as well... something to the effect that The Manchurian Candidate has rigged the electoral process in the favor of communists/socialists/liberals/Muslims/etc.

:popcorn6

ETA: All that said, I honestly, sincerely hope I am 100% wrong in my prediction. However, I cannot shake the nagging thought that this will be the makeup of the political landscape on the right after the election.
 
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remirol said:
And from today's 538, Nate answers this question himself:

Basically, Romney has opened up huge leads in states that were always super-conservative, and not having any impact on the moderates.
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Yup, the red states are now turning absolute blood-red. They are getting so red that I anticipate all manner of insanity coming out of these states in the next four years, assuming President Obama is re-elected.

I think it'll make the stuff we've seen since 2010 seem like child's play. I hope I'm wrong, but with the rise of the Tea Party I've learned to never under-estimate just how crazy people are willing to get in order to preserve their sense of ideological purity.
 
RCP's electoral map is still listing states like PA as "tossup". President Obama is leading there consistently by about +5 points, and according to RCP's own data has led in every poll since February. But they're still listing PA as a "tossup"... give me a frakkin' break :rolleyes:

I knew there was something stupid going on at RCP when they had MO as "tossup" back when Romney was consistently ahead there by +5 or +6 points.

Can anyone make sense of this?
 
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MattusMaximus said:
RCP's electoral map is still listing states like PA as "tossup". President Obama is leading there consistently by about +5 points, and according to RCP's own data has led in every poll since February. But they're still listing PA as a "tossup"... give me a frakkin' break :rolleyes:
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What's really odd is that there was a poll by Susquehanna Polling, taken from 10/11 - 10/13 and published on 10/18, that showed Romney up by four points. I dismissed it at the time because Susquehanna is a Republican pollster and that poll was completely at odds with every other PA poll. Subsequent polls have confirmed that it's an outlier. RCP's list includes an earlier Susquehanna poll that had Obama up by 2 points, but not the one that had Romney ahead.
 
People Who Can't Do Math Are So Mad At Nate Silver

Joe Scarborough said:
"Nate Silver says this is a 73.6 percent chance that the president's going to win. Nobody in that campaign thinks they have a 73.6 percent -- they think they have a 50.1 percent chance of winning.

.... Anybody that thinks that this race is anything but a tossup right now is such an ideologue [that] they should be kept away from typewriters, computers, laptops, and microphones for the next ten days, because they're jokes."​
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Now Scarborough wants his general impression of the polls to count, too. He isn't the only Silver-basher who is unable to use numbers to explain why the forecaster is so wrong. The Daily Caller's Matt Lewis wrote a couple weeks ago that despite Silver's model showing a likely Obama victory, "my guess is that, right now, it’s probably a 50-50 proposition." The National Review's Josh Jordan's critique is more related to numbers than feelings, saying Silver's polling average is different than the Real Clear Politics average, because Silver weighs polls, while RCP averages them equally. But Silver does this because some pollsters have a better track record than others, and some have a clear partisan tilt, left or right. If his weighting is wrong, we'll know next week.
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Predictwise WTA numbers...

Obama 67.8%
Romney 32.4%

And Nate Silver at 538 is now projecting that President Obama is likely to crack 300 on the Electoral College.
 
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