Politics & Current Events
missymo
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Nate Silver, anyone?
Anyone else as impressed with his projections as I am? Once again he knocked it out of the park. To be honest, his commentary soothed my frayed nerves in the final days of the election.
Who was it on this board that scoffed at his methodology? I think it was Breitbart. How you like him now, Andy? 
Re: Nate Silver, anyone?
Where is Andy??? lolol
Also, the predictions from the bobbsey twins (Linda & Terry Jamison). F*IN malarkey...
I blame liberal bias. The election is skewed because the election had a higher proportion of Obama votes. So desperate.
I blame (read: thank) Fox. You have nothing to gain by making it sound like your guy is a sure thing if it's going to scare the other guy's supporters into getting out to vote. Enthusiasm gap my @$$.
Yeah, I wonder if they would have done better if they'd openly said, "Look - the electorate college is close and we don't know how it's gonna go, but we need to send a message so let's go after the popular vote like we've got nothing to lose."
So true! Will their base finally admit they are a bunch of know nothings, or keep clinging to the partisan lies? I found this run down of incorrect predictions to be hilarious...why do people trust info from these jokers?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mobileweb/michael-sigman/pundits-romney-election-results_b_2088155.html
Nate Silver had a ridiculously good night. Like, insanely good. When most of the major news outlets were claiming the Presidential race was tied, he was steady the whole time and nailed it the Presidential outcome with incredible accuracy. He even called Florida as 50-50, and Florida may not be decided for days.
Nate's Senate projections weren't quite as good, in particular in Montana and North Dakota. I imagine with North Dakota the post-game analysis will be the polling there was really thin because it wasn't thought to be a close contest. In both ND and MT Nate's "State Fundamentals" proved to be off. I'm guessing ND has legitimately shifted slightly as more people move there from other states for jobs. Not sure on MT, but Montanta is possibly the hardest state to model politically in general.
Do you have a link that scores his senate projections? I was too lazy to do a race-by-race comparison, but couldn't find anything online.
Not surprised. AB spoke as if her words were fact, when they couldn't have been more wrong. I wasn't really expecting her to show up and eat crow.
Someone else will have to tabulate the election prediction game!
I'll give her the benefit of the doubt - she never posts during the day anyway.
I'm willing to play nice because I want her to come back and discuss if she still thinks the polls had the wrong assumptions, or why things went down the way they did.
I'll post this here, too, because it is that awesome.
Which states was he wrong on? The map looks right but he predicted Obama 313 and Romney 225. Right now it's 303 - 206 with Florida still in play.
I just put together a quick back of the envelope spreadsheet of his senate projections vs. the results. There's a caveat that some states haven't finished counting yet, so the numbers could still change.
One big thing that jumps out at me is Republicans really underperformed relative to Nate's model, and presumably the polls. The only states the R outperformed the projection by more than half a percentage point were Wyoming and Tennessee, where the projected big winner won even bigger than expected, and Nebraska, where the Republican turned what was supposed to be a close race into a landslide.
Third Party candidates also had a huge night which threw off some of the projections. Sobhani pulled 17% in Maryland, with more coming from the presumed Republican vote than Democratic vote. David VanDerBeek pulled almost 5% in Nevada and Dan Cox pulled 6.5% in MT. Andrew Horning pulled almost 6% of the vote in Indiana, presumably pulling more from disgusted Mourdock voters.
Nate's biggest Senate misses by percentage of vote were Vermont (Favorite won bigger than expected), Mississippi (Thinly polled blowout that was slightly less of a blowout than projected), Maryland (Overperforming Independant sucked away votes from both), West Virginia (Favorite won bigger than expected), Rhode Island (Favorite won bigger than expected), Hawaii (Favorite won bigger than expected) and Wyoming (Favorite won bigger than expected). In all those cases his model was only as good at the polling, and there was almost certainly not much polling for those "safe" seats.
In terms of outcome, Nate's biggest miss is North Dakota, where he projected a R win by 5 points and instead the Dem won by 1. I already mentioned that Nebraska was projected to be a nail biter which turned out to be a big R win, one of their few bright spots of the night. Montana may count as a miss as well, as he projected a narrow win for the R, but it looks like the D will pull a 2-3 point win off.
My guess is the pollsters on a whole need to revamp their voter models. I think a lot of people expected that 2008 was a fluke and a lot of Obama voters wouldn't show up again in 2012. It looks like a lot more of them did than expected, which helped provide some nice coattails for the Senate Democrats.
I believe his model called Florida a true tossup and split the difference between the two candidates. If you look at the Electoral Vote distribution, he actually viewed 332 as Obama's most likely total followed by 303.
Did he even have VA in Obama's column? That one surprised me.
he did.