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Hey guys! We'll be closing this thread shortly, but we will make an American politics megathread where we can continue the discussions in here. The new thread can be found here: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=383301 | ||
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Chriscras
Korea (South)2812 Posts
On November 01 2012 13:53 Signet wrote: That's just what the robots want us to believe! [edit -- oh I'm just trolling around. Although I think it's likely that at some point this century, we'll create an artificial superintelligence.] I'm voting Skynet for President and Sword Art Online for VP in 2052. | ||
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TheTenthDoc
United States9561 Posts
On November 01 2012 14:06 Chriscras wrote: I'm voting Skynet for President and Sword Art Online for VP in 2052. Vote for .hack//SIGN instead, it has prettier music. | ||
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Mohdoo
United States15689 Posts
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Zaqwert
United States411 Posts
On November 01 2012 14:39 Mohdoo wrote: Does anyone know if confidence in winning an election helps or hurts voter turn out? Seems like both sides are trying to claim victory, but I would have thought that would make voter turn out worse... It's pretty clear both parties are under the impression that to be thought of as "winning" will actually help you win, which is why both campaigns and their supporters try to spin every poll and piece of news into "proof" that their side is gonna win. I think it doesn't matter in close elections like this, everyone knows it's close and turns out. It matters in blowouts IMO and probably makes them bigger blowouts. Like everyone knew McCain was gonna lose and so that probably cost him maybe 1-2%, but even if you give him that he still woulda lost. So no I don't think it ever actually matters in who wins or loses. | ||
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Jumbled
1543 Posts
On November 01 2012 14:39 Mohdoo wrote: Does anyone know if confidence in winning an election helps or hurts voter turn out? Seems like both sides are trying to claim victory, but I would have thought that would make voter turn out worse... I would guess that the ideal is to be seen as headed for a narrow victory, so that supporters aren't demoralised, but aren't complacent either. That said, some factions place a lot of value simply on having their candidate be seen as a "winner." | ||
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Feartheguru
Canada1334 Posts
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ControlMonkey
Australia3109 Posts
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Jumbled
1543 Posts
On November 01 2012 15:09 ControlMonkey wrote: In its Australia it's the opposite, everyone tries to claim underdog status. That's because there's compulsory voting, so the main concern is to deter voters from making a protest vote. | ||
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aksfjh
United States4853 Posts
On November 01 2012 14:57 Jumbled wrote: I would guess that the ideal is to be seen as headed for a narrow victory, so that supporters aren't demoralised, but aren't complacent either. That said, some factions place a lot of value simply on having their candidate be seen as a "winner." People also like to vote for the winner in a lot of cases. In after election polling, a lot more people recount voting for the winner than actually voting for them. | ||
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sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
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Danglars
United States12133 Posts
On November 01 2012 14:39 Mohdoo wrote: Does anyone know if confidence in winning an election helps or hurts voter turn out? Seems like both sides are trying to claim victory, but I would have thought that would make voter turn out worse... Helps, usually. My guy is doing good, just needs some more people to seal the deal! Worked with Bush '04 for a recent example. He ran some ads in states he didn't have a prayer of winning and fooled quite a few into thinking he just had that much money left over after battleground states. | ||
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Romantic
United States1844 Posts
On November 01 2012 11:26 xDaunt wrote: Karl Rove is predicting that Romney will win 51-48 with 279 electoral votes or so. His interpretation of the polling numbers is interesting and basically in line with my thoughts. Source. Are all of these polls, especially state polls, really assuming 2008 turnout for 2012? That would just be too silly. It would mean they were off quite a bit. When in the past have polls done such a thing? I have a hard time believing in 2012 suddenly all the pollsters went bonkers. | ||
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Poorlilrich
Australia262 Posts
On November 01 2012 16:41 Romantic wrote: Are all of these polls, especially state polls, really assuming 2008 turnout for 2012? That would just be too silly. It would mean they were off quite a bit. When in the past have polls done such a thing? I have a hard time believing in 2012 suddenly all the pollsters went bonkers. They are doing the same thing they have done in the past, the difference is that 2008 was an outlier with record minority and youth turnout. In the past the turnout has always been the same, so you could base your model off previous elections with reasonable accuracy. But you are right, basing 2012 off 2008 is lunacy. Gallup and Rasmussen have both identified a 15 point shift in favour of the GOP in terms of party ID, making it R+2 or so overall. Based on that, and the early voting data in Ohio which is something like a 250,000 gain for the Republicans compared to '08, I'm predicting Romney takes Ohio and most of the battlegrounds. | ||
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ControlMonkey
Australia3109 Posts
On November 01 2012 15:11 Jumbled wrote: That's because there's compulsory voting, so the main concern is to deter voters from making a protest vote. So it's a case of tall poppy syndrome I guess. | ||
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El2iz3ab1et6h
United States2 Posts
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paralleluniverse
4065 Posts
And since then, Romney has gained big, and suddenly he's cherry picking polls as if it proves the doom of Obama, for example here. So there was a liberal conspiracy to make Obama's poll numbers better than they really were, and once Romney started gaining after Denver, suddenly, inexplicably, the conspiracy stopped, despite there being no change in polling methodology? More like, anything showing Obama winning is biased, and anything showing Romney winning must be the truth. Because, like the rest of the right-wing media, anything contrary with their worldview must be bias. Like Nate Silver giving Obama an 80% chance of winning, climate science, evolution. It's all bias. These cries of bias, from pundits and forum posters who don't know a damn thing about statistics, just underscores the continual and ceaseless anti-intellectualism of the right. Take for example the attacks on Nate Silver from The National Review, which I responded to earlier by pointing out that the author is clueless about statistics. He hails Real Clear Politics's unweighted average of polls as somehow superior to Silver's. He doesn't know that it's a fact of statistics that weighting by the sample size of polls reduces the standard error, and that Silver does even better because he weights by sample size and the past reliability of the poll. And there's nothing at all "subjective" about this weighting method, as the author claims. Silver isn't weighting anything, his model is, and he takes what his computer spits out. It's the model, not the man. Then there's Politico quoting Joe Scarborough with an article from another know-nothing, who says that: "Nate Silver says this is a 73.6 percent chance that the president is going to win? Nobody in that campaign thinks they have a 73 percent chance — they think they have a 50.1 percent chance of winning. And you talk to the Romney people, it's the same thing," Scarborough said. "Both sides understand that it is close, and it could go either way. And anybody that thinks that this race is anything but a tossup right now is such an ideologue, they should be kept away from typewriters, computers, laptops and microphones for the next 10 days, because they're jokes." This guy doesn't understand probability. There is absolutely nothing paradoxical about a close election race and one candidate having a high chance of winning. Suppose that in a population of 1000, the true state of the race is 510 people voting for Obama, 490 people voting for Romney and that these preferences have held steady for a very long time. Then polls of this population will show a very tight race, but Obama would have a very high chance of winning, because the preference of the population doesn't change much. Closeness does not necessarily imply that the probability of Obama winning is 50.1%. This extreme example isn't even too far from the real world, Obama has a small, but consistent and stubborn lead in the battleground states that matter. And here's an absolutely moronic tweet from Politico again: Avert your gaze, liberals: Nate Silver admits he's simply averaging public polls and there is no secret sauce This is the pinnacle of stupidity. No shit Nate Silver is "simply averaging public polls". Nate Silver has been completely transparent in explaining his model. You can read all about it on Wikipedia and the links within. We don't want secret sauce, we want rigorous and sound statistical methodology, and that's exactly what Nate's Silver does. And as Krugman argues, this "secret sauce" statement is possibly motivated by the fact that Nate Silver, and statisticians like him, makes the job of the innumerate pundit obsolete. If not by analyzing polls, how else would you predict elections? By reading pundits, like the ones who prove to the world that they know absolutely nothing about statistics when they write articles like the ones linked above? Gut feeling, which is pretty much what xDaunt does? And to prefer relying on that, instead of textbook statistical analysis, because the latter shows Obama winning, is not surprising given the anti-intellectualism of the right. What are the chances a right-winger will trust in evidence and math, when they reject climate science and evolution? What we don't see is right-wing commentators making any sensible criticism of Silver's statistical methodology. Obviously, because as the above article writers have proved to the world, they don't know a damn thing about statistics. They just call him bias because he shows that Obama is winning. In fact, the only valid criticism I've seen in the media is the article from David Brooks who says that Silver's model can't predict events like the leaking of the 47% video, an awful debate performance from Obama, etc. And this is true. That's why Silver has a nowcast and a forecast, and why the forecast isn't a flat horizontal line, because the information up to the current time increases as time goes on. Of course, it's not just pundits who don't know anything about statistics. There's a lot of posters here too. For example, xDaunt, again, claims that: On October 31 2012 23:56 xDaunt wrote: The disconnect and inconsistency between many of the polls is very amusing. Someone's going to write a book on this when it's all done. But that is not at all surprising. Polls have margins of error. The fact that there's a lot of inconsistency between polls showing Obama winning and Romney winning in Florida just shows that there's a tight race. If the true vote for each candidate is almost 50%, then we would expect that about half the polls show Obama winning and the other half show Romney winning. And the fact that this is what we see is merely indicative of a very close race in Florida. There is nothing amusing, unexpected, or wrong about it. There's this guy who thinks a poll of 1000 people is OK for a small state, but too small for the country. On September 12 2012 01:53 radiatoren wrote: However, ~1000 people are too small a sample to carry any significance in itself for a country with 315 million inhabitants or even only counting swing states of about 76 millions. [...] In other words: The poll is invalid from the get go due to too few participants. Had it been for a single state, like North Carolina, 1000 would be a decent poll, but that is not the case here. This guy demonstrates failure to understand some of the most basic facts of statistics: if the population size is large, a poll of 1000 people is virtually just as accurate for a population of 5 million as it is for a population of 500 million as I've explained here. And then there's people just making shit up: On November 01 2012 00:35 Recognizable wrote: It's the same every election. I believe some mathmatician once proved that polls didn't do any better than random chance. And with no supporting evidence. The fact is that according to Nate Silver, Obama has almost an 80% chance of winning. And the prediction markets put it in the high 60s. To deny this by cherry picking polls (national polls, not even state polls) that show Romney winning, as xDaunt does, is completely dishonest. It's not even valid because an aggregate of polls is a lower variance estimator than picking a few polls where Romney is winning. It's also absolutely hypocritical for xDaunt because he was criticizing polls for exhibiting liberal bias before the race tightened after Denver. But that doesn't mean that the race is over. A 20% chance of winning is not bad at all, a 20% chance is 1 in 5, it would really be over if it were 1 in 20 (5%) or 1 in 100 (1%). 20% events happen all the time. A 20% chance is equal to the chance that a randomly selected bronze player is zerg (according to SC2Ranks). And if it turns out that Romney does win, it does not in itself prove that Silver was wrong or that I was wrong in believing him, simply because 20% chance events happen *all the time*. To claim otherwise, would be to not understand probability. Nate Silver publishes the vote share by state along with a margin of error (95% confidence interval). Therefore, theory suggests that we would expect that about 1 in 20 of his predictions are wrong in the sense that they lie outside of his margins of error. If it turns out that he called somewhat more than 1 in 20 states incorrectly, then it would show that Nate Silver is wrong, and that I'm wrong for believing him. Another reason why Nate Silver could be wrong is if the polls are wrong. But as Drew Linzer explains, there is good evidence to believe that the polls are accurate. Not that xDaunt can use this argument anyway without being a hypocrite, since he is selectively pointing to polls where Romney is winning. If there's one single reason why I didn't become a right-winger, it would unmistakably be because I hate anti-intellectualism, and the dumb attacks from the right on Silver, on this forum and in the punditry, which only prove that they know nothing about statistics, is exactly why I hate the right. | ||
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acker
United States2958 Posts
For example, Intrade's currently running between 65 and 70% chance of Obama victory. If you think it's, say, closer to 40% chance Obama victory, you could make quite a bit of money off of that 25% difference. Nate Silver on the turnout issue, on the popular vote: Suppose, for example, that you take the consensus forecast in each state. (By “consensus” I just mean: the average of the different forecasts.) Then you weigh it based on what each state’s share of the overall turnout was in 2008, in order to produce an estimate of the national popular vote. 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. (In each of these examples, you’d get almost exactly the same outcome if you used the FiveThirtyEight forecast alone rather than the consensus. We’re on the high end and the low end of the consensus in different states for Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama, but it pretty much balances out over all.) | ||
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urashimakt
United States1591 Posts
On November 01 2012 09:21 sc2superfan101 wrote: maybe in the court of law, but I'm not a jury or a judge. I don't play by the innocent unless proven guilty game unless I am on a jury. in real life, you're either innocent or you're guilty, and the law's ability or inability to prove the charges is irrelevant to the fact of whether you broke the law or not. and have we honestly gotten to where Obama's defense is "I'm innocent until proven guilty"? The point of innocence until proven guilty isn't that you should need to use it as a defense, but that an individual should be expected to jump to logic and discourse before witch hunt. | ||
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Velr
Switzerland10716 Posts
While most of the sane word is shaking it's head how a guy like Romney, who has like no message but told more obvious lies and flip flops than tought possible "pre"-Romney, isomehow is still in the race. Hint: The main problem with the US elections are the media. The problem is not that they are biased, not at all. The problem is that they are allowed to lie and spin stuff whichever way they want and sell it as truth.. Why are there no consequences for manipulations like this? Free Speak? Rofl... Well.. How such "News"-Channels could ever get big is the really sad story... | ||
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paralleluniverse
4065 Posts
If you're a Republican who thinks deficits are bad, you should love the fiscal cliff, instead of agreeing that it will tank the economy by using the exact same Keynesian logic that you ignore when talking about the stimulus. Spending cuts are great, right? And then there's Romney spending plan, which involves outrageous cuts in virtually everything in order to add up, but he won't tell us what he's going to cut: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/10/30/mitt-romneys-voodoo-spending-cuts/?wprss=rss_ezra-klein Why not just let the fiscal cliff do the cutting since reducing the federal budget by 40% (which is what the Romney spending plan requires to add up), isn't politically feasible? | ||
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