Nate Silver today has Obama at a 3 to 1 chance of winning reelection. He is far outside of polling organizations that show many states in play and national commentators talking about how razor thin this margin is.
But, he’s “just presenting statistics,” right? If Romney wins, can’t he just say that he told all of us that there was a 25% chance of that happening, and it happened! How could someone like Silver ever be proven a fraud* or just plain wrong?
*I’m not suggesting he’s a fraud. He seems to have his shit together, but let’s pretend that he was an old fashioned snake oil salesman. What would prove that?
ETA: Should be question mark in the thread title…can’t edit it…
He’s not far outside the polling- the national polls, taken altogether, show a near-tie, but the state polls (again, taken altogether) show Obama with a stable and significant advantage in enough states to get ~290 EVs (and very close in a few other states).
I don’t know how he could be proven a fraud, but his credibility would certainly take a hit if Romney wins (assuming the percentages stay about the same until election day). But he’s not brand new at this- he’s taken seriously, and his predictions are taken seriously, largely because his predictions in 2008 and 2010 were very close to the actual election results.
I don’t know. If he’s a fraud, then he’s a fraud who somehow managed to predict very accurately the results for the elections in 2008 and 2010.
Why is that the case? Flip a coin twice and have it land on heads both times. Does my credibility take a hit if I tell you there is only a 25% chance of that happening?
The free market. If his product (election predictions) suck, no one’s gonna buy them.
If he’s “wrong,” I imagine he’ll go back, look at where he messed up, re-calibrate his methodology, and try again. If he *is *exposed as a fraud, snake-oil salesman, or just plain ineffective at predicting election outcomes, his gravy train will ride away. It’s in his best interest to get it right.
And if he does get it “wrong,” it’s not in his best interest to just throw his hands up and say “Welp, I said there was a 25% chance Romney would win.” I honestly think he would own up to the miscalculation, figure out what really happened for his prediction to be so off, and hopefully move forward. He’s not this highly regarded because he’s been largely wrong. And where he has been wrong, he looks at the variables that caused his predictions to be off so he can correct his methodology.
Indeed, if he stays in this business for 30 years and successfully predicts the winner of each presidential race by declaring them the 75% favorite, then he isn’t all that he’s cracked up to be. He should have “lost” some and had been estimating the percentage too low.
But we don’t have enough data at this point to know, if we’re just looking at Presidential races.
Just to make an initial note, the national polling can be “Razor thin” but you’re still going to have one winner and one loser (disregarding a 269/269 split). In the states that matter most for getting 270, Obama has had slim but consistent leads. If the average is constantly putting him +2 in Ohio, it’s very likely that he is, in fact, +2 in Ohio and while +2 might be a slim lead, it’s a consistent and reasonable one. More so than assuming every poll must be off by three and it’s really Romney +1.
No single election will prove Silver wrong. Let’s just say that on election day, the model shows Obama getting exactly 270 EVs. And let’s say Obama loses Ohio by a handful of votes but gets every other state the model predicted. Does Obama losing the presidency show Silver’s model is garbage or Silver is a fraud? I’d say no… you’d need a string of failures (like wrongly predicting several states by notable margins) to start claiming the model is poor.
The other obvious issue is “Garbage In, Garbage Out”. If Romney wins Ohio by 7 points, there was no hint that that would happen and it would be unfair to blame it on Silver’s model per se. That would be a more systemic issue with polling in general. You could say Silver’s model is no good because you have no accurate sources of data but that’s different from an innate flaw with the model itself.
That’s the great thing about manufacturing odds for one-time events - you can never be proven wrong.
Still, what Andy said was right. He isn’t outside the mainstream. Everyone who follows the polls agrees the polls from the swing states give Obama an advantage, even though the national polls are showing they’re roughly tied.
If CNN or whoever is saying something different it’s because it’s easier, or they don’t want to piss anybody off.
I guess that’s my point. He wouldn’t be “wrong.” He said that there was a 25% chance that Romney would win, and he did. There is no “wrong” there anymore than if I told you before flipping two coins that there was a 75% chance you wouldn’t get two heads in a row.
Why should he then have to recalculate or do anything else?
The thing is, he’s not making just one prediction. He’s making a whole bunch of them - forecasting outcomes down to the congressional district level - and so you have more than one prediction to judge him on. Even if Obama wins, Nate could still be “wrong” if he gets the electoral vote totals wrong - he’s currently predicting Obama with 294 EVs (as of late Monday), and if that’s his prediction going into the election and Obama gets 315, Nate would have missed.
It’s not about getting it right. I’ve been saying for a year that Obama will win a close election because there are too many states that he won last time for Romney to flip.
Who cares that I said that? It’s a gut feeling, based on nothing more than my living through a lot of elections.
Silver, however, has published a methodology that states line by line what he considers important, what specific numbers he evaluates, and how he weights and treats them. It’s that public methodology that is being tested. It’s like making your source code public. Everybody who is qualified can test it for themselves. If it doesn’t work, everybody knows why.
There are others who make wildly different predictions based on different assumptions about different numbers, most notably a pair of University of Colorado professors whose software has Romney winning with 330 electoral votes.
They both can’t right. Not even “right.” One will be wrong, and I mean wrong. The actual results may wind up somewhere in the middle, of course, but the odds are that one of them will be totally discredited. It’s simply not true that either is in a real “I can never be wrong” position. That misunderstands the situation.
One thing that many on the right forget is that Nate Silver is also respected because he demonstrated before how and why some pollsters in the past were indeed selling snake oil, one of the pollsters busted by Silver was a pollster that DailyKos used to look at, (they dropped that pollster after the Silver expose) so one of the reasons he is well respected is that he also has done a service by continuing to clean up the wells from all sides.
What Braniac4 said, but also this. It’s not the case that Silver can never be wrong, but he’d have to badly screw up a couple of elections, or slightly screw up a shitload of elections, in order to be wrong. But that’s not just Silver, that’s anyone who makes predictions that they claim to have a probability other than 100%.
Silver is getting a lot of attention on that score, I think, because he works for the NY Times and he’s predicting an Obama victory and it fits into the narrative of “the liberal media tries to have its own facts.”
A candidate defying the odds would not be troubling to Silver. If NO candidates defy the odds, well, that would be a problem.
On his website he gives the odds for a lot of different scenarios. I am sure that after the election he will crunch those numbers to see if his percentages match up with reality and adjust his model accordingly.
If he is “wrong” about Obama, I’m sure a lot of people will abandon him, and to them I say good riddance. As long as the win/lose ration is consistent with his model, I will still follow him closely.
He’s really not that far outside. And he takes all of these polling organizations into account in his model. By taking in ALL the data, the theory is that he can then be more accurate than a single polling organization can hope to be.
And national commentators talking about how “razor thin” the margin is? I think for the most part they are trying to attract people to view their own particular news station. It’s like getting viewers to watch your football coverage - you don’t get commentators the week before talking about how it’s going to be a blow-out and a waste of time to watch. They talk about what a great, close game it will be and how everyone better tune in to watch because you never know who might win.
Most news networks treat the election like a sporting event. Many people do as well, more’s the pity.
Besides which, he’s not running models on just the Presidential election. He’s doing it for every major federal election there is. So that’s a TON of opportunities to prove or disprove the worth of his system. That’s why his past record in '08 (and, IIRC, '10) is so remarkable.
I know it SOUNDS great, but for Romney to have a 1 in 4 shot at winning, the polls have to be very, very close. 3-to-1 is not by any stretch of the imagination a commanding lead.
What do you think Michael Dukakis’s chances at this point in 1988 were? Probably one in a hundred. Mondale in 1984? Dole in 1996? Not even that; they were absolute toast and had no realistic shot at all.