Nate Silver is a limp wristed queer. You can ignore his faggoty polls.
Ultimately the 538 model depends on the polls. If the polls are wrong the model will be wrong. The model does have some bells and whistles but they aren’t enough to overcome a systematic problem in the polls. 538’s final state-by-state prediction is probably going to be very close to that arrived by taking a simple average of the last 10 polls in every state.
A sophisticated modeling approach is more useful in races where polling is fairly light like primaries. IIRC in the 2008 Democratic primaries, Nate significantly improved his forecasts by combined polling data with state demographic data. A model also helps in understanding a race which is some months away. I believe every single state in the 538 model today is leaning the same direction as June which is impressive considering that there was much less polling data then and the model relied more heavily on economic variables. To understand exactly how state-by-state unemployment numbers will affect an election you need a good model.This. Silver is making lots of predictions. You can’t judge his accuracy based on just one of them. But you can get a good idea of whether his predictions are statistically significant themselves by looking at the lot.
This is why he’s functionally different from those meaningless oracles, like the high school football team that predicts the presidential election since whenever, or the octopus who picks a March Madness bracket.
Also, keep in mind, a small advantage in the polling popular vote for a state does not necessarily equal a small percentage chance of winning. For example, if Obama is polling a state at 52%, with a 2% margin of error, means Obama should win the start 66% of the time.
How is he different, in this, from any other pollster? Why are you singling him out?
“Other pollster”? Silver isn’t a pollster.
Nate Silver isn’t the only person modeling the elections. Sam Wang of Princeton Electoral Consortium is another: he tends to give much higher odds for an Obama victory. After the election, the various polling aggregators (for that is what they are) can discuss where they went wrong and right. Silver has 50 probabilities for 50 states over 2 elections: that’s a sample of 100, enough to do some crude probabilistic matching perhaps.
The time series of the reported probabilities can be compared across analysts: it seems to me that Sam Wang will fall down under this criteria.
Meanwhile, when faced with all this mathematical rigor, conservatives are predictably butthurt. Never mind that Silver hasn’t touched his model since last Spring and no substantive objections have been offered. It must be librull bias!
I think the Bickers and Berry prediction is weak. They based their prediction on economic indicators not poll results. They tracked indicators like unemployment and income and then correlated those with the outcomes of past elections.
Now I’m not saying that’s valueless but I think that approach has its limits. People do make voting choices for economic reasons but there are also dozens of other reasons. And more critically, I think it’s wrong to make a prediction based on what you think people should believe and ignore contradicting data on what people say they believe.
I don’t think you need to be concerned about Silver being treated too lightly if his predictions prove incorrect. There is an entire media machine ready to tear him apart. If he predicts even a 51% Obama re-elect chance and Romney actually wins Silver will get way more than his share of mocking and derision, and will likely go into the next cycle with very little national credibility.
Predictions made by math and science are treated with far less mercy if they are wrong than predictions made by intuition, woo, or “gut feelings”. Just look at the jailed earthquake scientists for an example of this. Or, conversely, Dick Morris has been wrong more times about his political gut feelings than anybody in the world, but still has a job and his predictions are still given credence.
I don’t know if that’s the situation here. Nate Silver is perceived as liberal, and he’s predicting success (in aggregate) for Democrats, who are also perceived as liberal, and so people, particularly conservatives and political hipsters, are skeptical that he’s even using a model.
Conservatives are skeptical because he’s saying something they don’t want to hear (and of course liberals like the fact that he’s saying something they approve of), and I think a lot of political reporters resent the fact that he’s making predictions based just about entirely on polls and hard data without a lot of the other speculative bullshit that has come to pass for political reporting. I can’t vouch for Silver’s statistical methods, but they’re a tool that can be used to understand what’s going on. If it’s this or watching a debate and making guesses about what viewers will think about the body language of the candidates, I know what I consider more informative.
I don’t think the criticism in the OP is reasonable. It’s like criticizing a weatherman if he tells you there’s an 80 percent chance of rain and it doesn’t rain. Maybe the station’s weather satellite stinks, or maybe he was right - because even if there’s an 80 percent chance of rain there’s a decent chance it’s not going to rain, and it doesn’t make sense to demand certainty when we can’t know for sure what’s going to happen.
Even if Obama won by taking Florida and losing Ohio we would start to question Silver’s model.
I think one thing that would make me a bit skeptical is if “simpler” models (like a straight average of the polls) performs better. That would at least imply that his weighting and adjusting is not adding value to the predictions.
That would be a more valid criticism than whether or not he ‘calls’ the presidency correctly. At least that’s two events he predicted to be unlikely in the *opposite *directions. (Today he has Ohio at 73% Obama, Florida 64% Romney).
God. Yes. Seriously, I could not agree with this more.
Look, even if you think that Silver is a partisan hack, he’s completely transparent with his methodology, so you can easily go and see exactly what he’s doing and say, “OK, I think you are inappropriately weighting this set of polls” or whatever. It’s not like he’s just making up a bunch of bullshit.
I don’t understand this criticism. Silver also predicted 34/36 2010 Senate races correctly (24 Pubs and 10 Dems), and the two he got wrong were states that elected Dems where his model said Pubs (Colorado and Nevada). Do the people criticizing him now think he was just trying to set everyone up two years ago?
Well, ok, I do understand the criticism. It’s just wrong.
You can’t understand it with your brain. You feel it with your gut.
Do you have a hard link for this? I’m also pretty sick of the constant stream of bullshit about Silver “massaging the numbers in favor of his preferred candidate” and would like something to point people to who are unwilling to investigate his methodology.
Being off the mark consistently in the past. He has a reputation that’s well deserved for accuracy, but I guess it’s possible he could throw this prediction on purpose…for what reason I have no idea.
For me, the least interesting thing from Silver is his odds of Obama winning the election; I find his exploration of the data far more intriguing and thought-provoking. Focusing on the odds is like focusing on how many stars Roger Ebert gives a movie and ignoring his excellent film analysis.