No, you’d question the polls - that show that Obama’s ahead in Ohio and behind in Florida.
BTW, no one will be more critical of Silver if he turns out wrong than Silver himself, in the sense that he will actually attempt to find out where the error was. I am currently reading his book The Signal and the Noise and one of his themes is that folks need to accept that there is uncertainty in prediction.
The only thing worse than Nate Silver are his (cult like) followers, who disregard certain points because “Nate says otherwise”.
The only thing worse? Can’t think of a single thing on earth worse than Nate Silver or his followers, huh? Wow. Partisan butt hurt much?
Also, it isn’t that Nate says otherwise, its that the numbers say otherwise. Nate is a stats geek. All he cares about are the numbers. You aren’t mad at Nate, or at those that follow his blog, you’re just mad at the numbers. You can admit it. Its ok.
As opposed to disregard the state polls, which have a record of accuracy (as a whole), just because it “doesn’t fit” or whatever?
This is a threadshit.
And this is a personal insult. Both of you are encouraged to take this to the Pit because it’s not appropriate for this forum.
So, you’re saying he’s blinding them? With SCIENCE?
“She’s tidied up, and I can’t find anything!”
I apologize for the butt hurt remark and retract. Although I believe I’ve seen that phrase used several times recently in this forum without any mod comments. Nevertheless, consider it withdrawn with apologies.
Not that I take Nate’s detractors seriously, since they’re obviously engaged in a smear campaign (they didn’t seem to have any complaints in 2010), but he is making state-by-state predictions. That’s 50 different results we can evaluate. So if he has Obama winning Ohio by a margin of 2.1%, and Romney wins by a margin of 2%, that’s a big enough swing to call his model into question.
If the wingers really want to get angry, they should check out Sam Wang’s prediction.
I’m guessing no. But what do I know, right?
What numbers? People constantly say this, probably because they seemingly believe the people who criticize Nate’s “methodology” don’t understand polling nor statistics, but Nate looks at the top line of any given poll, applies an arbitrary weight to it and then uses some super secret formula which no one knows to come up with his final percentages. Hell, I could do that, too. Silver’s popularity seems to come from his accuracy in the 2008 election (an election, mind you, where he received internal polling from the Obama administration). Yet the same people who adore Silver seem to ignore the fact that he was just okay in 2010. In fact, he was no more accurate than Rasmussen (who everyone around here loves to denigrate).
Now never mind the fact that Silver doesn’t really delve past a polls top line, even looking at an aggregate of all the polls, Obama is about at 47%/48%, significantly lower than where he is on Silver’s model. When do we break out the “Nate Silver vs. the World” headline? :rolleyes:
Silver isn’t predicting anything. If you don’t understand that, you don’t understand what he is doing on a very fundamental level and you need to go back to school.
He is aggregating a bunch of publicly available data and running a Monte Carlo style probabilistic set of simulations. At this time, Obama wins the electoral vote in about 73% of the simulations. There is no right or wrong here.
His models in previous elections were not just accurate for the presidential race, they were also very accurate in every result for the individual States for the presidential race as well as all of the Senate races.
On the whole, the higher the percentage for something to occur in the model, the more likely it is to happen. This should be blindingly obvious. That means that the occasional 90%+ change thing is not going to happen and a lot of the 51-55% chance things aren’t going to happen.
You have to look at everything in his models as a group. If way too many high percentage things fail, his model has issues. This has not been the case with him historically.
That’s the popular vote. Silver gives Obama 50.3% change of winning the popular vote.
(Bolding mine)
You’re just flat out wrong about the bolded part - as I mentioned before he got 34/36 senate races right. He also correctly predicted 36 of the 37 state governorships, and he wasn’t far off on the House, predicting a gain of 55 Republican seats (they actually gained 63).
I have to disagree with Airbeck. You’re not mad at the numbers - you don’t even know what the numbers are.
Anyone can look at the aggregate of polls (just look at a list of polls from a particular state), and see that Obama is ahead by about 2-3 points in OH, and ahead by a similar amount or more in NV, IA, and WI.
No, he was very close in 2010. Within 8 House seats, 1 Senate seat, and 1 governorship. His predictions in 2010 were excellent.
Yes, his national popular vote prediction is a bit more “mysterious” then his state predictions- I’m not exactly sure how he shows Obama ahead by about 1, when the national aggregate shows it dead even. But states are what matters, and it’s clear that the state polls in aggregate show Obama ahead. And you continue to ignore state polls, just because they don’t fit your narrative.
Frankly, given conservative conspiracy theories, I wouldn’t be surprised if they thought he was lying, and was actively and constantly mucking with his model on an ongoing basis to “throw the election to Obama.”
Yes and no. You’re right about the simulations and using those results as the basis for analysis, but I don’t think it’s misleading to call it a prediction. It’s standard terminology for modeling - make a prediction (by whatever methodology the model uses) and test it against what really happens. Silver uses a probabilistic model to make his predictions, but they’re still predictions.
With 538, you run into some trouble when you try to use his electoral forecast/nowcast as a prediction, because there’s no way in hell Obama’s gonna get 294.6 electoral votes. If you frame it in terms of likelihood of winning (72.9%), there’s nothing wrong with calling that a prediction.
I think it’s pretty common to reserve the word “prediction” for people who are making claims about what’s going to happen. What Nate’s doing is more properly referred to as probabilistic forecasting, which is a bit more sophisticated. It’s a fascinating topic and it’s not entirely clear how to measure the accuracy of any given forecaster. There are reasonable methods, but there’s no clear right method like there is with a yes/no prediction.
But yes, if Romney wins, there are a lot of people who are going to claim that the model’s wrong. It’s not at all accurate, but since when has the average person cared about making accurate claims?
Is that right? I think that’s the amount of the vote his model predicts, because when you look at the scenarios over on the right-side, it says:
So his model is showing a 69.1% chance of Obama winning the popular vote.
I think that we’re all in agreement and this is more of a semantic issue. If Silver were to give 1000 different events a 75% chance of happening, that doesn’t make him “wrong” when 200-300 of them don’t happen. He would be “wrong” if over 900 of them happened of if only a few hundred of them happened.
You are correct. He is projected to win 50.3% of the popular vote which is the average result of the simulations but wins the popular vote in 69.1% of the simulations some by more and some by less of the 50.3%.