I don’t understand why people have such a massive woody for Silver - he is no better or worse than anyone else I see, and he puts reasonable error bars on his predictions so it’s easy to say he’s “right on the money.” Put +/- 10% on all my predictions, then lay your roses at my feet tomorrow instead.
I like him just because he shows his work. It appeals to the engineer/mathematician in me. The errors bars help too - they always generate a nice woody. And the charts… oh the charts… did you see his “following the election” guide for tonight? Good stuff.
Also, I’m a huge baseball fan, and his work there was pretty revolutionary.
The great thing about Silver is that he boils down the results of what everyone else is doing.
The best three sources of info leading up to an election, from my perspective, are Silver’s blog, RCP, and Intrade.
Personally, I have a lot more trust for someone who admits that he has error bars, and says up front what they are. Looking confident is not always a good thing.
I use RealClearPolitics - is that what you mean by RCP?
And I haven’t seen anything to convince me this is a tossup. Yeah, there is pretty tepid support here in Illinois for both guys but from what I’ve seen and heard around here more people are turned off by Giannoulias and the family bank scandal than the fact Kirk is a big fat liar about his military record. Nate Silver/538 have had Kirk as the favorite for weeks now and the polls have had Kirk in the lead pretty consistently. The fact he is anti-abortion and anti-gay marriage will only serve to bring voters out in droves downstate.
I think part of the reason this is seen as a toss-up is because this is Obama’s old seat and there seem to be a lot of people out there buying into the myth Illinois is a solid blue state. Sorry, but it is very, very purple here. The Dems have never been guaranteed victory in statewide races in Illinois.
Of course, I would like nothing more than to be proven wrong about this tonight but I think the chances of that happening are slim to none.
Cite? That’s the exact opposite of everything I’ve ever heard about which party tends to have higher turnout rates.
I think that the biggest reason that Illinois has been considered a tossup is that the polling showed an unusually large number of undecideds. As the undecideds go, so will go the race, and nobody really knew which way that would be.
Three out of four ain’t bad.
I believe the thinking is that Republicans normally turn out to vote for their candidates for each election anyway. If there is a generic bump in turnout rates, it usually means that more Democrat voters have turned out, along with the usual number of Republican voters. No cite for any of this, sorry.
Right now it looks like 239 is sewed up for the GOP, with the Democrats at 185 and 11 seats still undecided. This is a win for me.
Right now, it’s 51 Democrats, 46 Republicans, 3 up in the air. Close but no cigar.
Republicans 27, Democrats 15, 7 undecided, 1 Independent (Lincoln Chaffee (RI)).
Undecided Gubernatorial Races:
Illinois: will go D
Minn: will go D
Vermont: pick 'em
Maine: will go R
Conn: will go R
Ore: will go R
Alaska: will go R
So on this pick, I’ll give myself a conditional cigar.
And on my prediction, Rehberg did indeed do worse than projected, but not by very much, and can probably be accounted for by the scarcity of polling. So I can at least take small comfort in the fact that my fellow Montanans can remember names after all.