Basically, it weights current polls heavily and doesn’t do much data massage.
I said weeks ago he has 0% chance. That he cannot STFU and says something dumb every day. My GF actually met his campaign manager and I told her to offer my services…but she didn’t want to appear insane.
His chances rose when the DNC had their opening shitshow. That was the only real chance he had. To from that moment stop doing stupid shit…start attacking the Dems on issues they can’t refute. Didn’t happen.
He will continue saying and doing stupid shit and there’s nothing the Dems can do now that will hurt them. Including bombing more civilians. It’s OVAH.
Heh.
You seem to be describing the sort of thing that happens in optical illusions like this one - where some initially perceive just an attractive woman admiring herself at her vanity in its mirror (the double meaning clearly intended) until at some point suddenly it clicks that we are looking at death’s skull.
And for some that perceptual flip may occur and make up their minds to vote Clinton or minimally to not vote Trump … but the sad thing is that some not insignificant number know they are looking at vanity’s death skull and like what they see.
Thankfully I think not enough to win the election but the fact that there are so many is still a sad thing.
Indeed, DSeid; a sad thing indeed.
I keep reminding myself that eight years ago this country elected a black man with Hussein as a middle name. I honestly didn’t give us enough credit, I was a little surprised - and insanely proud, it was the most patriotic moment of my life.
Yes, its a sad thing that we still have this much hate in our country, but we elected a black man to be President, and we are on the cusp of electing a woman.
It’s “if the election were held today” and I’m always looking to add to my tie dye collection. I prefer blues and greens.
As of 10 minutes ago or so, the Nowcast is showing Clinton at 85%, winning all the swing states. Even the Polls-plus forecast is up to 65%, winning all the swing states except NC. Now that’s a convention bump!
Of course the Nowcast doesn’t mean anything except to show what damage Trump has done to himself* in the past two weeks. Not that he can’t recover or that Hillary won’t stumble (I’m looking for some really nasty October surprises from the Trump camp) but it helps me sleep at night.
*And further burning his bridges, Trump is now endorsing Paul Ryan’s primary opponent (primary this late in the year? Oh well). So is Ann Coulter.
What do the numbers have to get to for the Senate Republicans to start scheduling those hearings for Merrick Garland?
To quote the relevant bit:
I think the now-cast will converge to the other models as we get closer to the election, but we’re still a thousand days out, so it’s more for entertainment than for serious discussion.
It has to converge by its very definition.
I never understood that. When did “most like a tedious drunk in a bar” become a criteria for leadership?
What it is really about is a lot of Americans are really unhappy for one reason or another. Too much diversity. Too much PC. Too few mid-level jobs for people who aren’t Silicon Valley engineers or Wall Street analysts. Too much income disparity. Too much constant noise of bullshit coming from too many screens telling them to be outraged. And Trump is the response to that. His fans don’t care about his offensive and ignorant comments because they that’s how they feel. He says the stupid, simplistic things that “everyone knows” but for some reason those elitists won’t say.
I think the author of this NY Mag article (and Plato) would agree with you.
According to the author’s interpretation of Plato, we are at a point where we have so embraced liberal Democracy that we are now cynical of any sort of authority or traditional institutions - government, schools, parental authority, experts in the scientific community. All opinions are now considered equally valid. All forms of inequality no longer tolerated. The reason why this is a bad thing is that there are some very positive forms of authority or social hierarchies that should be respected:
-Parents over their children (until they become adults of their own)
-Teachers over students
-Experts over novices
-Facts over opinion
-Agents of the law carrying out their duty to enforce just laws in a just manner
In other words, ideally, young people should be learning from their parents how to become adults. They go to school to learn how the world works and to gain the skills to contribute to it. When they start working, they learn from the experience of their managers and more experienced coworkers.
So when you have a breakdown of these relationships, you end up with a society where every opinion is considered valid. Facts become irrelevant. People become unwilling to learn or change.
So you end up with Trump. A demagogue who tells people what they want to hear, unsupported by evidence or facts. And people buy into it because they just want their ideas validated without having to be burdened with the rigors of critical thinking.
It’s why you end up with a host of other society problems as well. Ageism in the workplace for one. One reason it exists is that there is a perception that experience isn’t valuable.
Not necessarily, though it likely will. Because it puts more weight on recent polls, it’s subject to the biases of the more recent polls. For example, if the most recent poll before the election was completely wrong then the nowcast will be completely wrong, and the regular model, which would average in prior polls, would be more accurate.
From your own cite “The now-cast is basically the polls-only model, except that we lie to our computer and tell it the election is today.” On Election Day, they are the same.
It’s not the fault of 538. Silver clearly explains the models if you’re willing to look into it. It’s the people holding up the result, claiming that it means much of anything at all at this point.
Well said!
You may be right. I thought they weighted the polls differently. They apparently do at some point in time:
But maybe by election time the weighting differences are undone. I really don’t like the word “basically” in their quote. That’s a word that can conceal a lot.
We DON’T have that much hate in this country, at least compared to 50 years ago- but now the haters have better soapboxes to stand on.
Remember that- Crime is down, violent crime is down, even “gun crime” is down, Unemployment is down, the Economy is Up- life is better now that it has ever been for us Americans.
Haters just get more attention today. There’s whole message boards supposedly devoted to say Disneyland or D&D- that have been taken over by trolls and haters who will run off anyone who actually says that they like those things.
We have given "teh stupid’ a bigger, better soapbox in this crazy "Interwebs’ thing, and the trolls are fatter than ever.
Yes he clearly explains but let’s be real … saying that the actual odds are pretty much stable and highlighting that generates less clicks than being able to say “UP! DOWN! UP AGAIN! What a battle folks!”
Oh no question that compared to 1966 we are all holding hands and singing kumayah. But it is not all the bigger soapbox either. Trump is the nominee of a major party. His views, hateful, willfully ignorant, arrogant, pandering to White Supremacists and neo-Nazis … are being supported by a large subset of this country, not just by a few nutbars. Fewer than there have been in the past? Very likely so. But the fact that their numbers are still that large is nevertheless sad. Maybe no surprise, but sad.
True, but remember this?
This is true, but that election was quite polarized among racial and ideological lines, and assuming Hillary wins, this election will be no different. The only thing that would make me feel more confident about our country’s future – at least politically – is a massive, massive sweep by center-left and hard left progressives in this election. I could be wrong. I hope I’m wrong. But I don’t see that sweep happening.
I see more gridlock, with an even more polarized country that is divided over a political dynasty they love to hate instead of a black guy with a funny name. Unless there is a dramatic collapses of the republican party, I think we’ll see a narrow Clinton victory, with perhaps the Democrats having an ever-so-slight majority in the Senate or a 50-50 tie at best.
Not a mandate for change. But that’s what we really need: a decisive mandate for mature, knowledgeable center-left progressives. Not only in federal elections but also in state and local races as well. We need another era of New Dealers to tear down the statue of Reagan and replace with a neo-Roosevelt.