They were so wrong they should actually lose their jobs (and tenure) simply for being so completely incompetent.
For those who are too dumb to understand the above:
“Dey wuz rong.”
It’s not surprising, after the media conspired together to prevent an Obama victory.
Don’t forget to give proper credit to Simon Bar Sinister and his Weather Machine.
That really was a shocker, btw. Who knew Simon Bar Sinister was a Democrat?
kaylasdad99:
Don’t forget to give proper credit to Simon Bar Sinister and his Weather Machine.
That really was a shocker, btw. Who knew Simon Bar Sinister was a Democrat?
But to balance it out, Riff Raff’s a Republican.
42fish
November 7, 2012, 11:07am
45
Hey, give them some credit: they were 100% accurate at predicting stuff after it happened.
The lead scholar came with a mea culpa:
http://blogs.denverpost.com/thespot/2012/11/07/antisilver-cu-prof-projected-romney-landslide-issues-mea-culpa/86219/
The academics later updated their estimates based on new data and gave the Republican an even bigger edge – 330 Electoral College votes to Obama’s 208. Bickers appeared on FOX’s “The O’Reilly Factor” and conservative talk radio.
On Wednesday – after the professors incorrectly forecast that Romney would sweep the battleground states that ended up carrying Obama to an easy victory – it was time for a reckoning.
“The model was wrong,” Bickers conceded. “Sure, that’s a mea culpa I suppose. I’ve argued everywhere from the beginning that polls and prediction models don’t vote. This gives you the historical conditions, provides a kind of baseline for information in interpreting what might happen. In that sense, I still think it’s a useful tool. It didn’t get the correct outcome but it does give you the historical context.”
If Nate Silver of the FiveThirtyEight blog is biggest winner of the election prognosticators by nailing all 50 states with his poll averages and “secret sauce,” then Bickers and Berry are among the goats.
I always mention in many discussions in GD, that what you are using as your sources and their methods is what makes you good or bad and you always have to continuously check how good your sources are doing, many pointed at the flaws in the Colorado study methodology early on, even Nate Silver, but because the Colorado research fitted the Republican narrative, it was one of the bits of “information” that was distributed and bounced around in their echo chamber and it fooled many important right wingers in this election.
Well done Professor [del]Fate[/del] Bickers
At least he is a good sport:
Bickers said the other thing difficult to model is figuring out on whose shoulders voters place the blame for economic malaise (a criticism that Silver, before he really got famous, leveled when the analysis was first published). Bickers noted Wednesday this race differed from others in that respect.
“You don’t have many cases where a president inherits a bad economy and can blame his predecessor,” Bickers said. “So I think that helped (Obama).”
He noted that the model doesn’t rely strictly on economic factors; it also weighs past votes in each state and other factors. Ultimately, on the day after, Bickers credited the president for beating the odds.
“The president performed well,” he said. “He made history again. First he made history as the first African-American president, and then he made it again as an incumbent who can rise above a weak economic recovery and go on to win re-election. To me, it’s kudos to the president’s campaign.”
Nate Silver is The Great Leslie?
My understanding of their model - and I admit I haven’t gone into it thoroughly - is that they based a large part of it on absolute economic indicators. A sophisticated version of the no president has won with more than 7% unemployment idiocy that was all over the internet.
If so, they need to do much more than mildly apologize. Trend lines are infinitely more important than static numbers. That’s the kind of basic “I’m an idiot” mistake that they had no business loudly trumpeting.
His “mea culpa” essentially boils down to “Our model is still good and valuable, and Obama bucked the trend of history. Good for you Obama.”
No, your model was a piece of shit, you worthless political hack. Your model is about as valuable as the Redskins Rule (not valuable at all).
So U of Colorado can predict elections about as well as they play football? Go figure.
