Il Douché and His Discontents: The 2016 Primary Voting Thread, Part 4

yeah but it was a more intimate show

I just got home from the work, in the same building as the town hall. Apart from the MSNBC and NBC vans and a Jose Diaz-Balart spotting, no traffic problems today.

By the way: I'm sorry Miami inflicted Chuck Todd on the rest of you.

pretty sure i have never seen or heard him, but i now think of him as 'my man chuck todd'

Chuck T

Some Clinton supporters chose to vote in the Republican primary. We know 7 percent of voters in the Republican primary identified themselves as Democrats to exit pollsters, compared with just 4 percent of voters in the Democratic primary who said they were Republicans. “Those 7 percent of Dems were likely mostly Hillary voters who thought she had an easy win and they could do their part trying to stop (Donald) Trump,” said ***Bernie Porn*** of pollster EPIC-MRA. The exit-poll samples are too small, though, to check that.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-the-polls-missed-bernie-sanders-michigan-upset/ 8th paragraph down.

Bernie Porn?

There are fifty states in the US (I should know, I've lived there for a year!) which means 100 primaries every cycle, which means that at least once per cycle a 99% certain outcome could be wrong. This was the biggest upset since 1984 at least. It could be completely correct to say that the probability of this happening was >99%. Silver doesn't think so, though, he said on twitter that they've been tweaking the model. Michigan only went down to 98% Clinton, though.

#actually there are 46 states and four commonwealths

actually there is Texas and 49 lesser states

45 states, 4 commonwealths, and a principality.

Democratic debate tonight. Three days after the last one.

I'm burnt out- no more debates for me.

i also don't like the implication that NS the human = his forecast, and the suggestion that he should tinker with his forecast every time it makes a bad call or runs counter to intuition is exactly wrong and misunderstands why it's interesting. saying 99% confidence doesn't mean NS the human was literally feeling the human emotion of confidence, it just means the stand error was small enough, which is exactly what we would expect to happen when all the polls show hillary in the lead.

ok you can replace every time i said "nate silver was wrong" with "nate silver's model was wrong" if it makes you feel better about the implications. or passive voice?

anyway, his priors about pollsters are of course data-driven but the decision to apply priors at all is subjective (even if they are uninformative or flat priors), and the priors and the other uncertainties he folds into the model were obviously too confident here, to the extent that they lead him to rule out the final result with extreme confidence.

why am i saying "obviously" too confident? why is this not just "if you make 100 predictions with 99% confidence, you're going to be wrong about once"? the answer is the same reason that far more than 1 in 20 psychology papers that claim p<0.05 are wrong. the defense is true as far as it goes, but that's how you explain away random noise, i.e. statistical fluctuations. but the problems are systematic, not random. i don't think anyone is arguing unlucky random samples is what went wrong with the polls. i mean it could be what went wrong (there is a non-zero probability that 5 polls with 3 percent uncertainties could all be wrong in the same direction by 20% or so), but i think everyone is right in assuming there were _systematic_ problems. and it's concern about those systematic errors that should be in silver's priors and in the resulting confidence of the model.

people literally going "that smug neoliberal fuck is 99% confident Bernie's gonna lose! and he hasn't even updates his confidence on Florida" seem to not understand the degree to which it's largely out of his hands at this point--and that that's what makes it interesting

not trying to pull rank here, but i do know what i'm talking about re: statistics, and i can't vote in this election, so i'm not coming at this from a "neoliberal fuck" angle.

i wouldn't harp on about this, but silver's alleged innovations are to do a good job of handicapping the pollsters and to a lesser extent to deliver the subsequent predictions with meaningful confidence intervals. failure to do a good job of one or both of those (my money is on the first) is obviously what has gone wrong here.

i ike 2 party

The GOP field last April was Cruz, Carson, Fiorina, Santorum, Paul, Huckabee & Pataki, let's remember.

I hope that this cycle has finally put an end to huckabee, santorum, and rand paul for good

Btw nate silver currently charges $60k for a 1 hour talk about how to build statistical models (more outside the nyc area) so "I dunno man, I just go where the statistical model tells me" seems a little generous.

I hope that this cycle has finally put an end to huckabee, santorum, and rand paul for good

These dorks always get out of their races before they run out of money, so they'll be back.

guys is trump president yet

No Nate silver is :-(

good post caek

Caek, you're obviously sorta right, since they've changed the model. But I think you're wrong about the problem lying with the handicapping of the polling firms. There wasn't a single poll that gave Sanders a shot, so how would ranging them differently change the outcome? Yeah, there were structural problems, most likely mainly that Michigan haven't had a contested primary for a long time, so it was a lot harder than other states.

The guys whose careers are over thx to trump = jebra, rubio, christie (sorta)

Rand paul's still in the senate and chuckles can still play bass. Santorum idk what he does.

http://img.wonkette.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/santorum_immigration_lady.jpg

ILEagels

"Go" home

Related to the topic of listening to minorities: http://www.freep.com/story/news/politics/2016/03/08/spotlight-arab-american-muslim-voters-engage-issues/81486692/

xps caek- i agree that his specification of the models (there are two) and any prior is subjective. but it's not clear to me that he fed in any priors to make the model extra certain of a hillary win, and the suspicion is obviously politically motivated and imo makes some people look partisan and dumb. i don't know how much tinkering goes on on a day-to-day basis but i always assumed little to none and he just kind of sets it up and lets it rip

why am i saying "obviously" too confident? why is this not just "if you make 100 predictions with 99% confidence, you're going to be wrong about once"? the answer is the same reason that far more than 1 in 20 psychology papers that claim p<0.05 are wrong. the defense is true as far as it goes, but that's how you explain away random noise, i.e. statistical fluctuations. but the problems are systematic, not random. i don't think anyone is arguing unlucky random samples is what went wrong with the polls. i mean it could be what went wrong (there is a non-zero probability that 5 polls with 3 percent uncertainties could all be wrong in the same direction by 20% or so), but i think everyone is right in assuming there were _systematic_ problems. and it's concern about those systematic errors that should be in silver's priors and in the resulting confidence of the model.

but not all systematic errors can be accounted for with the data at hand, that's the #1 problem everyone who uses non-experimental data faces. i think it's quite obvious his model is wildly underspecified with lots of omitted variables bias (they basically admit this on the first paragraph of the 538 site explaining how they set up the primary forecast) and so the interpretation of a p-value is kind of out of the window either way. i don't think other specifications with the same data would have given drastically results. like, what weighting scheme do you use to not have a confident bet that clinton would win using this data?

http://i.imgur.com/2LQVIQt.png

christ you guys

^^^

what?

Pataki! I forgot about him.

Pataki got lots of undercover that's coming at me iirc

I can't believe we're discussing models and stats and -- leave that to Nate and the Silvers

Alfred otm, separate thread pls

i personally scroll past discussion on threads that don't interest me but ok

It's getting very technical, but it's pretty relevant. The main question is what this means for the polling in Ohio, Illinois, Pennsylvania, where Clinton is also far ahead. Was this a one-off, or is there some 'systemic' problem that means every poll in the midwest has hidden around 25% of Sanders' voters?

It's also theoretical, because afaict, he still wouldn't win the primary.

in the interest of keeping it to one-thread-per-month tho...

xp

I can quote more old AZ lyrics if that would help foster the dialogue

lol

Latest poll from Illinois has Clinton ahead 42%. I can def see that be wrong by a lot more than 25%

Obamaland

keep the stats talk on here, it's more meaningful than (insert passive aggressive swipe of your choice here)

CNN reporting
Rubio on reports he's dropping out of the race: "I'm rap James Bond/my crack case gone/got cuffed in the court/had my Mack face on"

i can see the polling stats stuff being interesting because it does, purposefully or not, affect narrative and turnout. but on the other hand, all you really have to do is wait for the actual voting results

still think prediction markets are garb tho, despite my <3 for caek

I dig this, using a John Wayne spoken-word album to distill down a lot of the psychology of what happens when your sense of identity, belonging, and stability gets violently ruptured:

White working-class nostalgia, explained by John Wayne

In a little over a generation, right-leaning, working-class whites went from defining America — being the standard, the base model, the hard-working, self-reliant American dream made flesh, about which kitschy songs are written — to being, in their view, an embattled minority.

Their social values are mocked and rejected by mainstream pop culture, and they are condescended to and dismissed by elites. Rightly or not, they've come to view immigrants, other ethnicities, and often liberals as competitors in a zero-sum fight.

They are pissed off and panicky about it, and while we need not accept the uglier forms the backlash takes, we should still acknowledge the unique angst that results when the communities that most value order are struck by the most dislocation.

'But white working-class Americans (like all Americans) should be offered some shelter from those changes, some sense that they will be okay, that they are still part of the American Us, no matter what.'

Honestly the problem seems to me more that the Trumpits don't consider the new 'American Us' to be legitimate. They've fought tooth and nail to exclude as many people as possible from the old 'American Us', and they still aren't ready to accept reality. I don't think the new 'American Us' will be particularly inclined to forgive them, btw. Sad, but true. Also, I don't particularly think they have to, pragmatically speaking.

And I think the article is pretty a-historical. It glosses over that the self-same white right-wing voters has supported the politicians that took away things they used to have, that the new deal coalition fought for. And why did they vote for this? Why did the democratic new deal coalition lose white working class voters for a generation, even though republicans did nothing for them? Because of civil rights.

Please don't use the word "us"

Lol, that's really hard when discussing an article talking about it. Combined with the fact that I put 'us' in '''s, and that I don't particularly care what you think = nah.

http://www.azquotes.com/picture-quotes/quote-i-don-t-care-what-you-think-unless-it-is-about-me-kurt-cobain-43-19-27.jpg

Can we just autoreplace all frederik's posts on this thread w something less patronizing like idk pics of puppies