I DON'T KNOW WHERE THE BOTTOM IS • US presidential elections part VIII

p.s 538 sucks

There's a Carson sticker on a car in my neighborhood. Not sure if it's a campy joke or sincere.

Also I have a high school friend with a Mondale/Ferraro sticker on his Prius. Unfortunately he undercuts whatever value it might have by constantly pointing it out to people, like hey, do you realize I have a genuine vintage Mondale/Ferraro sticker and like I totes put it on a modern car? Aren't I just the most high larious member of the Wacky Club that you ever did see?

(Of course that's the implicit message of like 65% of all bumper stickers anyway, so.)

538 is really bad this year it's true xp

Also I have a high school friend with a Mondale/Ferraro sticker on his Prius. Unfortunately he undercuts whatever value it might have by constantly pointing it out to people, like hey, do you realize I have a genuine vintage Mondale/Ferraro sticker and like I totes put it on a modern car? Aren't I just the most high larious member of the Wacky Club that you ever did see?

idk what's sadder: this sticker or a Dole sticker. Do those exist? I gotta imagine they've gotta be worth a few hundred bucks in mint condition.

I don't really look at 538 much beyond their general polling updates and that one time I played with their state-map-tool thing - why are ppl so down on them this cycle?

Volatile modeling and dumb articles. The podcast has been not terrible but not amazing either.

I trust Steve Kornacki more tbh

Princeton Election Consortium win probability increased to 74% random drift, 86% Bayesian for Hildawg today

1) the nowcast is so bad it's professionally negligent
2) https://twitter.com/FiveThirtyEight/status/763717850238480384 <- answer, you built a bad model
3) all the non nate silver pundity is awful

Their prediction models are pretty good but it's tough to account for one candidate basically not trying

until the election it's impossible to say definitively if their predictions are "good" but one of the basic requirements is they shouldn't swing all over the place in response to individual polls

they were also the only people that had trump in the lead during the RNC, during which they went mysteriously quiet and stopped talking about updates to the models, because they clearly didn't believe them

right, and their models were supposed to have the convention bump built in so it was a huge fuck-up. i think they tried to explain it by saying that it was trending towards trump before the conventions so i guess the model forgot about the convention bump and just assumed any more movement towards trump was legitimate.

I have a Mondale/Ferarro bumper sticker somewhere (unstuck).

one of my neighbors has a quiet little Gary Johnson sticker on his car.

and they don't write about burritos anymore

I don't understand the nowcast criticism - for the '538 experience' there's no reason to look at anything but the Polls-Plus model, which has been fairly steady

The problem with the nowcast is that it's irresponsible to have it on the website at all

Only if people looking at it are too dumb to read all the disclaimers about how all the nowcast means is that the latest polls would lead to X and that it's irrelevant.

the nowcast is not a prediction about an event that is going to take place. it's not like the other two. it's a diagnostic tool that is next to impossible to interpret for anyone except NS. it shouldn't be up there. it's up there for obvious reasons though.

if the disclaimers say "don't use this" (which they should), then maybe just don't put it up there. interpreting probabilistic predictions is a hard enough task for their audience without bullshit like that.

Donald J. Trump ‏@realDonaldTrump 8h8 hours ago
I love watching these poor, pathetic people (pundits) on television working so hard and so seriously to try and figure me out. They can't!

puttering pundbobs of patheticity

my main criteria in choosing who to vote for is "does this person love watching things they hold in contempt on television?"

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-1sKS5gRMkvw/USxaQ0vaIVI/AAAAAAAABAU/WCOBOzzf60c/s1600/dalegribble.png

"you can't know me...I AM UNKNOWABLE!"

I've seen just one Trump yard sign in my town, but I suspect he's got a fair amount of support in this rural area.

Trump in Erie, PA:

"We don't win anymore. You people [pointing to the crowd] don't win, that's for sure."

I think I've seen one of the iconic Hillary signs, on the inside of someone's porch window.

I can see Trump from my house!

^^That's what he'd like to believe!

Be careful, he might see you and try to implicate you in the Kennedy assassination!

It was only the now-cast that had Trump in the lead after the RNC, right? The other two just showed the race tightening, which it was before the RNC as well.

Still haven't seen a Trump sign in OC, but that insane surfer vs. cyclist video happened in the next town up the coast.

when I was driving through rural eastern Washington back in May, there were tons of Trump signs. also weed dispensaries

"also"

Saw a few (maybe 6-7) Trump signs in rural-ish eastern upstate NY, a few of them homemade. Zero signs in urban areas, though.

538's fine! They provide lots of explanation of how much credence you should put in what. Even today, when the "now-cast" sits at 87-13 or whatever, they make it a point to say that a 13% chance of something happening is not at all a remote possibility. It's no different than some of the junk baseball stats that Bill James will occasionally throw out there. He'll say this is fun, this is interesting, don't take it that seriously. Same thing.

seems like pointless clickbait/trolling to me

http://crooksandliars.com/files/mediaposters/2016/08/34198.jpg?ts=1471023905

I really and truly do not get this woman. She goes on CNN every day and people yell at her. From the right, from the left, guests, hosts, everyone ridicules her and throws up their hands in exasperation. I guess she'll be rewarded in the future for her undying loyalty. (I mean, I understand surrogates and spinning and all that. But she's beyond anything I've ever seen.)

Is she the replacement for the brunette with the bullet necklace?

No Katrina Pierson still bringing the crazy the rest of the day.

I'm not sure who that is...Katrina Pierson? Anyway, she--Kayleigh McEnany--has been one of CNN's two primary Trump mouthpieces for many months (Jeffrey Lord the other).

It's no different than some of the junk baseball stats that Bill James will occasionally throw out there. He'll say this is fun, this is interesting, don't take it that seriously. Same thing.

Baseball is a game.

when I was driving through rural eastern Washington back in May, there were tons of Trump signs. also weed dispensaries

I live in rural eastern washington and I've only seen two, they seem conspicuously absent when there are SO MANY other signs for republicans everywhere. But yes on the weed stores, there are now four in my ~30,000 person town.

Also I still own one of these shirts that I bought for $5 from a guy in a trailer park in Michigan in 1992:
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/83/d3/25/83d3250d8d1b5d245c0131bb6ca8e74d.jpg

Kayleigh McEnany goes on CNN and takes abuse from everyone because she truly truly believes that Trump is the best solution for America's problems and believe that she can convince smart people to vote for him with her words. She's a Trump evangelist.

I would feel bad for her if Trump weren't the worst person in America, but what do you know, he is.

538 is the worst form electoral prediction, except for all the others.

a friend of mine has an original reagan/helms '80 shirt that he still wears

maybe thats 76? shit I wasnt alive anyway.

There are more Zapp Brannigan Trump quotes... these are... amazing.

I don't really look at 538 much beyond their general polling updates and that one time I played with their state-map-tool thing - why are ppl so down on them this cycle?

― Οὖτις, Friday, 12 August 2016 18:51 (3 hours ago) Permalink

Volatile modeling and dumb articles. The podcast has been not terrible but not amazing either.

― Mordy, Friday, 12 August 2016 18:54 (2 hours ago) Permalink

i don't follow the debates concerning 538 as closely as some of you. i don't seem to grasp the critique entirely.

you'd expect the "polls only" forecast to be volatile, since they are designed to change with each new poll, which is necessarily based on a sample size quite a bit smaller than the voting population.

is the argument that the "polls-plus" forecast is likewise overly volatile given the dynamics of this race?

are we sure we're not critical of 538 because they estimate trump's chances of winning as higher than we'd like to imagine? (i.e. the reverse of those right-wing websites who chatter about "unskewed" polls.)

I've been wearing this a lot lately (not an original...and that's not me):

http://i1059.photobucket.com/albums/t427/sayhey1/nixon_zps3wqnh9cs.jpg

Unlike the other Nixon T-shirt I wore a few years ago, people look at me sideways now. It's the "Vote Republican," and also Trump. A woman sat down beside me at a movie last month and said, "Nice shirt--I hope it's ironic." I mumbled something about rain and weddings.

i don't understand why you would wear that even ironically