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

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

Rain/weddings?

Nm,

yeah, well i've been wearing this a lot lately

http://rlv.zcache.com/wallace_68_t_shirt-rdbe853e3e3f84d199ef1c11dacda746a_jy9a7_512.jpg

hilarious!

x-post

I used to have a thrift store "Teachers For [Bill] Clinton" shirt.

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

ya rly

it reminds me of that billy joel song where everything --including major humanitarian disasters, political ideologies, etc. -- is reduced to pop-culture trivia.

I think I still have a Viva Kennedy button from when my brother dragged me to a Dem election center in Merced, Ca in 1968.

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

Agree w/this, but I do enjoy the deer-in-headlights look she gets when the other panelists (left or right) call Trump on his bullshit.

it reminds me of that billy joel song where everything --including major humanitarian disasters, political ideologies, etc. -- is reduced to pop-culture trivia.

https://twitter.com/jonathanchait/status/762458291897192448

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.

oh duh that might be because I wrote eastern but meant *western* Washington (basically Aberdeen north to Olympic NP). it was also right around the time of the primary, so some may have come down since? the dispensary per capita ratio was truly remarkable though, like we passed through several towns that literally had no other businesses, maybe a gas station at most

one thing I love about RealClearPolitics is it pastes a smattering of opinion articles on the election on the front page, so you can read batshit stuff from the Moonies, The Federalist, and "Washington Examiner" amongst the NYT/WaPo articles. Get the whole spectrum!

Nixon fascinates me more than any other politician ever. Simple.

well that's true for me too but wearing a shirt like that implies endorsement or "I'm being ironic bro" status

so don't be surprised when people react that way to you

you know who fascinates me? Nathan Bedford Forrest. i'm bout to get one of those Nate Forrest tees from American Apparel.

i used to have a tito shirt, but then we broke

would wear an augustus shirt tbh :/

http://s3.amazonaws.com/images.store.woven.com/products/66/large/reagan-right-bro.jpeg

I don't think I expressed surprise, exactly--I was just noticing the difference between this and the other Nixon T-shirt I wore a few years ago, which I partly attribute to the slogan but also partly to Trump. I wasn't shattered or anything.

Jesus, amateurist, give the piety a rest. I think you were on here a few days ago calling someone an idiot because he didn't have the same interpretation of a film as you, and I think you've even gotten temporary bans here for some of your more thoughtful commentary. It's a T-shirt.

forget it jake....

sorry, didn't mean to be pious. i just thought "i was fascinated by..." was a weird reason for wearing a t-shirt and decided to take the logic to a few farcical conclusions.

One would have sufficed. I got your point.

gentle mockery, in other words

(my auto-translate wanted to render "mockery" as "hockey")

i apologize for overdoing it!

i got one temporary ban for a bad-taste analogy involving morbs fwiw, and it was deserved.

someone put Sherman looking all irritable on a t shirt and i'll wear the fuck out of it

538 never had Trump ahead, or even close.

http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/?ex_cid=rrpromo#plus

it was the NowCast I believe that had him ahead

It's the now-cast that complaints about 538 are directed at.

But the Now-cast isn't their prediction, it's a toy.

it should change the colors to magenta and chartreuse when you click on the nowcast

should call it the Fartcast

it should play fart.wav on a loop when you open it

where does he get such wonderful nowcasts

(xpost) I agree, AF. It's like looking at baseball standings this morning--I'm happy the Jays are in first, but the league's not awarding them a playoff spot, and I'm well aware things can and undoubtedly will change before October.

did 538 have three different forecasts or just the one in 2012? thought I remembered the latter but it's been so long....

((since some folks seem to bring this up every other week, and few provide any context, i feel oddly compelled to do so myself. plz ignore this if you don't give a shit, which is probably everyone except me. so: morbs indicated in some long-forgotten thread that he wished the ACA were repealed. he opined that he didn't care about the consequences to people who might lose health-care coverage, b/c it was a bad law etc. etc usual making-the-perfect-the-enemy-of-the-good stuff.. i wrote something about how his insurance should be cut off and he would lose access to his cancer care. it was a poorly-thought-out way of trying to get him to understand, viscerally, what an ACA repeal would mean to thousands of people. in other words, it was a rhetorical gesture, not an actual /wish/— just like i imagine or hope morbs's comment about not caring about the consequences of a repeal was likewise a hyperbolic piece of rhetoric. i understand how people took the comment, and i accept why i was banned. i don't follow ILX closely enough to know if morbs has likewise been banned for the rather routine posts in which he wishes other ILXORs dead, but i'll presume he does.))

I'm sorry I brought that up. I get defensive when cornered.

we can't let Trump do this to us

Pretty sure they only had one in '08 and '12.

I feel like there's some backlash against Silver this cycle. Maybe a lot of that has to do with the new site--I didn't look at it when it first started, just started looking in again the past couple of months. I don't know how bad it was early on. Some of it may have to do with him being wrong about Trump through the primaries, or at least early on. In 2012, I spent the last month saying he was too optimistic about Obama's chances. I was wrong.

re: 538: i have griped about them numerous times this cycle, never for the nowcast. the quality of the writing and depth of the analysis have gone down considerably in the espn era, as the articles are shorter, more numerous, and mostly not by silver. they were 'special' and now they mostly read lke ordinary pundits except they'll throw in one or two charts (if two, one is a link back to a chart from six months ago). it's a very different site than four years ago.

also yes, now that you bring it up, the nowcast is dumb clickbait, and pretty obviously dictated from on high for that exact reason. the site works best as nate silver writing an extensive pontification on a forest of numbers once or twice per fortnight, nothing else. or as i said a few months ago:

The thing about 538 is that they really, truly treat political races like basketball or any other thing which might be susceptible to a "data" analysis. Interpretation of real-world relevance, causes and effects, perspective, historical context, values, and meaning are all essentially outside of their wheelhouse, and whenever they venture that-a-way the stuff they say is absolutely maddening.

― never ending bath infusion (Doctor Casino), Saturday, 9 April 2016 19:41 (4 months ago) Permalink