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

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 so: morbs indicated in some long-forgotten thread that he wished the ACA were repealed.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

^^ agreed w/ clickbait. they spend so much time defending their methodology on the model and shit and then theyre like 'well theres also this nowcast which is a fucking joke and means nothing but please go take a look at it on the site'

i think it's irresponsible even w/ the disclaimer. i'm aware that it's trash and i still check it out when i visit the site bc it's there to check out. and it inevitably colors my perception of the race bc i don't have total objectivity. if you are building your brand on accuracy + credibility don't have features that undermine that.

I'm going to build my own polling model and only circulate the results as a text file via anonymous FTP and gopher

it's the web and you are reading it for free ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Hate to get back to T-shirt talk, but I went out for a burrito and there's a guy in a Reagan/Bush tee here.

it's the web and you are reading it for free ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

saving this for later use, on the slim chance that anybody on ilx ever again takes issue with anything published on the internet.

lol that's fair, sorry

silver built his brand on being largely right in the last two elections, but he is now owned by espn/disney, which wants hits more than just every fourth october. so yeah you're going to get burritos and nowcast, the hot take of polls. just ignore it and take what you find valuable

Wtf is irresponsible about it? You really worried that one tool treated lightly is going to elect Trump or something because the tiny percentage of people who use it won't vote?

i only read the nowcast because it's fiery and volatile just like i am.

Wouldn't the now-cast have just been called..."polling" 40 years ago? Weren't all polls now-casts back then? (Allowing that it's expressed as a probability rather than survey data.)

election should be a best of 7 series

http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/12/politics/donald-trump-pennsylvania-cheating/index.html

i do believe he's trying to lose

gonna need reince and paul to weigh in on this

smart, a large part of his base are the same people that ate up the same circular logic of

Premise: Iraq is stockpiling weapons of mass destruction
Data: We found no such stockpile
Conclusion: Iraq is hiding them

he'll drop out in October and say "it's clear that this isn't going to be a fair fight, rampant evidence of improprieties, and it wouldn't be fair to go through with this facade of an election"...

I'm not watching the video, but it's really great journalism for the accompanying story not to mention that PA has voted Democratic in 7 of the last 10 elections, including the last 6 in a row.

"Trump says Clinton is cheating (she might be)"

Go down to certain areas and watch and study and make sure other people don't come in and vote five times

god

I'm going to build my own polling model and only circulate the results as a text file via anonymous FTP and gopher

I like this idea but would prefer to have results delivered via barbershop quartet singing telegrams

"certain areas" - - - what a shitbag.

otherpeople

At his first rally of the day, Trump put his dislike of the media in harsher terms than usual -- calling journalists "the lowest form of life."
"I tell you, the lowest," he said. "They are the lowest form of humanity."

Vermin, even.

let us crush them, even as bugs, disregarding the stuff that oozes out of them, for they are among the lowest form of life and not deserving of our mercy

doubt trump's people have forgotten how ecstatically titillated they were by the spectacle of a new black panther standing outside a philly polling place in 2008 (doubt trump has forgotten this either as it is exactly the sort of white-underworld obama-era shitmeme he consumes) and expect they are thrilled to be commanded to a white vigilantism to match the black vigilantism of their dreams

i do believe he's trying to lose

― nomar, Friday, August 12, 2016 2:57 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

he's trying to cause trouble, for the same reason he buys casinos: to put his name on it

i meant 2012.

This made me think of that parody list posted earlier, the one that ended with Trump joining ISIS and marrying his daughter:

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/290995-geraldo-rivera-calls-out-trumps-bull

Somewhere on that downward spiral: "Alienate all remaining corners of Crazy Media defending you."

At his first rally of the day, Trump put his dislike of the media in harsher terms than usual -- calling journalists "the lowest form of life."
"I tell you, the lowest," he said. "They are the lowest form of humanity."

"What the hell were you thinking, John? ‘The media are leeches’ – do you know who reports comments like ‘the media are leeches’? The media report them, John!"

Something to look forward to this fall - the candidate opening a castle-like building at 1100 Pennsylvania Avenue.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-hotel-in-washington-d-c-to-open-ahead-of-schedule-1454901018

Also, missed until now this long Andrew Sullivan piece from May. Holds up.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/04/america-tyranny-donald-trump.html

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.)

― wizzz! (amateurist), Friday, August 12, 2016 5:57 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

he was below 10% last week in 2/3 of their forecasts.

538 never had Trump ahead, or even close.

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

― Andrew Farrell, Friday, August 12, 2016 7:17 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that's one of the three forecasts (and not the "default" on you get when you visit http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/). he was ahead in the other two.