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

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 so: morbs indicated in some long-forgotten thread that he wished the ACA were repealed.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

I do sometimes use RCP as an enthusiasm check, as it is generally right-leaning. 538 presents the different ways of assessing probability (as opposed to raw spread) Both are simply aggregators, not pollsters - oddly some people (not here) are confused on this point. The differences lie in weighting and what they are willing to say about their averages.

There is a relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/1131/

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

I am going to be watching this off and on to see if they do well or if they wind up having to re-brand. I cannot imagine that business travelers or even tourists will be flocking to pay premium rates to stay in a Trump property in DC. And event planners might also end up avoiding it like the plague, which would really be the death knell for the thing. I wonder how difficult it is to back out of a 60-year lease with the GSA?

If, after two years, he moves on and lets some other firm take over the lease, it will be a nice "with a whimper" button on this shitty adventure

From Nate Silver's Twitter today:

"In USC/LATimes poll, Trump supporters' likelihood of voting has fallen a bunch over past week. His "rigged" message may depress his turnout."

Not to fixate on this, but doesn't the now-cast at least have some historical value, giving a good idea of how the election progressed over the summer? When we look back at the way Bush came back in '88, or at Truman-Dewey, those polls have historical value. But they also had the limitations of their day--Truman/Dewey, I assume, was Gallup only, and Bush/Dukakis polling, even if it wasn't a single poll, was probably an average of a few polls only. (Don't know how widespread polling was in '88.) 538 is drawing from numerous polls, and also weighting them for reliability and currency. So when you look at their now-cast line graph through the summer, won't that be an accurate illustration 20 years from now of how this election progressed?

SUre, but that would also be true of the "polls-only" graph over time, and that doesn't involve the seductive/misleading "if the election were held today" angle.

Will be interesting/revealing whether any Republicans join the too-little-too-late repudiation of Trump over the "rigged" stuff specifically - IMHO it's as dangerous and fascistic as anything else he's said, and even more up the alley of the party that's supposed to be obsessed with the Constitution and the smooth functioning of our heroic one-of-a-kind republic etc.

(xpost) But the way I understand it, the polls-only doesn't track the election day-to-day; it's tracking what would happen in November based on day-to-day polling. In other words, the now-cast for today tells us what would happen if the election literally were held today; the polls-only tells us what will happen Nov. 8 based on all the polls to date and based on historical polling trends (i.e., the way the gap inevitably narrows as the election gets closer). And, of the two, it's the now-cast that is aligned with the polling done in 1988 and 1948, it's just a better--much more input--version.

Am I misunderstanding? I could be!

From what I remember of 1988, Bush came back after the GOP convention and never lost his lead again (Steve Kornacki mentioned it too, I think).

it was all over after he bent over to shake Dukakis's hand

clemenza: No, that's correct... I guess I just mean that they might as well just call it "unadjusted non-predictive poll-averager" and get the same "track the polls across the campaign" kinda deal, like the graphs at RCP. That might take away some of the annoyance but basically if you make a whole career out of saying "it doesn't make sense to talk about what would happen if the election were held today, the polls grow more meaningful with time, how they're behaving versus longer trends is more interesting than where they are right this second" then to have any tool that slaps up "where they are right this second" is kinda dumb. Maybe if it were just kinda shuffled off by itself or with another group of "fun toys" rather than put right alongside the predictive ones. I dunno, it's just lame is all.