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Nate Silver is full of shit


Victor Lazlo

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This was the headline on their final model projection early yesterday morning:

Quote

Totally full of shit.

Also, when they said there was a 10% chance that Trump won, I took it as implicit there was also a chance of a close Biden win.

Edited by WBT
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1 hour ago, BehoId, The Underminer! said:

Biden is going to win by decimal points but he should’ve won by five, six, seven, or eight points in some of the states. If all you can get your head around is the black or white win or a loss, feel free to look at the individual senators and representatives that won’t get over the line there. This isn’t exactly a nuanced and obscure point.

Yeah- it’s like a basketball game that’s decided on a wide open 3 pointer. You need to have a winner and a loser but what does it really prove about who is “better” whether the shot goes in or doesn’t. If you are talking about elections inside a point who the hell knows. 

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My day-after conclusion?

Propaganda works.  Like, really really works.  
 

“Hunter Biden’s laptop” may have gotten more people to the polls than any other issues.  e g Do I want healthcare for my family?  Should we listen to experts?  Should we rebuild our traditional overseas alliances?

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A ton of statistics, machine learning and data science is predicated on past behaviors being indicative of future behavior.  Models are trained/seeded with historical data to predict a future outcome.  This tends to work great when the context is static.  The same variables producing the same outcomes.

But many things throw this all into disarray in 2020 and make a statistical prediction of the future difficult if not impossible.  Trump is not a traditional candidate, the pandemic disrupted normal voting participation, there is some unknown amount of foreign influence, there were active voter suppression efforts going on and there will be legal challenges to cast ballots.

All of that adds up to statistical models of the 2020 election having been a crap shoot.

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1 hour ago, JBJ said:

They missed down ballot as well.  It's a methodology problem.

To me it’s 2 things. They can never account for how a voter like me will vote. There’s a lot of us who will not answer a pollsters call or respond to a text or any other survey. And the last 2 elections were driven by absolute hatred of a candidate - instead of casting “yes” votes for the candidate we’ve been casting “no” votes.

 

 

 

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4 hours ago, longhornmatt said:

I would be curious to see a study of how the pollsters raw data stacks up against their adjusted results once they finish all their weighting and tinkering to make the data fit with past results.  Does their own adjusting make the poll worse, or do they just never truly get a representative sample because who answers a robocall in 2020?

.  

 

RCP beat the brakes off of 538, once again. This after all the poll guys were mocking the RCP for including "right wing outliers" like Trafalgar. End of the day, Trafalgar missed on some too, but was far more accurate than the "A-Rated polls". Take Wisconsin where Trafalgar and Susquehanna, two polls that were mocked by the poll aggregator guys this entire cycle, projected Biden +1 and +3. Tthe A+ pollsters had Biden +8 and Biden +11. I mean these guys are missing by 8-10 points in some states. That's inexcusable

I won't go through every state but I spent a lot of time looking at those numbers and I am certain you'd see the same thing repeated in other states.

That's a problem with these guys in terms of credibility. Look, we get that you're bound by the polling data. But two POTUS elections in a row Silver and company belittled the "Republican outlier" polls, then proceeded to get owned and embarrassed by them. 

When you go around trash talking other prognosticators, you better make sure they don't kick the shit out of and give you a wedgie in front of 400 million Americans... again.

At some point I'm going to look at my projections vs. 538's. I also beat the brakes off of them and my model took me 30 minutes. I knew the polls skewed liberal and adjusted, and I'm a complete novice in that area of data science, it's nothing like what I do professionally.. They should have seen it too. In fact my biggest screwup was believing the pollsters when they said they fixed their issues from 2016, and tamping down my adjustment. Otherwise I would have been even more accurate.

These guys are all liberals. And that's okay. Educated people usually are. But it's pretty obvious that they let their beliefs interject themselves into the projections. That's unprofessional and woiuld get most people fired from their jobs.

Edited by BradInATX
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To me it’s 2 things. They can never account for how a voter like me will vote. There’s a lot of us who will not answer a pollsters call or respond to a text or any other survey. And the last 2 elections were driven by absolute hatred of a candidate - instead of casting “yes” votes for the candidate we’ve been casting “no” votes.
 
 
 

Negative partisanship appears to derive votes as much as anything these days. I’m not sure how much that’s accounted for in current polling.
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13 hours ago, Captainant said:

The crypt keeper democratic leadership will continue to do things as they have, as is tradition. Microtargeting? A data strategy? What are you, some junior know-nothing from Illinois?

More than that, I think, both parties are run by old white people.   Even "woke" old white people aren't that in touch with what's really going on on the ground.

The minorities they have in leadership are probably more like old white people than the minorities in the electorate, by education, assimilation, etc.  And they certainly spend more time among old white people than they do their "brethren" in the "community." 

They don't understand what's going on in the "ghettos," or the "barrios," or the _________towns.  They know it as what they left, for the most part, decades ago.

It's not necessarily intentional, or "racist," or even "elitist."  It's just you can't know what you don't know.

I think you have to have some innate knowledge of things before you can start to really make sense of or help design statistical or probabilistic models.

Carville and Atwater got by on knowing their constituency really well.  But the constituency has changed.

Edited by TwiceHorn
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11 hours ago, Paul Wesley said:

My day-after conclusion?

Propaganda works.  Like, really really works.  
 

“Hunter Biden’s laptop” may have gotten more people to the polls than any other issues.  e g Do I want healthcare for my family?  Should we listen to experts?  Should we rebuild our traditional overseas alliances?

Nah. Hunter Bidens laptop didn’t get anyone to the polls. It was cover to get a couple on the fence GOP partisans to do what they already wanted to do (vote for Trump). 

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Credit where it's due, the pollbros have been doing a really good job on election day and today. They've been incredibly strong coming through with data on what's left in each state, what types of ballots (mail or EV or day-of), and even informal projections. They did great with the data in a live bullets situation this year. 

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12 minutes ago, BradInATX said:

Credit where it's due, the pollbros have been doing a really good job on election day and today. They've been incredibly strong coming through with data on what's left in each state, what types of ballots (mail or EV or day-of), and even informal projections. They did great with the data in a live bullets situation this year. 

It’s not that they are idiots (they aren’t) they are smug and smarmy Dbags who have more certainty than they ought to. 

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I really think the issue is the way they conduct their LV/RV outreach. I hung up on a few this year because they said it would take 15-20 minutes to answer the questions. I don't have time for that shit, I have a job, a kid, important adult things to do. I don't see how they can account for the "IDGAF about your survey" crowd and accurately account for them.

Could that group skew more towards one side or another? Are certain demographics more likely to sit on a call for 20 minutes just to tell a stranger how they will vote? I would love to see some research into that part of it, as I have my own assumptions on what demographics would fit into those categories. I think that might be the actual "silent voter" rather than the ashamed Trump voter.

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19 hours ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

garbage in garbage out.

Pollsters, not 538, said that Biden had meaningful leads in many states that Trump won or that Biden is barely winning.  And we apparently cannot grade which pollster is correct until afterwards which offers zero value for the next election.

 

Seltzer poll in Iowa wasn’t garbage.

Whatever she did, should be the standard.

 

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10 hours ago, BradInATX said:

Credit where it's due, the pollbros have been doing a really good job on election day and today. They've been incredibly strong coming through with data on what's left in each state, what types of ballots (mail or EV or day-of), and even informal projections. They did great with the data in a live bullets situation this year. 

Yeah, this should be their role going forward. Don’t give me any sort of polls before hand because you’re terrible at your job. But you can tell me how the data looks once you’re starting to get real time verification of results. They seem to really be on the ball on that.

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14 hours ago, BradInATX said:

At some point I'm going to look at my projections vs. 538's. I also beat the brakes off of them and my model took me 30 minutes. I knew the polls skewed liberal and adjusted, and I'm a complete novice in that area of data science, it's nothing like what I do professionally.. They should have seen it too. In fact my biggest screwup was believing the pollsters when they said they fixed their issues from 2016, and tamping down my adjustment. Otherwise I would have been even more accurate.

Same here.  I have been keeping about two months of records from RCP and 538 and adjusting them per the national crosstabs from TIPP.  In the battleground states, I'm not perfect but only off by an average of 1.8%.  And it has 0.1% party bias.

This really isn't that hard, but you have to pick a decent pollster that you trust to be mostly correct to piggyback.

 

16045893606793898488147128227396.jpg

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Even called states are still counting mail in ballots that are probably going to shift toward Biden.  For example, the NYT shows Ohio at 90% of estimated votes reported.  It might be a little early to evaluate vote margins.

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51 minutes ago, WBT said:

Even called states are still counting mail in ballots that are probably going to shift toward Biden.  For example, the NYT shows Ohio at 90% of estimated votes reported.  It might be a little early to evaluate vote margins.

You can when 538 is missing Ohio by 7.4%.

I'm off by 2% and it took about half-a-day to put this together and most of that was gathering data from 538s website.    This isn't hard.  There's no excuse to be this bad when it's the branding of your company. 

There's especially no excuse to be worse than RCP when all they do is average the last 30 days of polling.  538 is worse than people not even trying to weigh and adjust for pollster methodology, reliability, and bias.  Consistently worse. That shouldn't even be possible.

 

Edited by JBJ
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That’s all I said and all the betas in their feelings go ape shit.

Y’all are actively dumping ballots out of no where, changing ballots, keeping monitors from their monitoring positions, physically, blocking out the windows from people seeing whatever it is you are up to. ACTIVELY destroying the franchise like you’ve done with the rest of the. Constitution .

Now a judge has ruled that the monitors be allowed in and you’ve ignored THAT so police need to come and escort them back in. God knows what you’ve done while they’ve been not monitored.

only answer is is that NONE of this will count

You pussies will continue with. “There’s never been ANY REAL evidence of voter fraud .

This will go to the Supreme Court where you know who is waiting for you

If this were being done by Republicans, major cities would be on fire now (cuz racism and that one black dude who posts here (“Pop?) is fucking your wives.

But. No riots. Just justice

b1d7ad2eb01e9668118368fb91dc20f1.jpg
614d2718725e7dc751dc5c45b3ee97cc.jpg


You assholes ruined the country and you are in for a reckoning.

Chuck Schumer and this broad

https://images.app.goo.gl/PvVHJcT4BUezGFiL7

expecting her to “recuse herself” from rulings re:Constitutional Matters


Buhhhhhbwaaaahahaha

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3 minutes ago, TtomTerrific said:

That’s all I said and all the betas in their feelings go ape shit.

Y’all are actively dumping ballots out of no where, changing ballots, keeping monitors from their monitoring positions, physically, blocking out the windows from people seeing whatever it is you are up to. ACTIVELY destroying the franchise like you’ve done with the rest of the. Constitution .

Now a judge has ruled that the monitors be allowed in and you’ve ignored THAT so police need to come and escort them back in. God knows what you’ve done while they’ve been not monitored.

only answer is is that NONE of this will count

You pussies will continue with. “There’s never been ANY REAL evidence of voter fraud .

This will go to the Supreme Court where you know who is waiting for you emoji23.pngemoji23.pngemoji23.pngemoji23.pngemoji3590.pngemoji3590.png

If this were being done by Republicans, major cities would be on fire now (cuz racism and that one black dude who posts here (“Pop?) is fucking your wives.

But. No riots. Just justice

b1d7ad2eb01e9668118368fb91dc20f1.jpg
614d2718725e7dc751dc5c45b3ee97cc.jpg


You assholes ruined the country and you are in for a reckoning.

Chuck Schumer and this broad expecting her to “recuse herself” from rulings re:Constitutional Matters


Buhhhhhbwaaaahahaha

Seek help.

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Just now, TtomTerrific said:

Fuck you

Leave my country and if you are in Texas. Leave my state before you are removed

You support criminal, insurgents and terroristic behavior. If I find you, I’ll remove you, film it and post it here

Cool, cool.

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3 minutes ago, TtomTerrific said:

Fuck you

Leave my country and if you are in Texas. Leave my state before you are removed

You support criminal, insurgents and terroristic behavior. If I find you, I’ll remove you, film it and post it here

@immamac, this should probably be reported to the police, no? At the very least to get this lunatic on record making violent threats.

Edited by BradInATX
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9 minutes ago, TtomTerrific said:

Fuck you

Leave my country and if you are in Texas. Leave my state before you are removed

You support criminal, insurgents and terroristic behavior. If I find you, I’ll remove you, film it and post it here

you need to clarify this carefully or you are going to be taking a long vacation

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16 minutes ago, TtomTerrific said:

Fuck you

Leave my country and if you are in Texas. Leave my state before you are removed

You support criminal, insurgents and terroristic behavior. If I find you, I’ll remove you, film it and post it here

It's our country Nazi. Get out!

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13 minutes ago, TtomTerrific said:

Y’all boarded up all the businesses. Wonder which group of voters they were worried about destroying our private property in a tantrum. Welcome to the pendulum swinging back


Good luck with that

Which side's people are at election centers trying to intimidate the vote counters? You piece of shit. 

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18 minutes ago, TtomTerrific said:

Fuck you

Leave my country and if you are in Texas. Leave my state before you are removed

You support criminal, insurgents and terroristic behavior. If I find you, I’ll remove you, film it and post it here

lol you're probably a big limpdick pussy so fuck you.  you ain't bout that life go back to your basement.

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32 minutes ago, TtomTerrific said:

That’s all I said and all the betas in their feelings go ape shit.

Y’all are actively dumping ballots out of no where, changing ballots, keeping monitors from their monitoring positions, physically, blocking out the windows from people seeing whatever it is you are up to. ACTIVELY destroying the franchise like you’ve done with the rest of the. Constitution .

Now a judge has ruled that the monitors be allowed in and you’ve ignored THAT so police need to come and escort them back in. God knows what you’ve done while they’ve been not monitored.

only answer is is that NONE of this will count

You pussies will continue with. “There’s never been ANY REAL evidence of voter fraud .

This will go to the Supreme Court where you know who is waiting for you emoji23.pngemoji23.pngemoji23.pngemoji23.pngemoji3590.pngemoji3590.png

If this were being done by Republicans, major cities would be on fire now (cuz racism and that one black dude who posts here (“Pop?) is fucking your wives.

But. No riots. Just justice

b1d7ad2eb01e9668118368fb91dc20f1.jpg
614d2718725e7dc751dc5c45b3ee97cc.jpg


You assholes ruined the country and you are in for a reckoning.

Chuck Schumer and this broad

https://images.app.goo.gl/PvVHJcT4BUezGFiL7

expecting her to “recuse herself” from rulings re:Constitutional Matters


Buhhhhhbwaaaahahaha

Yeah, your feelings are definitely in control.  Call your sponsor, you've lost the plot again.

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Which side's people are at election centers trying to intimidate the vote counters? You piece of shit. 

The ones flying Black Lives Matter flags and keeping ballot monitors from the building and covering the widows with newspapers and otherwise blocking whatever the fuck they are doing from view. You unbelievable criminal endorsing cunt?

You are now going right at the franchise. JUST AS WAS PREDICTED YOU WOULD WITH THIS “FLOOD THE SYSTEM MAIL IN, NO ACCOUNTABILITY bullshit. Actively strong arming those who shouldn’t be needed anyway to watch this, but everyone knows what you are up to.....you are going at the foundational tenet of our system of Government. This is why McConnell put 300 federal judges on the bench and three very important ones on the Supreme Court.

You assholes have openly supported the fire bombings, shooting of police, beating of innocent bystanders who didn’t have the right color and now want the police called on me for Something I guess

Fuck You

War
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28 minutes ago, TtomTerrific said:

Fuck you

Leave my country and if you are in Texas. Leave my state before you are removed

You support criminal, insurgents and terroristic behavior. If I find you, I’ll remove you, film it and post it here

Sure you will, tough guy.

Gonzales banner Flag, come and take it flag from Flags Unlimited | US Flags

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2 minutes ago, TtomTerrific said:


The ones flying Black Lives Matter flags and keeping ballot monitors from the building and covering the widows with newspapers and otherwise blocking whatever the fuck they are doing from view. You unbelievable criminal endorsing cunt?

You are now going right at the franchise. JUST AS WAS PREDICTED YOU WOULD WITH THIS “FLOOD THE SYSTEM MAIL IN, NO ACCOUNTABILITY bullshit. Actively strong arming those who shouldn’t be needed anyway to watch this, but everyone knows what you are up to.....you are going at the foundational tenet of our system of Government. This is why McConnell put 300 federal judges on the bench and three very important ones on the Supreme Court.

You assholes have openly supported the fire bombings, shooting of police, beating of innocent bystanders who didn’t have the right color and now want the police called on me for Something I guess

Fuck You

War

lolwut?

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