freeman2 wrote:You still do not explain why RCP average of .8 in favor of Romney is incorrect. If that stays the same Romney loses. I am also not buying that Romney's ground game is as good as Obama's when it is run by the party (and therefore has other priorities) whereas Obama offices are run by his campaign

freeman2 wrote:Yeah, how could I disagree with you-- you are so impartial? By the way, hurricane Sandy could prove to be a last minute boon to the president

Romney currently leads Obama 52% to 45% among voters who say they have already cast their ballots. However, that is comparable to Romney's 51% to 46% lead among all likely voters in Gallup's Oct. 22-28 tracking polling. At the same time, the race is tied at 49% among those who have not yet voted but still intend to vote early, suggesting these voters could cause the race to tighten. However, Romney leads 51% to 45% among the much larger group of voters who plan to vote on Election Day, Nov. 6.

freeman2 wrote:Doesn't it seem a little weird for a dead man's website to keep going? I think it is about time to close it down...

Anyway you are obsessing over one outlier poll-- if that one turns to be correct then you're golden...Otherwise this is a close race and Obama has the electoral advantage

In this survey conducted at least in part by James Carville’s group, Mitt Romney leads Barack Obama by a point, 49/48, on a national basis. On the other hand, their survey in battleground states (a subgroup of the overall sample) shows Obama up four, 50/46.

So what gives? The national sample has a D+4 tilt, with a D/R/I of 35/31/34. The battleground sample, however, has a D+9 tilt at 40/31/27. In what reality does the Democratic advantage increase in battleground states to a margin wider than the 2008 turnout advantage? I’m guessing only in NPR/Carville World.

The internals have more bad news for Team Obama. Independents break hard nationally for Romney, 51/39. In fact, only 29% of independents are certain to vote for Obama, a disastrously low number for the incumbent in any election cycle, especially with just seven days to go. Independents are harshly critical of Obama’s job performance, with a 42/54 approval rating that consists of only 17% strongly approving and 44% strongly disapproving. They’re even tougher on his economic performance at 39/60.\

The debates turned out to be Obama’s breaking point. Romney won converts at six points higher than Obama from the debates, 34/28 overall, but won by 16 points among independents at 37/21. Even in the ridiculously tilted battleground sample, Romney won by five at 33/28.

freeman2 wrote:The key is Ohio. From the previous article I cited independents are favoring
Obama 49-44. Also, white males without a college degree are for Obama at 41 percent (much higher than the 24 percent rate for Obama with regard to that group in the South) The auto bail-out is an albatross around Romney's neck; after he loses he is going to wish he showed a bit more compassion towards us auto workers. So, yeah, talk about the internals all you want--the internals with regard to Ohio look bad for Romney and if you lose Ohio you lose the presidency

Ray Jay wrote:The British odds makers are still putting it at a 71% chance that Obama will win. To me that's the best poll that is out there since it is an agregate of a lot of different views. For those who are so confident about Romney's chances, they should be exploiting these odds, until they bend back to something that is more realistic.

One of the primary sources of Democratic optimism springs from Nate Silver, a former sabremetrician and blogger. Four years ago he built a complex mathematical model that correctly predicted 49 of 50 state outcomes in the presidential race. From his higher perch now at the New York Times, he confidently predicts that Obama has a 73.1% chance of winning and that he is likely to take about 294 electoral votes. Read the comments on blogs both right and left; Democrats wield Silver’s predictions like a crucifix in front of a vampire of contrary poll results. The headline in today’s (London) Telegraph, for example, adoringly calls him “the geeky statistician who is singlehandedly dismantling the myth of Mitt-mentum.”

The first crack in Silver’s statistical prognostications appeared in 2010 when his early projections significantly undercounted Republican gains in the House. Eleven days before the election he predicted that there was a 70% chance that Republicans would gain less than 60 seats. They won 63. That alone should be enough to remind observors that there shouldn’t be so much certitude about Silver’s 70% predictions a week and-a-half away from a vote.

But there’s another problem with Silver’s model; and it’s a problem that a sabremetrician should most studiously attempt to avoid: It is based on the wrong statistic.

Sabremetrics is a portmanteau derived from a nearly 20 40-year old group known as the Society for American Baseball Research. SABR sits at the intersection of mathematics and sports and its overwhelming desire is the search for the perfect measure of success. These are the guys that found that instead of tracking batting averages or runs batted in, a far more accurate predictor of offensive baseball success is OPS: on-base percentage plus slugging. (Moneyball, the story of Billy Beane’s use of sabremetric-like statistics to create a winning ball club in a small market team, is a great read on this subject.)

Silver’s model relies heavily on one metric: the spread between candidates–and especially on the spread in state level polling. There is a problem with both parts of that and with the model itself.

First, the model. Most good time-series mathematical modeling is validated against past events in order to predict future unknowns. Furthermore, greater weight is given to more recent events when verifying the model. That is usually the smart way to model a problem–except, that is, when the recent event with the greatest weight happens to be an historical outlier. The 2008 presidential election was an outlier. It was the first election since 1952 when there was neither an incumbent president nor a sitting vice president on the ballot. Since it was a contest unencumbered by incumbency, late-breaking undecideds were not predisposed by external factors to break one way or the other. Going into election day, the RCP average showed about a 7-point lead for Obama over McCain and that’s the way it ended up on election day. In other words, late-breakers broke to each side in about the same proportion as the decided portion of the electorate. However, when there is an incumbent on the ballot, it is uncommon for him to get the late-breaking vote.

After John Kerry gained points at George W. Bush’s expense during the first debate, and after John Kerry gave some of those points away when he made a stupid third-debate remark about Dick Cheney’s daughter being a lesbian, we see a distinct pattern over the last two weeks of the race. Bush’s numbers are stuck. Meanwhile, the challenger John Kerry saw significant gains from his depths four days after the last debate. In the last two weeks of the 2012 race we should expect to see a similar pattern. Why? Why not. So far we have seen a similar pattern between the Bush-Kerry race and the Obama-Romney race all the way up to this point. Here’s the same chart, but with both the 2004 and 2012 races superimposed. They are almost identical in shape for both incumbent and challenger.

Furthermore, the pattern of this race bears no resemblance at all to what occurred in 2008. Therefore, there is nothing up to this point that would lead us to believe that 2008 is a good predictor for today.

Nate Silver’s model tells you where the race is. (More accurately, his model tells you where the race was, as data is usually about 2-7 days old.) But it doesn’t account for where the race is going. In 2008 that wasn’t a problem as late-breakers broke proportionately. However, two weeks before the 2004 election, Silver’s model would have underestimated the challenger’s gains, just as his model underestimated the gains of Republican House challengers two years ago. His is not a dynamic model that takes into account historical patterns and thus, it is unable to project future results. That doesn’t necessarily make it a bad model, so long as you keep in mind the limitation that he produces a snapshot of the recent past and not a vision of the future. Based on the most recent historical precedent for the 2012 election, Barack Obama is not in good shape when he is already behind a challenger who hasn’t yet seen his late-breaking surge.

But there is another problem with Silver’s model. By relying so heavily on the spread between candidates to predict results, it misses the point that not all spreads are the same. An incumbent with a two-point lead who is sitting at 49 points is in much better shape than an incumbent with the same two-point lead but who is at 45. The incumbent’s level of support, not the spread, is the most important metric in a re-election race. That is because it tells you how safe the incumbent is from the effects of a last-minute surge. On that metric, Barack Obama is not safe at all. Since at least 2010, when the creation of Obamacare led the news, Barack Obama has struggled with his support, only briefly breaking the 50% barrier . . . .

Barring an unprecedented shift, Barack Obama is unlikely to win the popular vote. That alone is enough to place him in an electoral disadvantage, worthy of no higher than a 50-50 chance. But still, there they are: Democrats and Intraders and their irrational exuberance.

Because I just compared Nate Silver to Paul Krugman (a juxtaposition that is terribly unfair to the sabremetrician), one might get the impression that I don’t like Nate Silver and don’t find his analyses informative. That would be incorrect. I’ve read him since before the 2008 election and admire him for his data savvy superior to my own.

But where I do find fault, is his certitude. I don’t mean that attitudinally. As I am sometimes accused of being arrogant myself, it would be unfair for me to hold against others a similar trait. But I do criticize Silver for the certitude implied in the exactness of his results. When I read on 538.com that Obama has a 76.6% chance of winning Ohio, I am reminded of the joke about the old docent at the natural history museum. He points proudly to a fossil and says, “These bones are two-million seven years old.” The astonished visitor asks the man how he knows the age so precisely. To which the old man responds, “The exhibit was two-million years old when I started working here seven years ago.”

AJStrata, a statistician who works with Global Positioning Systems, says it well. He cautions readers to be wary of “ridiculously precise models using data that has enormous error bars. Where Keplerian physics is well understood and can be modeled precisely enough that the incertitude of the samples [one] measures makes little difference to the outcome, in politics, “the dynamics of what is being sampled (the electorate) is very poorly understood.”

The progressive is particularly prone to being fooled by the supposed certainty of expertise. It is an ideology that believes that if the right power can be placed into the hands of experts capable of understanding and controlling the complex, then the world will be a better place. If one already accepts that the value of currency, the nation’s entire health care network, and even the planet’s climate are not so complicated that a smart expert with good intentions could predict and control outcomes, then certainly Nate Silver, a billiant and well-intentioned man, is capable of solving a minor problem of math down to the tenth of a point.

However, while polling involves math, it is not math. The math within it bears little resemblance to the certainty of Keplerian physics. Keep in mind that I am a fan of polling and have done it professionally before. But having said that, I urge the reader to remember that polling is an educated guess heaped upon conjecture piled atop assumptions filtered through subjectivity and complicated by lies. To treat it as more certain than that is to regard humanity with disdain. For polling is nothing more than a gauge of human interactions and humans are complicated things.

One thing that you have to admire about Nate Silver is that he isn’t afraid to go out on a limb. As an example of that, the New York Times political soothsayer currently projects Barack Obama winning the popular vote by 1.7%.

That would place him well on the left side of most current polling. The below histogram shows the distribution of the spread between the two candidates in each of the ten polls that make up today’s RCP Average.

There are five polls showing a Romney lead, three showing an Obama lead, and two ties. The RCP Average has Romney winning the national vote by 0.9%. Since many polls use a 90% confidence interval, and that means that the remaining 10% of the time, a poll will be outside the margin of error, I’ve isolated the highest and lowest polls from this sample. Even by eliminating the effects of those outliers, that still makes the adjusted average a Romney lead of .75%.

Nate Silver’s projection that the spread will be 1.7% in Obama’s favor is a full 2.6 points larger than the RCP average. That is quite an outlying position.

However, remember that I keep saying to ignore the spread and to look instead at the incumbent’s level of support. By that metric, Silver’s estimate is even more extreme. Below is the histogram of those same polls and where they show Obama’s numbers right now. The RCP average of Obama’s support sits currently 46.7%. But Nate Silver projects the President to finish with 50.4%, nearly four points higher than today.

Now, to be fair to Silver, there are still undecided voters, some of whom will break in the President’s direction. If we assume that about one-percent of the electorate is going to vote for a third-party candidate (an assumption Silver makes as well), then the current RCP average leaves 4.7% of voters still undecided. However, for Barack Obama to go from 46.7% today to the 50.4% that Nate Silver projects a week from now, it would require that he get 79% of the remaining undecided vote. That’s certainly going out on a limb.

Either nearly every public poll we currently see is vastly over-reporting Republican strength (a result opposite of what occurred just four years ago) and Nate Silver is the greatest prognosticator of our time, or Nate Silver will be the one eating crow on election night. In a week we will see which one it is.

1. Every poll has a margin of error. You can't, mathematically speaking, eliminate that by averaging them together.

2. Some of those polls in the RCP are more than a week old.

3. Some of those polls are wildly optimistic about the percentage advantage Democrats will have (if anyone believes Obama is going to outperform 2008, they're on a month-long meth bender).

danivon wrote:How far out has Nate Silver been in previous elections? Surely that is the test of his reliability, not whether you believe he's an eevul