Free Republic

Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SS disability, the entire US military, police departments, fire departments, roads and highways, medical research and development, universal/public education started by Thomas Jefferson, clean air, clean water, untainted meat/food in restaurants, border patrol...........all socialism. What do you mean socialism is “coming”? Socialism has been part of America since her founding. We are a mixed economy of Capitalism and socialism. Why are you trying to make “socialism” such a boogeyman word? Kinda alarmist and a bit childish isn’t it?

Morale doesn’t decide elections. Demographics do. That was the point I started making here years ago.

We need to work with demographics, not against them. Otherwise we’ll have fewer and fewer years in the Executive over the next two generations. And God help us if those demographics start voting in midterms.

I wish Florida were so but the early voting demographics look bad in Nevada and Florida.

Here’s my final prediction. Notice we still have the House and the Senate is too tight for them to do anything radical over the next two years. We’ll be ok. Just have to wait it out.

These final numbers are based on my 2012 model which relies heavily on the 2010 census data and demographic trends since 2000.

Clinton will win by 5.5%. She will get 322 EV to Trump’s 216 EV.

Trump States:

Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine District 2, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming.

Clinton States:

California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine (minus district 2), Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin.

Senate: 51 Dems 49 Republicans

House: Democrats gain 14 seats but Republicans retain majority of 235 to Democrats 200

There have been close to 40 polls done so far this month. Three of them, including this one, have shown Trump up or tied.

What does this tell you? They are outliers. Remember the shock on Romney’s face around 9pm on election night 2012? Remember the shock on so many of our faces? It’s because we pinned our hopes on statistical outliers and didn’t read the real data.

What is the real data saying? Trump isn’t up 2 like Rasmussen says and Clinton isn’t up 12 like ABC says. She is up what the average of the other 30 polls say, roughly 5 to 7 points.

Clinton will win by about 7 points, maybe more. She’ll win 300+ electoral votes and if things get crazy, could start pushing 400.

Sorry folks, this is what the data are saying. Look at my posts from 2012, I know what I’m talking about.

We will lose the Senate narrowly but retain the house by 12 or more seats. That’s where the real power is so relax, the Republic will be fine.

That video is fake. You can see them setting it up with actors and cameras here:

https://twitter.com/txorres/status/788130226052079616

JoeySalads is a notorious fraud.

Trump was praising Obama because in 2009 public sector jobs were being shed like crazy. Government was absolutely not growing. Government employment growth has been slower under Obama than any president in the last 50 years.

http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2015/08/public-and-private-sector-payroll-jobs.html

“We will have socialized medicine in a few years one way or another.”

If you think about it, we kind of already do. We have almost half of the country on socialized medicine or socialized insurance with the VA, Medicare and Medicaid. Then you have millions of children on the sCHIP program and lastly, you have tax free status on employer contributions to health premiums. It’s just a matter of semantics at this point. Even if the whole country goes to something you want to call another name, like Canada’s Medicare for all, we’re pretty much already there.

With a nicely crowned bull barrel, proper breathing, maintaining a consistent eye relief and after months of fine-tuning my own match reloads, I’d have to say that 90+ percent of my error is in my trigger pull. If this thing eliminates that, then sign me up....but at the current 15 to 20k per rifle I think I will just stick with more trigger time. Lot more fun that way anyhow.

This was my exact call before the election:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2955102/posts?page=117#117

You can read through my posts over the last two weeks to get a better idea of how I did this and also how I address the “voter fraud” nonsense argument....that issue just comes down to occam’s razor

Basically, after Romney won the primary, I started really digging into the demographics and questioned the assumption by the so-called tv, radio and print professionals, both conservative and liberal, regarding the idea that 2008 was special, different or an anomaly vis-a-vis the minority and female voting patterns of that year.

The political meme of both sides was that 2008 was a unique situation given that it was the first black candidate to win a major party primary. Then I started hearing most on the right say that the polls are being weighted improperly toward the democrats (2010 midterms were supposedly evidence of this) and knowing that 2010 was a midterm election which gives republicans an advantage, I tried to quantify this assumption.

That then brought me to the 2010 census where I started pouring over the 2010 census briefs released by the US Census Bureau in 2011. After a lot of comparisons to 2000, I came to a staggering conclusion: a democrat could win with only 38% of the white vote...I was pretty stunned by this, that was staggering. Obama got like 43-44% of the white vote in 2008 which meant he had breathing room to lose more white voters! Here’s the best synopsis of the data I was looking at:

http://2010.census.gov/news/releases/operations/cb11-cn125.html

Basically, as the csmonitor put it: “primacy of white male voters has passed”

So I began with a simple but unverifiable assumption, ie, let’s assume that each race/sex of voter turns out in equal percentages. Meaning if 60% of whites turn out, then 60% of latinos, asians and blacks would turn out. Since Obama’s team targeted latinos with the children of illegals executive action, the black vote was tied up and Obama was making an argument to appeal to manufacturing voters in the rust belt, I figured this assumption was shaping up.

The numbers lined up nicely. If you compare the census numbers in the link above to the actual turnout, it was spooky how much they mirror one another. For example, 72% of the population, according to the census 2010 is white and 72% of voters on Nov. 6th were white. Same for black population and turnout, 13%.

The country was changing at a steady NON-WHITE pace since 2010 and I concluded that based on demographics, the 2008 dem advantage was NOT an anomaly!

Next I looked at the outlier since it was such an easy target, Gallup. They were assuming 78% of the electorate would be white.....and there was the red flag. Next I looked at Rasmussen who was getting dem sample numbers in his surveys and bending the number to match his own assumptions , a really bad idea for any pollster but in light of the new demographic makeup of the US and therefore the electorate, these guys had NO idea what they were doing. Conclusion: throw gallup and Rasmussen polls in the trash.

So I started looking at other national polls who when they sampled 1000 people and 38% said they were dems and 32% said they were republicans, actually kept those numbers in the poll....I have written PAGES on the BS argument of skewing polls based on party ID and how ridiculous that is to anyone that has the slightest idea of how sampling in science, politics, marketing, etc works.

Anyway...I started looking at these national and the state polls that released internal data and formed a nice little model and weighted them according to my own assumptions. Were their demographic data plausible in light of new census data. If they fell within a certain range, I kept them and then weighted according to automated phone, live interviews, cell phones included and if so what percentage, internet poll.

As I posted many times before, I messed up on a few things as evidenced by my Obama +1.8% result and Obama getting 290EV and possibly 303EV. In hindsight I can see that compared to people like Nate Silver, I feel like a 5th grader doing arithmetic while he’s doing calculus.

But keep in mind I was living in the same world as most people on FR. I was being bombarded by pundits, columnists, tv interviews and radio personalities that were making me doubt everything I was doing. I can’t express how difficult it was to not only come to the conclusion I saw on my screen but actually post it here and stick to it. But as a person that had to take graduate level statistics and learn to look at data objectively in very biased circumstances, I was 99% sure that I was right with regard to the data even though people around here were throwing rotten tomatoes at me left and right.

I think if I weren’t in the conservative worldview, I may have allowed myself to believe the Colorado and Florida numbers and been more accurate with my final projection....but being human, I may have threw out or improperly weighed some polls based on my conservative heart...after all, do you have any idea how hard it is to weigh a Daily Kos poll so high as a conservative? Turns out they were dead on, one of the most accurate polls...but it’s a hell of a lot easier to swallow after the fact than before.

I know that’s long but I hope it helps answer your question.

“Ping to FR’s own master poller. Jackmercer is one of the (VERY) few who called this election correctly. He got slaughtered for it, but he was right.”

Haha, not sure about master poller but I did basically what Nate Silver did but only in a MUCH MUCH more crude way. I put the national and state polls in an equation and only weighted by whether they included cell phones or were internet based. I also threw out Rasmussen and Gallup because if you compared them to at least 12 other polls, they were (seemingly) crazy outliers.

Turns out that Rasmussen and Gallup were definitely outliers (embarrassingly so) but I had no business throwing them out completely. But since I am a VERY much an amateur, I can forgive myself for over-reacting on that.

In retrospect, I see that internet polls did pretty decent and should not have weighted them as badly as I did. I was right to give more weight to cell phone polls. I was wrong to completely throw out Rasmussen and Gallup; should have kept them in but weighed them down significantly like Silver did.

I called Obama +1.8% nationally and got 49 out of 50 states (technically 48-1-1 since I was really unsure of CO). If I had done the things in the previous paragraph, I would have gotten closer to Nate Silver and the actual final results. I’m really going to get serious with my own model next time.

“To prevent duplication, please don’t alter the published headline. Thanks.”

My apologies. While I post a lot of responses, I rarely start threads based on articles, so a “re-learning” curve for me.

The irony of the article is that even Romney’s campaign stated (in a very coded and savvy way) that it wasn’t the Tea Party that lost the election, it was Rove’s incompetence. From the article:

“Others in the Romney campaign, speaking on the condition of anonymity, were bitter that the super PACs didn’t do more to defend the Republican nominee and his business record, particularly in the late summer, when the campaign had run through its own primary-season funding.

“We didn’t have any air cover,” lamented one senior adviser.

That, Rove suggested, was the result of a missed signal.”

You will need to read between the lines in this article to see what Karl and Crossroads have planned but in a few paragraphs, it's pretty obvious.

From a macro view and in a vacuum, you can say Rasmussen did pretty well...and historically, he did do ok. But we live in a new era with lots of other outfits playing along.

Out of 18 national polling outfits this year, only Gallup did worse than him; Rasmussen was 17th in accuracy out of 18 and contrary to popular belief, he was tied at 6th most accurate in 2008...I have a post on that floating around somewhere

I’m not saying Rasmussen is a horrible pollster, though I discounted his polls in my calculations, I am saying that there are a very large number of better pollsters in the business today.

“that’s fatastic information. How do you know all this?”

The same way any other political junkie does. Follow current and former campaign officials on twitter from both campaigns, read the blogs of political analysts from all sides, liberal, conservative, libertarian, independent, green party, watch shows on Fox, CNN, MSNBC, the major networks. Read papers from all the major cities both north and south, east and west, red state, blue state. Read WSJ, WashPo, NYTimes, New York Post, Washington Times and their major columnists....all of them.

They key is to cast a wide net for the information, not just conservative media. It’s amazing what you can learn about the other side once you learn to tolerate hippies and bleeding hearts opinions. I still like the red meat of my own views but I’ve never become an expert at anything by staying in my intellectual comfort zone.

The type that can’t show my work until I get a decent p-value or other stat tests to deal with the null hypothesis. We have a statistics dept to which we are supposed to submit our work for official validation but I do the preliminary stuff. I know enough to be dangerous and it crosses over nicely when dealing with polls and methodology. Makes for a nice hobby.

Nebulous response I know but internet and all, I’m just another current events and politics junkie like everyone else here. Actually, since about 2005 I’m more of a policy junkie. Actually reading the bills and understanding how they are implemented and affect lives is more fun for me now.

“Well nobody had us gaining less than 55 seats. That was a given. He said we had only a 25% chance of getting 60 or more seats and we got 67. He was flat out off and wrong in 2010.”

Have you ever had college level statistics? I’m not being facetious or condescending here, I just don’t think you are getting what I am saying. Poll aggregators work in probabilities and their final projects are the peak of their bell curves.

You keep saying Nate Silver gave us a 25% chance of getting 60 or more seats and see that as a bad thing. You don’t realize how great that guess is until you understand his entire bell curve. There was a 25% chance, according to silver, that we would get less than 30 seats and a 25% chance that we would get more than 60 seats and a 50% chance that it would fall somewhere between.

Now based on that final projection curve, his best guess was 59 seats but since he works in the realm of probabilities, he was forced to hedge it. He specifically said:

“If we allocate all 435 seats to the leader projected by our model — no matter how slim the margin — Republicans would net a gain of 59 seats. In 15 of these 59 seats, however, the Republican is projected to win by fewer than 2 points. It is likely that Republicans will lose at least some of these — which is why the model forecasts an average gain of 54-55 seats, rather than 59”

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/01/house-forecast-g-o-p-plus-54-55-seats-significantly-larger-or-smaller-gains-possible/

He goes on to explain the right side of the curve like this:

“Moreover, given the exceptionally large number of seats in play, the Republicans’ gains could be significantly higher; they have better than a one-in-three chance of winning at least 60 seats, a one-in-six chance of winning at least 70 seats, and have some realistic chance of a gain exceeding 80 seats, according to the model.”

So if you see those odds at those ends, you can conversely call similar probabilities at the other end, i.e., 1 in 3 chance of only 30 seats, 1 in 6 changes of only 20 seats, etc.

In midterm elections, you have two components, the generic ballot and the house seats. The generic ballot is the only component that is comparable to a president election since it is binary, the republican or the democrat. In the generic, Nate Silver called it 6.8% as the post above showed. The final 2010 generic vote was EXACTLY 6.8%.

The seats are a completely different animal since you are dealing with 435 elections all with very different polling strengths. His probability curve was not dead on but really good especially since he ignored his liberal friends and said it would be waaay worse than they thought...kind of the converse of what happened here earlier this week.

My point is that if you can’t see that he is probably the best sports and politics statistician alive, then your ideology is blinding you or you aren’t understanding his work. Trust me, I sure as HELL would like to have that title belong to a neutral or conservative mathematician but it is what it is. Talent is talent and results are results, he doesn’t have many peers in his league.

I think you could be right on both counts, certainly on the first. The fundamentals alone should have resulted in a Romney and republican congressional landslide, but Obama squeaked it out with feet on the pavement.

The second part very likely played a role given the nature of unregistered voters. They are low information voters and therefore very susceptible to group think and the theory of truth by authority, i.e., if this is a person with whom I can identify and feel comfortable with and cares for me says something, it must be right. Kind of how we all inherit the religion and politics of our parents until we are old enough to differtiate intellectually or confirm through own experience that they were right. Then they find those around them with the same views and it becomes solid like cement.

Haha being an armchair analyst is one thing, using real money is a different animal. That’s a pond I wouldn’t dare jump in. If I did have more money than I knew what to do with, I’d sure be shorting gold right now out to 18 months if possible.

I think the real damning thing is the GOP GOTV incompetence. Do some google searches on the Obama campaign GOTV methods. They had people by the thousands at malls, outside movie theaters, along strip malls, college campuses, parks, etc etc in not just swing states but very targeted swing counties registering people to vote and persuading them with whatever liberal BS they had in their GOTV manuals.

On top of that, they had massive databases of people in specific neighborhoods and counties that never voted before. They didn’t just reinforce their base and try to persuade independents, they CREATED new voters by comparing registration rolls to other databases of eligible but non-registered citizens, getting them on the phone or knocking on their door, quickly analyzing what issue is most important to that person, checking their manual and immediately spouting the talking point that would appeal to that issue....bam, another new dem voter.

Rest assured, liberal policies and issues did not win this election IMO since policy elections are usually wave elections like the 2010 rejection of obamacare. This was a get out the vote election plain and simple and their design and machine put Romney’s outfit to shame.