Posted on 08/14/2004 4:15:09 PM PDT by quidnunc
A whereasandsoforth prediction: President Bush is going to win 46 states. He will win the popular vote by 4 points. All the gagging about Florida will be a wash because President Bush will win the state beyond any margin of error. He will win Ohio, too, without a challenge.
The democrats are gearing up for a fight that will not happen. This country is basically decent and good. The voting public knows what is going on. The democrats are dead. They have lied and deceived themselves right out of significance.
Put the dead pet 'Rat in a shoebox and bury it in the back yard. They will have to move on to another country now to further their dishonest and ridiclous fairytales. Canada? Cuba? Have at them, you toads! They too will someday stand up to your stupid nothingness. How about Anartica?
I'm sick of playing nice. President Bush will continue and after him, another conservative will be in the White House. And the Congress will only get more conservative.
I base all this on the FACT that the democrats LIE LIE and LIE again. The public is tried of it. It SMELLS!
I was saying that when the Dems were still in the primaries.
When an election gets as close as it was in 2000, it's almost impossible to predict with much confidence who will win. He's applied his model all the way back to 1916 and it holds up surprisingly well.
"How did he do in 2000? He predicted Gore. His answer is that he was right about the popular vote"
First of all I'm not so sure "Incumbency" applies to Vice Presidents. Secondly, he was actually quite accurate in that. Few people would have predicted gore to win the day before the election. I was a democrat at the time and even me and my freinds were predicting that Gore would lose by up to 10 points.
I feel the same way - I will not register with them either
His prediction was bang-on, couldn't have been improved. He called for Bush in a razor-thin victory, some months before election day.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/15/magazine/15QUESTIONS.html
As a professor of economics at Yale, you are known for creating an econometric equation that has predicted presidential elections with relative accuracy.
My latest prediction shows that Bush will receive 57.5 percent of the two-party votes.
The polls are suggesting a much closer race.
Polls are notoriously flaky this far ahead of the election, and there is a limit to how much you want to trust polls.
Why should we trust your equation, which seems unusually reductive?
It has done well historically. The average mistake of the equation is about 2.5 percentage points.
In your book ''Predicting Presidential Elections and Other Things,'' you claim that economic growth and inflation are the only variables that matter in a presidential race. Are you saying that the war in Iraq will have no influence on the election?
Historically, issues like war haven't swamped the economics. If the equation is correctly specified, then the chances that Bush loses are very small.
Advertisement
But the country hasn't been this polarized since the 60's, and voters seem genuinely engaged by social issues like gay marriage and the overall question of a more just society.
We throw all those into what we call the error term. In the past, all that stuff that you think should count averages about 2.5 percent, and that is pretty small.
It saddens me that you teach this to students at Yale, who could be thinking about society in complex and meaningful ways.
I will be teaching econometrics next year to undergraduates. Econometrics is a huge deal, because it is applied to all kinds of things.
Yes, I know one of your studies used the econometric method to predict who is most likely to have an extramarital affair.
In that case, the key economic question was whether high-wage people are more or less likely to engage in an affair. They are slightly more likely to have an affair. But the economic theory is ambiguous because if your wage is really high, that tends to make you work more, and that would cut down on how much time you want to spend in an affair.
Are you a Republican?
I can't credibly answer that question. Using game theory in economics, you are not going to believe me when I tell you my political affiliation because I know that you know that I could be behaving strategically. If I tell you I am a Kerry supporter, how do you know that I am not lying or behaving strategically to try to put more weight on the predictions and help the Republicans?
I don't want to do game theory. I just want to know if you are a Kerry supporter.
Backing away from game theory, which is kind of cute, I am a Kerry supporter.
I believe you entirely, although I'm a little surprised, because your predictions implicitly lend support to Bush.
I am not attempting to be an advocate for one party or another. I am attempting to be a social scientist trying to explain voting behavior.
But in the process you are shaping opinion. Predictions can be self-confirming, because wishy-washy voters might go with the candidate who is perceived to be more successful.
It could work the other way. If Kerry supporters see that I have made this big prediction for Bush, more of them could turn out just to prove an economist wrong.
Perhaps you could create an equation that would calculate how important the forecasts of economists are.
There are so many polls and predictions, and I am not sure the net effect of any one of them is much.
Yes, everyone in America is a forecaster. We all think we know how things will turn out.
So in that case, no one has much influence, including me.
"I'm sick of playing nice. President Bush will continue and after him, another conservative will be in the White House. And the Congress will only get more conservative."
AND then will this "CONSERVATIVE" MAJORITY pass Amnesty2
for 12 million illegals?
Apols for the error!
LOL! Echoes of the Gorebot. Good wordplay.
I understand about retrospective studies but it seems that if pervasive patterns are found, they should at least be acknowledged. Nobody suggests that he's got a crystal ball.
"Backing away from game theory, which is kind of cute, I am a Kerry supporter."
The guy is toying with the interviewer. It's really funny to see. He tells her that he could be lying, then she presses him, then he tells her the exact thing he said could be a lie. LOL Very well done either way, this sounds like a guy worth listening to. My favorite quote is "all that stuff that you think should count averages about 2.5 percent". Very cynical but probably true.
If Albert Wang is Albert Wrong he'll have much egg on face.
Vacancies would be filled by the DNC (as they did in '72 replacing Eagleton with Shriver).
Interestingly enough, the Johns could even drop out *after* the election (but before the electoral college votes) and the same replacement rule applies.
it seems the interview tells us much more about Ms Solomon than it does about him.
She's outsmarted every step of the way, but still clings to her NYT smugness.
I think he's more or less right, but for the wrong reasons. The WoT will trump economics this cycle.
Exactly why I pick up all the Kerry bumper stickers offered and answer the phone polls that I am solidly in Kerry's camp.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.