Forecasting the election: Most models say Obama will win. But not all.

Washington Post ^ | 09/01/2012 | Dylan Matthews

[WHBates]

What it predicts: The model forecasts Obama will get 53.2 percent of the two-party vote and Romney will get 46.8 percent.

I'm sorry, Obama may certainly win but if you believe Obama will get 53.2% of the vote this time around you must be on drugs of some kind.

[Oldpuppymax]

Sooooo Hussein will beat Romney be a larger margin than he beat McClame??!!

Uh huh.
Was this model completed before or after its creator’s Rock the Vote marathon for Obama?

[RightLady]

Hell, there will never be another election unless Zero is the only one running.

[Abiotic]

Completely disagree. Jeb will run versus Hillary in 2016. If Obama is re-elected, and if the country further goes down the economic drain (which it will, IMHO no matter who wins this 2012 race), then Jeb (or another candidate) will crush Clinton (or any other candidate).

If somehow there is a small recovery (or the status quo of slow collapse is grindingly played-out) under Obama, and if there is no disastrous war with Iran, then the 2016 election will be a toss-up. I still think that the Republican would win, as Hillary is so damn divisive. She is also white, and the race card of lurking guilt in regards to criticizing Obama is effectively muted.

The only way I see Clinton not running in 2016 is if she is on the Supreme Court (I doubt she would be approved, unless the Dems have huge Senatorial gains in 2014, which will NEVER happen, as I see the Repubs picking up 3 to 5 seats: NC, NJ, NH, LA, CO, AK being the hot contests).

[Cruising For Freedom]

The variables: Uniquely among the studies here, Norpoth and Bednarczuk do not include any economic variables. Instead, they simply use the share each major party candidate got of the primary vote in the New Hampshire primary. To account for presidents who run unopposed, they set a maximum possible vote share of 65 percent, and a minimum possible share of 35 percent. That is, if a candidate got between 65 and 100 percent of the vote, that’d be inputted as 65 percent, and if a candidate got between 0 and 35 percent of the vote, that’d be inputted as 35 percent.

That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard of.

Squint at data hard enough and you will find patterns. Investors in the stock market fall prey to the latest "this strategy has never failed if you follow this arcane investing pattern" all the time.

[Biggirl]

The Romney/Ryan team is set to win come November and as added proof, take a look at the rallies that they appear in, like “rock concert” size.

[stylin19a]

bradley effect

[Disambiguator]

Do you live in the “bubble” known as the Bay Area? There’s a lot of unreality there.

[Cruising For Freedom]

Don't just tut tut models that show Obamugabe winning ~ show the specific errors ~

You've got it backwards. Proving that the data models use isn't predictive isn't necessary. The models need to rigorously why the data they have constitutes a correlation.

This is no better than layman stock market technical analysis or data mining. Coming up with models is a hard science for quants getting paid 400K/year, one well beyond the means of polisci majors.

The only predictive power is sampling the actual votes (by the means of asking people who they will poll), and even then, there is a lot of art and error in sampling that.

Other than that? Unless some megabucks hedge fund firm is kind enough to open-source a model they spent millions and millions on, it's all bull. You are, quite seriously, no better off using the models cited in the article than using the "Halloween Mask Purchase" and "Cow Poops On An Obama/Romney Square" predictions.

[Hotlanta Mike]

Setting themselves up for an epic evening of shock...I’m going to have the bubbly on ice to celebrate a little R & R.

[Hotlanta Mike]

Setting themselves up for an epic evening of shock...I’m going to have the bubbly on ice to celebrate a little R & R.

[longtermmemmory]

the fact is the MSM is positivly ogasming at the start of the democrat convention. (even fox) Their personal partisanship is tangible. The MSM is a free multichannel partisan drive pushing Obama at all costs. There is no even pretense of journalism. MSNBC this morning was in full on communist pravda mode.

[Cruising For Freedom]

Don’t mistake me — I’m not blowing sunshine; I was making a comment on the models in the article and just the models in the article.

Obama could very well lose big, or win big. The orgasmic coverage of the DNC is always a big obstacle all Republican presidential candidates have been dealing with every 4 years since forever. There will be a post-convention DNC bump.

The fundamentals out there that Obama is campaigning on fumes and no accomplishments still aren’t going to change, and neither is the fact that both the names on the R ticket are brilliant strategizers & campaigners.

[2nd Amendment]

I’ve yet to meet one working person here in the South that will vote for zero. He is so reviled that I wonder what these libtard pollsters are smoking. If America gives Hugo jr. another 4 years, we don’t have a country left to fight for.

[Carry me back]

I think the media believes he is toast and is trying to keep it somewhat close. They don’t want him to lose in a landslide because they don’t want it hurting the dems over the long haul.

[princeofdarkness]

Here’s the reality. Romney despite his weaknesses is going to get roughly 95% of GOP vote, 10% of the Dems vote, at least 53% of the indie vote. He will win handily. Not Reagan-Carter style but more like GHWB-Dukakis style. People essentially still vote with their pocketbooks.

Romney will only lose if does a Tom Dewey 1948 style campaign.

[blueunicorn6]

The American political science association?.....they’re lucky they even know the candidate’s names......
“Our models show a decisive victory for the incumbent, Mick Jagger.”

[muawiyah]

True enough your typical university or college doesn't have the resources to bring in the full blown mathematicians to come up with a statistically useful and predictive sampling system.

I know we spent millions every year on ours ~ and a monthly sample selection would have over 1.5 million elements.

The really big bucks were spent on the sampling universe ~ we pre-identified the destination types we wanted to include and they were always in a constant flux AND there'd be changes in mail classifications, and every time that happened the whole shebang had to be reworked.

There aren't even private sector marketing firms with the kind of money and personnel to do a job like that.

Our planning organization had a predictive system that would estimate, based on sample reports from the Cost Ascertainment System what mail volume might be the next month.

I could take the same information and make the same prediction using an algorithm I"d developed.

One day I noticed that not once in 100 months/accounting periods had the planning organization ever correctly predicted whether or not mail volume would increase or decline.

Thought that fascinating since the statistical group stood on their heads to get the basic information for them to come up with that particular notation ~ mightily important to postal management I"ll tell you!

My algorithm, ALWAYS predicted whether or not volume in each successive period was going up, or going down!

Others have seen this before ~ but for those of you who haven't, I submitted my algorithm as one of those BENEFICIAL EMPLOYEE SUGGESTIONS.

They (top management) didn't accept my suggestion ~ didn't even send me a note rejecting it ~ but they relieved the guys responsible for running the competition ~ the prediction system that was ALWAYS wrong.

That system was, as I understand it, designed by the former Chief Postal Economist, Charles Guy ~ here's an article by him; >http://www.lexingtoninstitute.org/post-office-may-not-last-forever-an-interview-with-charles-guy?a=1&c=1139

I've probably never agreed with him on anything ~

[muawiyah]

That’s the style that guarantees a loss ~ fur shur ~ and it has been extremely popular with many Republican candidates over the last 70 years. Why Romney would not wish to campaign that way is beyond me ~ he seems perfectly suited for that one!

[Cruising For Freedom]

Nice story... it’s unbelievable the faith some people place in numbers, and how easily management is wooed by numbers (even if they are never right).

Numbers are the best way to represent things empirically, yes, but they are not magical, and one should resist the temptation to be easily impressed by them. The more I read peer-reviewed papers, the more I find that they’re basically a load. The numbers are only as good as the person, methodology, and agenda used to represent them.

This isn’t to say that 2012 polls so far are inaccurate. We have little empirical reason to believe that they are. But you can’t just find a pattern, and say, this is a good model. Nate Silver decided that the “third year” of a president’s term was a good prediction for re-election. How much arbitrary can you get?