Posted on 11/05/2012 9:12:30 PM PST by Kleon
The QStarNews projection of the 2012 presidential race sees Mitt Romney being elected the next president of the United States with 50.67 percent of the popular vote and 275 electoral votes to President Obama's 48.88 percent and 263 electoral votes.
(Excerpt) Read more at unskewedpolls.com ...
I looked at the data below the map and here’s what I noticed. The numbers for the states that they show going to Romney are pretty solid, mostly 51-48 or more. But on the Obozo side, there are at least 4 states where the margin for O is barely a few thousand votes. Pa, Iowa, Wi, NH are the examples I saw, there might be a few more. So if this data is close to correct, only a few extra Romney voters in those places take it from a 275-263 win to a 300+ Romney landslide.
“I looked at the data below the map and here’s what I noticed. The numbers for the states that they show going to Romney are pretty solid, mostly 51-48 or more. But on the Obozo side, there are at least 4 states where the margin for O is barely a few thousand votes. Pa, Iowa, Wi, NH are the examples I saw, there might be a few more. So if this data is close to correct, only a few extra Romney voters in those places take it from a 275-263 win to a 300+ Romney landslide.”
Poll ping.
The problem I have with Unskewed Polls is the data is all corrupt.
We don’t know if this is a 2008 or 2010 electorate.
I’m hoping for R+1 or R+2 - keep your fingers crossed and hope the GOP mounts the Mother Of All GOTV drives on Tuesday!
UnSkewed Polls is a joke. They have a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of party id. I’ve posted about this exhaustively before but rest assured, they don’t know what they are doing. I’ve made my projections based on statistical data plugged into SPSS many times over the past 3 days and I don’t like the results I got....at all...but I am pretty sure they are accurate.
I don’t throw out the results because I don’t like them, data are data and we have to deal with them as much as we have to deal with the rising and setting of the sun. But unlike the rotation of the earth, we CAN change the future data with our actions.... in 2014 and 2016. And trust me, we will do waaaay better in 2014. But this election season’s data is baked in now.
So you actually think Romney could lose? Excuse me, but what are you smoking?
“So you actually think Romney could lose? Excuse me, but what are you smoking?”
Could lose? of course he COULD lose...I’m not saying he could lose. I’m saying based on the data and the statistical analyses I’ve tinkered with in SPSS (which I get free at work) this week, he will lose. Obama has 290 EV locked in already, I posted about this analysis before and emphasized that we will hold the House SOLIDLY so we have nothing to worry about. Conservatives will still be in charge of writing the budgets and have the real power.
Well jackmercer,
You flat nailed it.
Do you have any follow up? Why do you think we will do way better in 2014?
I didn’t actually nail it completely. I called 290EV (possibly 303EV) and Obama +1.8%.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2955102/posts?page=137#137
I didn’t think Obama had any way in hell to get Florida, still close, but it looks like he will pull it off. Nate Silver did call Florida a few days before the election when the average of polls said different and so did every conservative AND liberal pundit and columnist in the country. As much as I hate to say it, I have to tip my hat to his brain. I do not have the proprietary model equations he came up with but as a scientist, I’d LOVE to see them. He really is the best in the business....he blew everyone out of the water 3 elections in a row now.
Back to your point though, I said that we may do big in 2014 for a very simple reason. Historically, the out-party ALWAYS gains seats in the midterms and right now we already have a very, very significant majority in the House. Adding more will make the House an incredible force at the bargaining table and give the House the mandate in 2014....just like 1998 did.
BUT! I already see some trouble on the horizon. Mitch McConnell came out today swinging and fired quite a shot across Obama’s bow and that could be bad news. He said something (and I’m paraphrasing) like Obama better not try to put something on the table that won’t pass the House. McConnell is up for re-election in 2014 and there are already strong forces in Kentucky moving to primary him. If he thinks of his own skin first, he could screw us.
With a nice cushion of 55 seats in the Senate and the entire Executive, the dems have a lot of leverage to make the House conservatives look unreasonable and dangerous. If the House Republicans pull another 2010 debt ceiling showdown, that will kill us, I mean really kill us.
Obama successfully painted them as obstructionists and the Republican house approval ratings plummeted. Now you can get away with that right after a midterm but not right before. If they do that in first few months of 2013 to force Obama’s hand on a number of issues, it will be ok. If they pull that type of thing in latter 2013 or seem even slightly unreasonable in 2014, Obama, the Senate and their cheerleaders in the media will destroy the conservative house brand and we could have a wave in the other direction.
The only thing that could soften that wave is the fact that 2010 was a major redistricting year and Republican Governors and statehouses carved some nice lines for us. In addition, liberals are living closer together and more densely in large cities which limits their House representation. Conservatives are more spread out in suburbs, exurbs and rural areas so our House districts are more broad and difficult to lose.
Anyway....that’s all amateur conjecture but I think 2014 will be ok as long as we give do what Reagan did, give up 20% of our agenda to gain 80%. But with such a shitty Senate situation, we may have to give up slightly more.
Tip of the hat to you....great job. For some reason I did not see your work out here on FR before the election. Lol, I don’t know if I would have believed it:)
Silver got 2008 and 2012. Was he on the money in 2004 as well?
I try to be realistic too so I did not want to believe some of the more pessimistic projections. In any case I was not too surprised we lost but I hoped it would be closer, and a couple more states (FL especially) would have flipped back just so there would be more optimism about next time. The net loss of 2 Senate seats is disastrous. I had thought if they held on to at least 47 there would be a good chance they’d get up to 51 in 2014 but now I am much less hopeful there. How bad do things have to get for the Dems for them to lose 6 seats? I guess it’s possible since it happened in 2010 but I hope they have as bad a “6 year itch” election as the GOP had in 2006.
“Silver got 2008 and 2012. Was he on the money in 2004 as well?”
No, I’m including 2010. The final results for the generic ballot in 2010 was Republicans by +6.8. RealClearPolitics had their final forecast as Republicans +9.4:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/2010_generic_congressional_vote-2171.html
Nate Silver’s model had the final projection as Republicans +6.8....see the 16th paragraph here. He wasn’t even off by a tenth of a percentage point. That’s one hell of a model:
In 2010, Silver gave the GOP only a 25% chance of flipping 60 House seats. It ended up being 67. Some vaunted model...
“In 2010, Silver gave the GOP only a 25% chance of flipping 60 House seats. It ended up being 67. Some vaunted model...”
Yes, but he gave us a 75% chance of getting 55 seats. He mapped out the probabilities district by district, no one else did that at that level of precision. They just gave generics. Newsweek projected a 23 seat gain for us and Gallup projected a 77 seat gain. Everyone else gave some guess in between those extreme parameters...he hit it better than any other group.
Look at paragraph 17 where he sums up his model probability. He projected a 50 to 60 seat gain and got more specific districts right than anyone.
It is all a bell curve of probabilities. If you cherry pick the 25% of the right side of the curve and say he is off, then you don’t understand statistics because there was also a 25% chance of 30 or less seats at the left end of the curve. If you chose the peak of his bell curve where the best guess lies, you would see that 67 was right at the right edge of that projection and 55 was at the peak.
Yea but from your link:
“But it tells you basically the same thing. Tonight, our forecast shows Republicans gaining 53 seats.”
We won a dozen more seats than that figure, so while his percentages were correct he low balled our seat gain. Gallup over shot by the same amount. Idk. I wanna see how accurate he is when Obama is not in the race. There’s something odd.
He was off by a lot though with our seat gain. There’s no way to try and spin it. He said 53 and we got 14 more seats than that. He low balled our gains....big time. Gallup had us up 10%..way off from 6.8% reality but they had our seat can closer at 77 (ten more than we won).
* our seat GAIN not can.
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.
“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”
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.
You admire a Kos Kid at your own risk, I'm telling you. If he's that good, he'd be sotto voce cleaning up in the betting exchanges, instead of wagering dimes to goofs like Morning Joe...
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