Here's The Real Reason Nate Silver's Perfect Election Call Was Such An Awesome Breakthrough

Business Insider ^ | Nov. 10, 2012 | Joe Weisenthal

[nathanbedford]

Obama was handily favored every single day of the race. The closest thing to a game changer (by far) was the early disastrous debate in early Ocrober. But at no point, did Romney's odds of winning hit 50%. And by the middle of October, Obama was back on the re-ascent. Sandy didn't change anything. The 47% tape didn't change anything. Benghazi didn't change anything. Paul Ryan's selection didn't change anything, and so forth. Romney didn't lose because of a glitch in his election day Get Out The Vote app, which is something a lot of folks are talking about right now.

[blueyon]

Can not see how with all the VOTER FRAUD that is being told (In Fla and PA) the article, as you say “our side never had a chance”.

141 percent voter turn out in 1 district in Fla and 90-99 percent voter turn out in Phila...

I am staying with the “We Won” but the GOP has no balls to stand up and claim it (except Allen West)!

[montag813]

Absurd.
Just because Nate Silver was right about the outcome, does not mean his percentage chance of victory was accurate. Romney lost by less than 320,000 votes in 4 swing states. Given that 46% of those exit polled said Obama’s response (as endorsed by Chris Christie before that ‘response ‘actually happened) to Hurricane Sandy was a “major factor” is determining their vote, and those people broke 2:1 for Obama, and 15% of those said Sandy was “the most important factor” and they broke 4:1, Sandy was indeed a MAJOR factor that could easily have reversed 70,000 votes in each swing state. Numerically, it may have moved double that number. Without Sandy, and with a ravenous media pushing Obama hard over Benghazi (instead of covering for him, as with CBS, or lying for him, as with Candy Crowley), this election could easily have been Romnney’s. Certainly nowhere near a “91% probability” of loss in the last 24 hours. Which shows the fundamental uselessness of Silver’s methodology to areas such a hedging futures for weather or other risks.

[nathanbedford]

If this really was a get out the vote election, you suggest the Democrats contrived a blend of technology and human contact which was unbelievably effective, even though Obama was 9-10 million votes short of is 2008 effort. I say it was unbelievably effective because considering his record and the state of the economy it is unbelievable that he could get any voters out at all.

I think the technology part is relatively simple to duplicate and it is Romney's failure that as a CEO he failed to test drive the technology sold to him by his consultants. But the interesting component, the human side, is the most difficult to organize and manage.

I suspect, but I do not know, that this was accomplished along primarily racial and gender lines. In other words, blacks got out the black vote, Hispanics got the Hispanic vote, coeds got out the college vote etc. My guess is that the Obama operation sought to bind the potential voter to the campaign not by talking so much about the issues but by group identity. The whole idea was that the potential voter gains peer acceptance by joining and conforming to the group. Considering the kind of voters Obama sought, this was a fruitful enterprise. It is easy to see black with black bonding in concentrated ghetto areas but one can also understand the interaction in the University towns.

This process of peer acceptance does away almost entirely with the need to be right on the issues, one need merely recite a few shibboleths and the issue is foreclosed. The bonding is not intellectual and rational but emotional and can easily be irrational.

This is purest speculation on my part but I think it would go a long way toward explaining the otherwise inexplicable to the conservative mind.

What do you think?

[nathanbedford]

If this really was a get out the vote election, you suggest the Democrats contrived a blend of technology and human contact which was unbelievably effective, even though Obama was 9-10 million votes short of is 2008 effort. I say it was unbelievably effective because considering his record and the state of the economy it is unbelievable that he could get any voters out at all.

I think the technology part is relatively simple to duplicate and it is Romney's failure that as a CEO he failed to test drive the technology sold to him by his consultants. But the interesting component, the human side, is the most difficult to organize and manage.

I suspect, but I do not know, that this was accomplished along primarily racial and gender lines. In other words, blacks got out the black vote, Hispanics got the Hispanic vote, coeds got out the college vote etc. My guess is that the Obama operation sought to bind the potential voter to the campaign not by talking so much about the issues but by group identity. The whole idea was that the potential voter gains peer acceptance by joining and conforming to the group. Considering the kind of voters Obama sought, this was a fruitful enterprise. It is easy to see black with black bonding in concentrated ghetto areas but one can also understand the interaction in the University towns.

This process of peer acceptance does away almost entirely with the need to be right on the issues, one need merely recite a few shibboleths and the issue is foreclosed. The bonding is not intellectual and rational but emotional and can easily be irrational.

This is purest speculation on my part but I think it would go a long way toward explaining the otherwise inexplicable to the conservative mind.

What do you think?

[nathanbedford]

Absurd.

Kindly post your predictions prior to the election.

[jackmercer]

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.

[gusopol3]

The other way you get to this kind of precision is to know ahead of time what numbers they’re going to write in on the vote tallies in a lot of places. Then it helps to be able to point to a brilliant guru who had it all figured out ahead of time.

[muleskinner]

Obama had over 200,000 precinct workers (SEIU, Autoworkers, etc) in the battleground states starting just after the 2010 elections. The 2010 elections was the lib/left wake-up call. Romney had 25,000. No army won a war with those numbers. Maybe a battle, but not a war.

Obama had a 6 month head start on advertising and carpetbombed Romney in Ohio. The Romney campaign couldn't answer until after the convention, but a Republican SuperPac could. Why it didn't? Poor coordination?

[Mozilla]

“Here’s The Real Reason Nate Silver’s Perfect Election Call Was Such An Awesome Breakthrough”

Answer: Fraud, corruption, lies and mass media promotion. Period.

[squarebarb]

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

[who_would_fardels_bear]

"to bust up the media conglomerate cartels and give the American people real media choices."

The media is already in major splinter mode. Also, John Ziegler makes a great point on his blog that a splintered and diversified media might not work in conservatives' favor.

We conservatives were primarily listening to Rush, Foxnews, etc. and drank the Kool-Aid. We got to hear what we wanted to hear and the liberals got to hear what they wanted to hear on CNN.

Meanwhile the vast majority of Americans are watching Entertainment Tonight and Honey Boo-Boo, and the "capitalists" (liberal or conservative or more likely amoral and apolitical) that own the media corporations are just trying to make a profit and don't care what ways the political winds blow. They will adapt their message to continue to generate profits at the expense of family values, constitutional government, and principled conservatism.

[Redmen4ever]

The stock market moved down big time after the election. This means the big money was surprised (not necessarily that Romney was favored, could simply be that the outcome was in doubt until the actual vote was counted).

I agree that the first debate was a game changer. It moved Romney up by, from neck and neck to a 3 point lead (yes, I am parroting Rasmussen).

But, there was another game changer: the hurricane.

Both Raz and Gallup affirm this (although Gallup’s suspension masked this second change).

The ABC/WP poll also affirms this, although with a liberal tilt. as a neck and neck race turned into a 3 point edge for Obama by their tracking poll.

The state polls (eg, Q and Marist) were way out of whack. According to Silvers, Obama had a lock on the Electoral College because of the state polls. Well, in the end, the key states - CO, OH and VA - fell to Obama by 2 or 3 points, almost exactly his edge in the nationwide popular vote.

Hence if Romney had won the nationwide popular vote by 1 point (or 3!), he would have been elected.

What people will remember is that Silvers was right; but, he was wrong. There was never a lock on the Electoral College. Obama rode a storm surge to re-election.

[Utmost Certainty]

Most of these effects are relatively easy to do with rudimentary knowledge of sociology and interpersonal group behavior. There’s really nothing incredibly groundbreaking about what the Ds are doing in concept, it’s just that Rs aren’t doing it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_dynamics#Intragroup_dynamics

Also relevant albeit of a more extreme variation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_Reform_and_the_Psychology_of_Totalism

The bit about thought-terminating clichés is revealing:

A thought-terminating cliché is a commonly used phrase, sometimes passing as folk wisdom, used to quell cognitive dissonance. Though the phrase in and of itself may be valid in certain contexts, its application as a means of dismissing dissent or justifying fallacious logic is what makes it thought-terminating.

Lifton said: “The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.”

[sickoflibs]

RE :”If this article is correct, our side never had a chance and we simply never connected with the public”

You got it. But the biggest mistake is telling yourself you are winning when you are losing. That is always a disaster.,

That is the key.

[Utmost Certainty]

I don’t think the media is all that splintered anymore. The common wisdom had been that the Internet would somehow diminish the influence of Big Media—which has been true but only somewhat. Plus Big Media has finally adapted to emergent realities of the Internet age anyway. And realistically I think there’s only so much the internet can do at this point—i.e., Conservative blog publishers are largely limited to writing derivative editorials of stories put out by Fox News and other major figures…

If Conservatives weren’t locked into Fox News so much (not that they can be particularly faulted for this—Fox News is really the only TV option available for Conservatives and it ain’t all that great), perhaps the echo chamber effect of inter-mutually reinforcing groupthink wouldn’t have been so all-encompassing into bunker mentality as it was.

So having more media POVs available to discern events and information would’ve been useful for purposes of percolating contradictory information about what was really going on in order to erode ossified perceptions. But there just aren’t many frontline news sources for Conservatives outside of Fox News, so this issue will be intransigent.

So long as Conservatives remain exasperatingly limited in media venues for getting the message and the facts out, they will at a distinct disadvantage, relegated to staring extinction in the face in the war of ideas. Ignoring this is suicide.

[Jane Long]

The other way you get to this kind of precision is to know ahead of time what numbers they’re going to write in on the vote tallies in a lot of places. Then it helps to be able to point to a brilliant guru who had it all figured out ahead of time.

+1

[NoLibZone]

Bingo. We ran another damned “gentleman” campaign. Makes me sick.

+1

“Look at Howard Sterns interviews of what the current electorate is comprsied of.”

Run D I R T Y and H A R D.

One must realize that the good guy cowboy has to kill all 12 bad guys and they only have to kill one.

The moral is the good guy has to be badder.
But for the right reasons.

[jackmercer]

“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.

[Political Junkie Too]

I did analyze Rasmussen's polls all election long. Even with its flaws, the best Romney did was a 45% probability of winning.

-PJ

[Political Junkie Too]

I never saw any jackmercer posts until the other day, so I missed out on a rich discussion. Even with the flaws in the Rasmussen polls, he also showed that the Senate was lost, too.

-PJ