Video ~ Nate Silver Orders Breakfast

No offense to the "real" Nate Silver, but this parody from ThePitNYC is hilarious. And it's just another homage to a statistician who often seems super-human to the rest of us who are math-challenged. Also, I posted as counterpoint a little poke at Karl Rove who set himself up as the Fox News Math Fail guy on election night - "caught in a landslide, no escape from reality." I never get tired of that!

Warning: Some adult language content.

Nate Silver Mentioned in Doonesbury

To quote Chris Matthews: HA!

Nate Silver's 538 Blog



Via Political Carnival

Nate Silver, Polls and Arithmatic

Well, Nate Silver was right. Exactly right. He couldn't have been more right. His Monte Carlo models for 2012 accurately predicted the number of electoral votes each candidate would receive, as well as which states would go blue for Obama. Well-done, Sir. You have now become part of election history, and I'm glad you also stuck to your guns when others were taunting you and with Politico calling you a "one-term celebrity." I guess they should have said "Won Term Celebrity."

What's important is that you get the last laugh. :) I think you'll be around in the next election. I'm not sure about the hacks at Breitbart or those guys from Politico. What were their names again?

Excerpt of Silver's Book "The Signal and the Noise" via Daily Beast

Political news, and especially the important news that really affects the campaign, proceeds at an irregular pace. But news coverage is produced every day. Most of it is filler, packaged in the form of stories that are designed to obscure its unimportance. Not only does political coverage often lose the signal—it frequently accentuates the noise.

Snark Amendment: Pundits Wagering War on Nate Silver
Previous Posts on Nate Silver and the Polls



The Romney camp was "shellshocked" over the fact that the Republican-leaning polls were the ones that were skewed, since the party-line had been the opposite for months.

Rush, Dick and Rove Skewed into Frenzy by Polls

In the last days of the campaign, people were coming out of the woodwork to predict a landslide, which had nothing to do with the reality of the polls, most of which showed Obama ahead at that time. I gathered up their quotes and tweets here:

Snark Amendment: Republicans Predict Romney Landslide

Yeah, the GOP got a landslide, all right. They are going to be digging their way out of it for years to come!



I think one reason ordinary voters drank that Kool-Aid in addition to the Romney Camp, was that some spineless pundits in the mainstream were hedging bets on the outside chance that all the Democratic pollsters were A. Delusional and B. Liars. For instance, CNN kept talking about the "razor thin margin" which somehow gave the advantage to Mitt instead of Obama, when their own internal polling showed otherwise. Chris Cillizza at Washington Post moved Ohio into the "toss-up" column just because Romney needed it so much to win.

The Dems who took a "poll of polls" approach and checked in with statisticians and oddsmakers were not nearly as confused. Yes, we were also nervous and scared about the unknown outcome, yes, but we were not AS confused about the data. And in the end, this election was all about the math.

Bookmark these websites for future elections - math works!

538.com - Nate Silver
ElectoralVote.com
Princeton - Sam Wang
PredictWise


Below is a list compiled by professor Costas Panagopoulos, Ph.D. of Fordham University. It shows which pollsters did a good job of accurately predicting the election outcome. It's a good idea to save this list for the next election so you can avoid the polls from CNN down to AP because those were the most biased and least accurate.

Fordham University List of Pollsters Ranked from Most Accurate to Least Accurate

Most (22) polls overestimated Romney support, while six (6)
overestimated Obama strength (indicated with a * below), but none of the 28 national preelection polls I examined had a significant partisan bias.
The following list ranks the 28 organizations by the predictive accuracy of their final, national pre-election estimates (as reported on pollster.com).

1. Ipsos/Reuters
2. YouGov
3. PPP (D)
3. Daily Kos/SEIU/PPP
4. Angus-Reid*
5. ABC/WP*
6. Pew Research*
6. Hartford Courant/UConn*
7. Purple Strategies
8. NBC/WSJ
8. CBS/NYT
8. YouGov/Economist
9. UPI/CVOTER
10. IBD/TIPP
11. Democracy Corps (D)*
12. CNN/ORC
12. Monmouth/SurveyUSA
12. Politico/GWU/Battleground
12. FOX News
12. Washington Times/JZ Analytics
12. Newsmax/JZ Analytics
12. American Research Group
12. Gravis Marketing
13. National Journal*
14. Rasmussen
14. Gallup
15. NPR
16. AP/GfK

It's Not Just Nate Silver Predicting Obama to Win Ohio and the Election

source: NYT 538 Blog

Nate Silver is getting pushback and lots of trash talk for sticking to his prediction that Obama will win the electoral college on Tuesday. Right now the prediction is that Obama has 85% chance of winning the electoral college if the election was held today. Actually, the election IS being held today, thanks to early voting, with thousands of new voters participating in every state. The vote may be slightly disrupted in the Northeast thanks to Hurricane Sandy, but plans are in place for mobile truck polling places in places like New Jersey and New York, which are blue states for Obama anyway. Ohio and Pennsylvania were not as affected by the storm, so any disruptions there are more likely to be overcrowded precincts and shenanigans from their Republican overlords in charge of the election.



And Obama is still set to win Ohio and Pennsylvania based on poll after poll. The only people who seem to doubt that are the pundits who are trying to make this into an "undecided" race when the numbers show something else entirely.

All the quotes from Nate, his detractors and other pundit hackery here:

Snark Amendment: Wagering War on Nate Silver
(Yes, the title is a pun not a misspelling)

There's a good reason for Silver's prediction. Look at the Polls:



All Obama needs is to win Ohio and then Romney can't possibly patch together enough votes to win. Yet media hacks like CNN's Wolf Blitzer, MSNBC's Chuck Todd, and several writers at Politico keep calling the race too close to call. They sound just like the wingnuts at Breitbart and Fox, so where is the journalistic integrity? If they won't report the facts then they are useless, and no better than Dick Morris or Karl Rove.

Particularly despicable is Chris Cillizza of Washington Post who moved Ohio to "Toss-Up" status the other day just because Mitt Romney needs the state to win. No real arithmatic involved, just pandering to the right, or perhaps nervousness about some Republican getting mad on the internet, LOL. Oooo, scary!

Washington Post

The Fix is moving Ohio from “lean Obama” to “tossup” in our presidential ratings amid a slew of polling that suggests that the race has tightened over the past month, even as the incumbent retains the slightest of edges.
. . . After reviewing all of the available public polling data as well as talking to operatives in both parties about the private polls they are privy to, we are convinced that Ohio is a 1-3 point race in President Obama’s favor at the moment.
That — coupled with the state’s electoral history and the absolute necessity for Romney to win the state if he wants to be president — leads us to move it back to the “tossup” category.

In response, numbers guy Sam Wang of Princeton wrote a piece called Perverse media incentive watch: Chris Cillizza

...Cillizza is hardly alone. A few days ago, Wolf Blitzer at CNN cited a single Ohio poll, done by his own organization, showing Obama up by 4%. He then proceeded to call this a "tie," revealing an amazing inability to interpret a simple number. Compounding this is the fact that dozens of polls have been conducted in Ohio. The odds of an Obama lead are extremely high. So why does he persist?
The news media have an incentive to fuzz up the picture: ratings and profit. A message that the cake is fully baked does not automatically bring back the viewers. Without the artificial suspense, Cillizza and Blitzer are put in a position of having to say something substantive or interesting that gets beyond a horserace number. Think how much work that would be.
The same problem extends to the aggregation of polling data, which many sites do (FiveThirtyEight, Oct. 31). But think of all the headlines you have seen about "Romney ahead nationally," "Obama pulls ahead in Wisconsin," "it's a dead heat," and other permutations. Each of these headlines was based on a single poll. But aggregation would lead to fewer news stories - and less of the breathless horserace coverage we are used to.

Today Wang stuck to his guns, writing:

President Obama is peeling away. As you can see from the electoral vote (EV) estimator, he is the candidate with the momentum, not Romney. In terms of EV or the Meta-margin, he's made up just about half the ground he ceded to Romney after Debate #1. And the indicators are still headed straight up.
A few days ago, the word was that Team Romney was buying ads in Minnesota and Pennsylvania. If he wins either of those states I will eat a bug. Ohio...a really big bug. And yes, I will post a photo.
Today I'll address a common concern among the commentariat: will President Obama lose the popular vote? Steve Lombardo is on the case with some Excel curve fitting of a quality that cannot even identify the Debate #1 bounce. Hmmm, someone take his keys away.
Anyway, the short answer: I estimate Romney's chance of winning the popular vote at 6%, odds of 16-1 against.

Here is the Princeton breakdown of states and electoral votes. Looks like Sam Wang won't have to eat a bug.


Another projection by the University of Illinois, Urbana, Election Analytics gives a similar result as Wang and Nate Silver:


Still not convinced? How about four different oddsmakers on Predictwise.com:



So there it is.

David Rothschild writes on Yahoo's The Signal: All eyes on—where else?—Ohio

Since the final presidential debate, 15 polls have surveyed voter opinion in Ohio, the state that is more likely than any other to determine the election. President Barack Obama leads former Gov. Mitt Romney in 13 of them. The candidates tied in one, and Romney leads in one. Those last two polls were both conducted by Rasmussen, one of the more right-leaning polling institutions, as FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver has documented.

No one is saying Ohio is a walk for the president. The Huffington Post's Pollster and the RealClearPolitics average both have Obama leading with 51.2 percent among those who express a preference for either major candidate. There is still time for a shift toward Romney, and it's always possible that there is a systematic bias in the polls.

But I don't think it's likely. Historically, polls have been pretty accurate this close to the election. Based only on these surveys, the Signal gives Obama a 75 percent chance of victory in Ohio. When we factor in prediction markets, that figure ticks up a small amount, to 77 percent.

None of these analysts should be vilified for doing simple mathematical algorithms based on dating that other people provide to them. What is much more worrying is the press spinning numbers in a way they know to be DISHONEST just three days before a major election.

Earth to GOP: The Polls are Arithmatic

"Skew" is another interesting phrase the GOP loves to use. Here's the defintion via Online Etymology Dictionary:

skew (v.)    late 15c., from O.N.Fr. eskiuer "shy away from, avoid," O.Fr. eschiver (see eschew). Meaning "depict unfairly" first recorded 1872, on notion of being slanted. Statistical sense dates from 1929. Related: Skewed; skewing. The adjectival meaning "slanting, turned to one side" is recorded from c.1600; noun meaning "slant, deviation" first attested 1680s.

It is ridiculous to imply that "all" the polls are "skewed" except for certain bad polls by biased people like Rasmussen or Karl Rove that show their guy Romney leading. Isn't it more likely that they are the ones who are skewed instead of the 15 other pollsters, some of whom are non-partisan or who take a poll of polls average?

But none of that matters if you are Republican clinging to false hope. They just can't accept that the very likable and inspirational - although African American - President Obama is way ahead in the polls. Because . . . arithmatic.

As of tonight, Nate Silver of 538 Blog is giving Barack Obama an 84% chance - well, let's be scientific and say "83.9%" chance of winning the Presidency.

Mitt Romney has, therefore, only 16.1% chance, no rounding necessary.

That's the mathematical truth, unless you are a Republican in denial.

The polls are what they are - just a statistical snapshot of the country's rejection of goofy-strange Mitt Romney as President of the United States. Simple as that.

But denial is strong in them, like the Force. For instance, here's a stammering and sputtering Karl Rove spinning about how "unscientific" the polls are, but even Bill O'Reilly isn't drinking the kool-aid on Fox News:

O'REILLY: . . . Are these polls dishonest?

ROVE: No. Look, we endow them with a false scientific precision they simply don't have. If you've got nine points more Democrats than Republicans and you're nine points more --
(CROSSTALK)

O'REILLY: You you're going to have a poll that reflects that.

ROVE: -- yes, nine points more Obama. Think about this. Romney and Obama get each roughly the same percentage of Republicans and Democrats as -- as their opponent. That is to say they carry their -- their base overwhelmingly. Romney, among Independents is winning by three points.

So -- so if Romney is winning the Independents and winning the Republicans do you think in a battle ground state like Florida, he's nine points down and the answer is no....

ROVE: . . . So look, we've got to be careful about, you know, we have a proliferation of these polls. There have been 87 national polls in the last 30 days. That's more polls than were run in the last six months of the 1980 presidential race.


O'REILLY: All right.

ROVE: Last week -- last week alone, we had 51 state level polls; and the week before that, 41.
(CROSSTALK)

O'REILLY: I understand that but -- but here -- here -- look, from my point of view as a news analyst and I believe that the folks know I'm honest in that regard, when news agencies like the CBS News on the radio report the polling and it shows that Barack Obama has leapt out to a big lead in Florida and Ohio, that gets inside people's minds. They remember that. And that can only help the President. That helps the President.

ROVE: Sure.

O'REILLY: Because the perception is he is going to be the winner.

. . . O'REILLY: All right, real quick, real quick, your board, the Karl Rove board where is the race in Ohio and Florida in your opinion?

ROVE: Well, toss-up in both states.

O'REILLY: Toss-up? It could go either way at this point in history.

ROVE: Sure.

O'REILLY: All right, Mr. Rove. We appreciate that.

Then tonight, we have Wolf Blitzer of CNN taking a stand for a change, although he rolls it back quickly to the "toss-up" idea, via Media Matters:


Transcript from CNN

Ashleigh Banfield: CNN's Wolf Blitzer joining me live from Washington, D.C.

Wolf, the Romney camp and their allies are suggesting that a lot of those so-called mainstream polls are skewed in some way, that they're not accurate. I want to play a short clip from Mr. Romney's political director, Rich Beeson.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

RICH BEESON, POLITICAL DIRECTOR, ROMNEY CAMPAIGN: We trust our internal polls. I don't make any campaign decisions based off what I read in the "Washington Post." So I'm not going to get into the specifics of what our polls say or don't say. I trust our numbers and that's what we're basing our decisions off of.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BANFIELD: But he won't give us those numbers.

So, Wolf, here's how it goes. Every time bad numbers come out, I hear campaigns saying, we don't use those numbers, we use our own. But I never hear that when the numbers are good. Am I wrong?

WOLF BLITZER, CNN HOST, "THE SITUATION ROOM": You're not wrong, but the fundamental fact of what's going on right now is the numbers in these key battleground states, according to almost all of the reputable national polls out there, show that Obama is ahead in most of these key battleground states. That's obviously disconcerting to a lot of Republicans. Some of them, like Karl Rove, for example, have repeatedly gone out there and suggested that these polls are biased against the Republicans because they're oversampling Democrats, for example, as opposed to Republicans. And as a result, don't trust these polls, they're not reliable. So it's sort of convenient for a lot of these Republicans, like Karl Rove, to go after the NBC poll or the ABC poll or CNN polls.

But what they don't say is that the FOX News polls are showing almost exactly the same thing. FOX has some good polls. For example, their most recent battleground states, Ashleigh, in Ohio and Virginia, show Obama ahead of Romney by seven points. In Florida, the FOX News poll shows the President ahead of Romney by five points. Very similar to all these other so-called mainstream poll numbers. You don't hear them complaining about the FOX News polls. They're complaining about the others, so there is an imbalance there.

If you take a look at all these polls, and we at CNN did a poll of polls, you show -- it clearly shows that the President is ahead slightly in almost all of these key battleground states. And I think that's pretty significant.

BANFIELD: We were just showing Virginia, and now here is Florida, and they're saying exactly what you just said, Wolf. And here is the thing. Yes, we're 40 days out. But early voting -- we started the program talking about the significance of early voting and the volumes of people who do early voting. Which brings me to my next question, regardless of what the Romney camp is saying about their internal polls, is it entirely possible they are seeing these polls that are now, as I said, solidifying with early voters and saying it may be time to spend the money on down-ballot contenders and go for the House and go for the Senate because we've lost those states at this point?

[Blogger Note: Wolf immediately rolls back his comments so as not to offend the GOP. Typical. The truth is never enough.]

BLITZER: Yes, I think it's way too premature to say they've lost those states. It's early. I've seen polls turn around the final 40 days of an election. They certainly can turn around in this election. And let's not forget --
(CROSSTALK)

BANFIELD: But even with the early voting numbers, Wolf?

BLITZER: Even with the early voting numbers. This is not over by any means, Ashleigh. There's three presidential debates, one vice presidential debate. And I remember very vividly -- you probably were too young to remember -- the 1980 race.