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Code for The Economist's election model for 2020

manuelfcreis 6y ago
There was quite a big argument between Nate Silver, from 538, and G. Elliott Morris, the author of this model, which was quite an entertaining read if you’re into statistical drama. A piece of it: https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1294263127668924416?s=20 https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1294263127668924416...
- Tarq0n 6y ago
  Andrew Gelman weighs into this much more thoughtfully here: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/08/14/new-fivethirtyeight-com-election-forecast/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/08/14/new-fiveth....
  - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    Important to note here that Andrew Gelman is involved in the Economist model (which increases my prior that its correct, even though it shouldn't).
    - wirrbel 6y ago
      well, its a well-informed meta-prior that when Gelman is involved, the model won't be absurd :-)
  - iaw 6y ago
    > "The first thing to say is that 72% and 89% can correspond to vote forecasts and associated uncertainties that are a lot closer than you might think." I'm with Nate Silver on this one, 72% and 89% are as close as 75% and 50% in terms of being double the likelihood for a Republican win. We will likely never know which model is more accurate but given Nate Silvers history on these predictions I trust him a bit more than others.
    - quico 6y ago
      > "72% and 89% are as close as 75% and 50% in terms of being double the likelihood for a Republican win." In a postscript (P.S.) Andrew Gelman clarified that the forecast distributions are close and not the probabilities of winning [0]. > "I’m not saying that 72% and 89% are close in probabilistic terms. I agree that there’s a big difference between 8-1 odds and 3-1 odds. What I’m saying is that the large difference in these probabilities arises from small differences in the forecast distributions. Changing a forecast from 0.54 +/- 0.02 to 0.53 +/- 0.025 is highly consequential to the win probability, but as uncertainty distributions they are similar and they are hard to distinguish directly. You can get much different headline probabilities from similar underlying distributions." [0]: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/08/14/new-fivethirtyeight-com-election-forecast/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/08/14/new-fiveth...
- mdoms 6y ago
  Nate Silver got lucky one time and has been coasting on it since. The man has no credibility.
  - garmaine 6y ago
    He’s been consistently more right (less wrong?) than the mainstream media. This hasn’t been a one off thing.
    - dragonwriter 6y ago
      > He’s been consistently more right (less wrong?) than the mainstream media. Well, once he rose to popularity, 538 has been part of the mainstream media, affiliated with the NYTimes, then owned by ESPN, then transferred within the Disney Empire to ABC News. But, sure, it's pretty consistently been one of the better (not just election) statistical forecasting shops in the mainstream media.
    - hoorayimhelping 6y ago
      That's the whole point, I think. We're saying, "he's better at predicting things than the mainstream media!" The issue is that the mainstream media's bar is so low, there is no bar. And the reason this guy is somewhat respected is because his bar is only slightly higher than rat shit, which seems amazing compared to what we're used to. The guy sucks at actually modelling outcomes. Because everyone does. He just sucks very slightly less than everyone else. Maybe the issue isn't that Nate Silver is slightly better than average, maybe the issue is that we shouldn't be sharing this garbage on the news, since it's not reflective of reality. It's like saying, "sure, Cuba is a human rights nightmare, but it's okay to trade and interact with them, cause at least it ain't the Congo!"
      - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
        Asking for people to not make or publish predictions is asking for the sun to not rise. You'll never see that day. Being less wrong is the best option that is actually on the table.
  - 6y ago
- WoahNoun 6y ago
  His tone comes off as very defensive about his own work rather than constructive criticism of the Economist model. >In that sense, the best tip-off that the forecasts are different is they have Biden at 97% to win the popular vote, and have sometimes been as high as 98% (and 99% before they revised their model) whereas we are at 82%. You're getting up to 97-98%, you're getting VERY confident.
  - TMWNN 6y ago
    >You're getting up to 97-98%, you're getting VERY confident. Silver made the same point about probability before the 2016 election, and got into a similar Twitter argument (https://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/nate-silver-huffington-post-polls-twitter-230815 https://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/nate-silver-huffingto...). One guess on who proved to be correct.
    - WoahNoun 6y ago
      Winning the election != winning the popular vote. There are plenty of qualitative reasons to believe the popular vote distribution matches the Economist model. He isn't arguing about how they came up with distribution. He is arguing that the particular kind of distribution is unreasonable in all instances. Which I disagree with. There are plenty of places in statistical modeling where a narrow head makes absolute sense.
    - matthewmacleod 6y ago
      Nobody was “proved to be correct”, because the winner of a poll does not by itself show anything about the probability of that particular candidate having won.
      - martingoodson 6y ago
        The probability of winning is based on the popular support for a candidate. The poll directly measures that support. How can it possibly not 'show anything about the probability of that particular candidate having won'?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
lordnacho 6y ago
Doesn't this suffer from low n? There's only been so many presidential elections, and there's only been so many in a similar environment, whatever you think the relevant factors are. Then there's the one - off problem of evaluating how good the prediction was. If you think it's 95+ for one side then yes, you're embarrassed when it goes the other way. If you think it's 75 then you should be wrong one out of four anyway, but people will still think you messed up. Impressive work regardless, I always enjoy these stats things.
- Tarq0n 6y ago
  Not at all. These models all have a multilevel structure, accounting for election level data, district data and poll data. The main source of uncertainty is probably how hard representative polling is, not to mention the polls are carried out by many different organizations.
  - manquer 6y ago
    The logistical challenges are considerable factor this election. Many people may want to vote for say Biden, but their ballots could be disregarded. Even without the political fight over USPS funding, it is going to be extremely hard for them to turn around in < 1 week as required in many states, there are also the issue with votes that which are postmarked earlier but delivered later than election date( this is with good reason as you don't want results delayed if you wait for votes to come in) I am not sure how anyone, without detailed data access to postal operations can accurately predict how much of this going to be a problem.
gridlockd 6y ago
There's a variable missing from these models which probably wasn't all that relevant until Donald Trump showed up: How many people are going to lie about or refuse to admit voting for a candidate like Donald Trump? I would expect this bias to be greater today than in 2016.
- kachnuv_ocasek 6y ago
  Andrew Gelman, one of the authors of the model, has some thoughts about that. I can't find the earlier article right now, but the Economist model counts with that as well. See the blog post (down in the first P.S.): https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/08/14/new-fivethirtyeight-com-election-forecast/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/08/14/new-fiveth...
- evgen 6y ago
  The so-called 'shy Tory' effect has been fairly conclusively proven to not actually exist; people will claim to be 'undecided' but will not claim to support X and then vote for Y. Look to size of the undecided group and then see where they break if the pollster forces a decision -- in 2020 the undecideds are smaller, and unlike 2016 they are breaking hard against Trump.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
  I see no reason to believe this to br greater today than in 2016. And I believe the 2016 data did not show any of it. More polls have also moved from live interviews to automated system, where it's less likely that anyone will be "shy".
  - gridlockd 6y ago
    In 2016 Trump polled way worse than he performed in key states. People are also more paranoid today than in 2016. If the communists take over, you do not want to be on some voted—nazi list.
    - jcranmer 6y ago
      > In 2016 Trump polled way worse than he performed in key states. That's not really true. The state-level polls were generally within normal polling error, although there was a systematic error due to educational attainment. In 2020, more pollsters have incorporated educational attainment into their weighting, so this source of error should be reduced.
schalab 6y ago
I am reminded of a story in Three men in a boat. A couple go out on a picnic with a young man. The moment they set out, the young man begins predicting rain. The couple begin to hate him for his gloomy disposition. They meet an old man on the road. He scrounges up his face, looks up at the sky, and says there wont be any rain. He has seen many days like this in his long life and it usually clears up. The couple cheer up at once and praise him for his wisdom. No sooner had they set up their picnic, then it begins raining heavily. On the drive back completely drenched, they look at the young man with anger. Like somehow he was responsible for the rain. They think of the old man fondly, "well atleast he tried". Thats human psychology.
- the8472 6y ago
  Unlike rain there can be a causal relation between predictions to election results. I.e. voters (and campaigners) can react to predictions.
  - chrisdsaldivar 6y ago
    This actually happened in the 1988 Mexican election. The PRI was losing the vote and their opposition was predicted to win using live vote tabulation. They hid the results by saying the system crashed and then declared themselves as winning. This kept many people from bothering to even vote. However, they went much further and burned legitimate ballots and even made fake ones. The difference here is the PRI actively used (fake) predictions to discourage voters. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988_Mexican_general_election https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988_Mexican_general_electio...
    - sukilot 6y ago
      According to your story, the prediction didn't affect the outcome.
    - benrbray 6y ago
      The most recent season of Narcos: Mexico has an entertaining dramatization of this event!
scruffyherder 6y ago
These models are stupid, many people cannot say what they want for fear of reprisals. The only question is which way does the majority lean, while the edges pull further apart.
- optimalsolver 6y ago
  Is the popular vote the best way to determine that?
  - scruffyherder 6y ago
    Not in America, it’s a republic, not a democracy.
BoiledCabbage 6y ago
I say this with all seriousness, the main flaw I see is the models not accounting for the levels of voter suppression being applied this year. One party is on record as saying that their own successful efforts in voter suppression last election won them the rust belt and as a result the presidency. After seeing it being so successful at tipping the scales last time it appears it will be even more heavily relied on this year. There are the most recent familiar hints in the news regarding mail in ballots, but so many more examples since the overturning of the voting rights act. How this isn't more of a scandal our democracy is frankly shocking. It's extremely difficult to talk about this in a purely non-partisan way because there really a case of "both sides are doing it". One party is effectively utilizing this to obtain, maintain and increase their hold on govt positions. > None of this is a coincidence. Republicans responded to the election of Barack Obama in 2008 not by trying to broaden their own base or appeal to a changing nation, but by modernizing voter suppression tactics out of the old Jim Crow playbook. Chief Justice John Roberts’s shameful 5-4 decision in 2013’s Shelby County v Holder ripped the heart out of the prime enforcement mechanism of the Voting Rights Act. Roberts argued that the South had changed, and such protections were no longer necessary. 1965, Roberts suggested, was a long time ago, in a different nation, across a changed South. The tens of thousands of Georgians whose voting precincts were closed, forcing them to endure six-hour lines to vote during a pandemic would like a word with him Roberts’s calamitous ignorance has done grievous damage. "Crosscheck" app/system which is frequently run against democratic counties was found to have a 200 to 1 false positive to true negative rate. It's still being heavily pushed. > Crosscheck is a national database designed to check for voters who are registered in more than one state by comparing names and dates of birth. Researchers at Stanford University, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, and Microsoft found that for every legitimate instance of double registration it finds, Crosscheck's algorithm returns approximately 200 false positives.[108] Kobach has been repeatedly sued by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other civil rights organizations for trying to restrict voting rights in Kansas. > Often, voter fraud is cited as a justification for such measures, even when the incidence of voter fraud is low. In Iowa, lawmakers passed a strict voter ID law with the potential to disenfranchise 260,000 voters. Out of 1.6 million votes cast in Iowa in 2016, there were only 10 allegations of voter fraud; none were cases of impersonation that a voter ID law could have prevented. Only one person, a Republican voter, was convicted. Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate, the architect of the bill, admitted, "We've not experienced widespread voter fraud in Iowa." We're reaching a very concerning threshold of election integrity that is being under appreciated. Our image of ourselves versus our reality is starting to diverge drastically. https://time.com/5852837/voter-suppression-obstacles-just-america/ https://time.com/5852837/voter-suppression-obstacles-just-am... https://www.npr.org/2018/10/23/659784277/republican-voter-suppression-efforts-are-targeting-minorities-journalist-says https://www.npr.org/2018/10/23/659784277/republican-voter-su... https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/17/us/some-republicans-acknowledge-leveraging-voter-id-laws-for-political-gain.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/17/us/some-republicans-ackno... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_Unite... https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/08/new-postal-service-plan-is-setting-off-election-alarms/amp https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/08/new-postal-service-p...
tamaharbor 6y ago
I do not tell pollsters I am for Trump, fearing my home get firebombed. No poll can measure that.
jeffbee 6y ago
Models are great but doesn't this all hinge on quality of the data inputs? In 2016 polls fielded the day before the election had Clinton up by 10 points in Wisconsin. Why did the polls and the election differ so greatly? Here's the last poll Google collected in Wisconsin in 2016: https://datastudio.google.com/s/kcPRGFaMaO0 https://datastudio.google.com/s/kcPRGFaMaO0
- coolspot 6y ago
  “Silent majority”. Even though there were more people supporting Trump in Wisconsin (or rather any non-left candidate), they couldn’t tell that in polls openly because is goes against vocal minority.
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    It makes no sense that people responding to anonymous online surveys would have such reservations.
    - coolspot 6y ago
      Online surveys are even worse than in-person, because they are hosted on particular sites, having particular audience, leaning or biased in particular way. E.g. Poll on cnn.com and fox.com will give you opposite results. Also different age/wealth/profession groups have particular leanings on political spectrum and particular average level of computer proficiency. E.g. a farmer in Idaho would likely to vote for any Republican candidate and simultaneously less likely to participate in any online polling.
      - jeffbee 6y ago
        As far as I can tell, rural conservatives are Extremely Online™.
- comicjk 6y ago
  Note that these polls are of Likely Voters. A big source of systematic error in 2016 state polls was Likely Voter models, used to weight raw poll results by voting propensity. In the Midwest in 2016, lots of people without college degrees said they preferred Trump - but based on previous elections, pollsters expected few would vote. This kind of shift is hard to predict - pollsters do not intend to make the same mistake again, but they might make another. (National polls are much less noisy because these kinds of regional errors often cancel out when averaged over the country.)
shoo 6y ago
The Economist's weekly US election podcast "Checks & Balance" interviewed Elliott Morris about election modelling & this model: https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2020/06/12/modelled-citizens-how-useful-is-polling-in-predicting-the-result-of-the-us-presidential-election https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2020/06/12/modelled-citiz... The podcast is for a general audience so it doesn't go into details of statistical modelling used in this model, but it does touch on polling, failures of polling to accurately predict results.
thedudeabides5 6y ago
Maybe Nate is just way less confident after getting caught w his pants down in 2016.

There was quite a big argument between Nate Silver, from 538, and G. Elliott Morris, the author of this model, which was quite an entertaining read if you’re into statistical drama. A piece of it: https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1294263127668924416?s=20 https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1294263127668924416...

Tarq0n 6y ago
Andrew Gelman weighs into this much more thoughtfully here: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/08/14/new-fivethirtyeight-com-election-forecast/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/08/14/new-fiveth....
- disgruntledphd2 6y ago
  Important to note here that Andrew Gelman is involved in the Economist model (which increases my prior that its correct, even though it shouldn't).
  - wirrbel 6y ago
    well, its a well-informed meta-prior that when Gelman is involved, the model won't be absurd :-)
- iaw 6y ago
  > "The first thing to say is that 72% and 89% can correspond to vote forecasts and associated uncertainties that are a lot closer than you might think." I'm with Nate Silver on this one, 72% and 89% are as close as 75% and 50% in terms of being double the likelihood for a Republican win. We will likely never know which model is more accurate but given Nate Silvers history on these predictions I trust him a bit more than others.
  - quico 6y ago
    > "72% and 89% are as close as 75% and 50% in terms of being double the likelihood for a Republican win." In a postscript (P.S.) Andrew Gelman clarified that the forecast distributions are close and not the probabilities of winning [0]. > "I’m not saying that 72% and 89% are close in probabilistic terms. I agree that there’s a big difference between 8-1 odds and 3-1 odds. What I’m saying is that the large difference in these probabilities arises from small differences in the forecast distributions. Changing a forecast from 0.54 +/- 0.02 to 0.53 +/- 0.025 is highly consequential to the win probability, but as uncertainty distributions they are similar and they are hard to distinguish directly. You can get much different headline probabilities from similar underlying distributions." [0]: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/08/14/new-fivethirtyeight-com-election-forecast/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/08/14/new-fiveth...
mdoms 6y ago
Nate Silver got lucky one time and has been coasting on it since. The man has no credibility.
- garmaine 6y ago
  He’s been consistently more right (less wrong?) than the mainstream media. This hasn’t been a one off thing.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > He’s been consistently more right (less wrong?) than the mainstream media. Well, once he rose to popularity, 538 has been part of the mainstream media, affiliated with the NYTimes, then owned by ESPN, then transferred within the Disney Empire to ABC News. But, sure, it's pretty consistently been one of the better (not just election) statistical forecasting shops in the mainstream media.
  - hoorayimhelping 6y ago
    That's the whole point, I think. We're saying, "he's better at predicting things than the mainstream media!" The issue is that the mainstream media's bar is so low, there is no bar. And the reason this guy is somewhat respected is because his bar is only slightly higher than rat shit, which seems amazing compared to what we're used to. The guy sucks at actually modelling outcomes. Because everyone does. He just sucks very slightly less than everyone else. Maybe the issue isn't that Nate Silver is slightly better than average, maybe the issue is that we shouldn't be sharing this garbage on the news, since it's not reflective of reality. It's like saying, "sure, Cuba is a human rights nightmare, but it's okay to trade and interact with them, cause at least it ain't the Congo!"
    - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
      Asking for people to not make or publish predictions is asking for the sun to not rise. You'll never see that day. Being less wrong is the best option that is actually on the table.
- 6y ago
WoahNoun 6y ago
His tone comes off as very defensive about his own work rather than constructive criticism of the Economist model. >In that sense, the best tip-off that the forecasts are different is they have Biden at 97% to win the popular vote, and have sometimes been as high as 98% (and 99% before they revised their model) whereas we are at 82%. You're getting up to 97-98%, you're getting VERY confident.
- TMWNN 6y ago
  >You're getting up to 97-98%, you're getting VERY confident. Silver made the same point about probability before the 2016 election, and got into a similar Twitter argument (https://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/nate-silver-huffington-post-polls-twitter-230815 https://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/nate-silver-huffingto...). One guess on who proved to be correct.
  - WoahNoun 6y ago
    Winning the election != winning the popular vote. There are plenty of qualitative reasons to believe the popular vote distribution matches the Economist model. He isn't arguing about how they came up with distribution. He is arguing that the particular kind of distribution is unreasonable in all instances. Which I disagree with. There are plenty of places in statistical modeling where a narrow head makes absolute sense.
  - matthewmacleod 6y ago
    Nobody was “proved to be correct”, because the winner of a poll does not by itself show anything about the probability of that particular candidate having won.
    - martingoodson 6y ago
      The probability of winning is based on the popular support for a candidate. The poll directly measures that support. How can it possibly not 'show anything about the probability of that particular candidate having won'?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

lordnacho 6y ago

Doesn't this suffer from low n? There's only been so many presidential elections, and there's only been so many in a similar environment, whatever you think the relevant factors are. Then there's the one - off problem of evaluating how good the prediction was. If you think it's 95+ for one side then yes, you're embarrassed when it goes the other way. If you think it's 75 then you should be wrong one out of four anyway, but people will still think you messed up. Impressive work regardless, I always enjoy these stats things.

Tarq0n 6y ago
Not at all. These models all have a multilevel structure, accounting for election level data, district data and poll data. The main source of uncertainty is probably how hard representative polling is, not to mention the polls are carried out by many different organizations.
- manquer 6y ago
  The logistical challenges are considerable factor this election. Many people may want to vote for say Biden, but their ballots could be disregarded. Even without the political fight over USPS funding, it is going to be extremely hard for them to turn around in < 1 week as required in many states, there are also the issue with votes that which are postmarked earlier but delivered later than election date( this is with good reason as you don't want results delayed if you wait for votes to come in) I am not sure how anyone, without detailed data access to postal operations can accurately predict how much of this going to be a problem.

gridlockd 6y ago

There's a variable missing from these models which probably wasn't all that relevant until Donald Trump showed up: How many people are going to lie about or refuse to admit voting for a candidate like Donald Trump? I would expect this bias to be greater today than in 2016.

kachnuv_ocasek 6y ago
Andrew Gelman, one of the authors of the model, has some thoughts about that. I can't find the earlier article right now, but the Economist model counts with that as well. See the blog post (down in the first P.S.): https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/08/14/new-fivethirtyeight-com-election-forecast/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/08/14/new-fiveth...
evgen 6y ago
The so-called 'shy Tory' effect has been fairly conclusively proven to not actually exist; people will claim to be 'undecided' but will not claim to support X and then vote for Y. Look to size of the undecided group and then see where they break if the pollster forces a decision -- in 2020 the undecideds are smaller, and unlike 2016 they are breaking hard against Trump.
IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
I see no reason to believe this to br greater today than in 2016. And I believe the 2016 data did not show any of it. More polls have also moved from live interviews to automated system, where it's less likely that anyone will be "shy".
- gridlockd 6y ago
  In 2016 Trump polled way worse than he performed in key states. People are also more paranoid today than in 2016. If the communists take over, you do not want to be on some voted—nazi list.
  - jcranmer 6y ago
    > In 2016 Trump polled way worse than he performed in key states. That's not really true. The state-level polls were generally within normal polling error, although there was a systematic error due to educational attainment. In 2020, more pollsters have incorporated educational attainment into their weighting, so this source of error should be reduced.

schalab 6y ago

I am reminded of a story in Three men in a boat. A couple go out on a picnic with a young man. The moment they set out, the young man begins predicting rain. The couple begin to hate him for his gloomy disposition. They meet an old man on the road. He scrounges up his face, looks up at the sky, and says there wont be any rain. He has seen many days like this in his long life and it usually clears up. The couple cheer up at once and praise him for his wisdom. No sooner had they set up their picnic, then it begins raining heavily. On the drive back completely drenched, they look at the young man with anger. Like somehow he was responsible for the rain. They think of the old man fondly, "well atleast he tried". Thats human psychology.

the8472 6y ago
Unlike rain there can be a causal relation between predictions to election results. I.e. voters (and campaigners) can react to predictions.
- chrisdsaldivar 6y ago
  This actually happened in the 1988 Mexican election. The PRI was losing the vote and their opposition was predicted to win using live vote tabulation. They hid the results by saying the system crashed and then declared themselves as winning. This kept many people from bothering to even vote. However, they went much further and burned legitimate ballots and even made fake ones. The difference here is the PRI actively used (fake) predictions to discourage voters. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988_Mexican_general_election https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988_Mexican_general_electio...
  - sukilot 6y ago
    According to your story, the prediction didn't affect the outcome.
  - benrbray 6y ago
    The most recent season of Narcos: Mexico has an entertaining dramatization of this event!

scruffyherder 6y ago

These models are stupid, many people cannot say what they want for fear of reprisals. The only question is which way does the majority lean, while the edges pull further apart.

optimalsolver 6y ago
Is the popular vote the best way to determine that?
- scruffyherder 6y ago
  Not in America, it’s a republic, not a democracy.

BoiledCabbage 6y ago

I say this with all seriousness, the main flaw I see is the models not accounting for the levels of voter suppression being applied this year. One party is on record as saying that their own successful efforts in voter suppression last election won them the rust belt and as a result the presidency. After seeing it being so successful at tipping the scales last time it appears it will be even more heavily relied on this year. There are the most recent familiar hints in the news regarding mail in ballots, but so many more examples since the overturning of the voting rights act. How this isn't more of a scandal our democracy is frankly shocking. It's extremely difficult to talk about this in a purely non-partisan way because there really a case of "both sides are doing it". One party is effectively utilizing this to obtain, maintain and increase their hold on govt positions. > None of this is a coincidence. Republicans responded to the election of Barack Obama in 2008 not by trying to broaden their own base or appeal to a changing nation, but by modernizing voter suppression tactics out of the old Jim Crow playbook. Chief Justice John Roberts’s shameful 5-4 decision in 2013’s Shelby County v Holder ripped the heart out of the prime enforcement mechanism of the Voting Rights Act. Roberts argued that the South had changed, and such protections were no longer necessary. 1965, Roberts suggested, was a long time ago, in a different nation, across a changed South. The tens of thousands of Georgians whose voting precincts were closed, forcing them to endure six-hour lines to vote during a pandemic would like a word with him Roberts’s calamitous ignorance has done grievous damage. "Crosscheck" app/system which is frequently run against democratic counties was found to have a 200 to 1 false positive to true negative rate. It's still being heavily pushed. > Crosscheck is a national database designed to check for voters who are registered in more than one state by comparing names and dates of birth. Researchers at Stanford University, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, and Microsoft found that for every legitimate instance of double registration it finds, Crosscheck's algorithm returns approximately 200 false positives.[108] Kobach has been repeatedly sued by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other civil rights organizations for trying to restrict voting rights in Kansas. > Often, voter fraud is cited as a justification for such measures, even when the incidence of voter fraud is low. In Iowa, lawmakers passed a strict voter ID law with the potential to disenfranchise 260,000 voters. Out of 1.6 million votes cast in Iowa in 2016, there were only 10 allegations of voter fraud; none were cases of impersonation that a voter ID law could have prevented. Only one person, a Republican voter, was convicted. Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate, the architect of the bill, admitted, "We've not experienced widespread voter fraud in Iowa." We're reaching a very concerning threshold of election integrity that is being under appreciated. Our image of ourselves versus our reality is starting to diverge drastically. https://time.com/5852837/voter-suppression-obstacles-just-america/ https://time.com/5852837/voter-suppression-obstacles-just-am... https://www.npr.org/2018/10/23/659784277/republican-voter-suppression-efforts-are-targeting-minorities-journalist-says https://www.npr.org/2018/10/23/659784277/republican-voter-su... https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/17/us/some-republicans-acknowledge-leveraging-voter-id-laws-for-political-gain.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/17/us/some-republicans-ackno... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_Unite... https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/08/new-postal-service-plan-is-setting-off-election-alarms/amp https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/08/new-postal-service-p...

tamaharbor 6y ago

I do not tell pollsters I am for Trump, fearing my home get firebombed. No poll can measure that.

jeffbee 6y ago

Models are great but doesn't this all hinge on quality of the data inputs? In 2016 polls fielded the day before the election had Clinton up by 10 points in Wisconsin. Why did the polls and the election differ so greatly? Here's the last poll Google collected in Wisconsin in 2016: https://datastudio.google.com/s/kcPRGFaMaO0 https://datastudio.google.com/s/kcPRGFaMaO0

coolspot 6y ago
“Silent majority”. Even though there were more people supporting Trump in Wisconsin (or rather any non-left candidate), they couldn’t tell that in polls openly because is goes against vocal minority.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  It makes no sense that people responding to anonymous online surveys would have such reservations.
  - coolspot 6y ago
    Online surveys are even worse than in-person, because they are hosted on particular sites, having particular audience, leaning or biased in particular way. E.g. Poll on cnn.com and fox.com will give you opposite results. Also different age/wealth/profession groups have particular leanings on political spectrum and particular average level of computer proficiency. E.g. a farmer in Idaho would likely to vote for any Republican candidate and simultaneously less likely to participate in any online polling.
    - jeffbee 6y ago
      As far as I can tell, rural conservatives are Extremely Online™.
comicjk 6y ago
Note that these polls are of Likely Voters. A big source of systematic error in 2016 state polls was Likely Voter models, used to weight raw poll results by voting propensity. In the Midwest in 2016, lots of people without college degrees said they preferred Trump - but based on previous elections, pollsters expected few would vote. This kind of shift is hard to predict - pollsters do not intend to make the same mistake again, but they might make another. (National polls are much less noisy because these kinds of regional errors often cancel out when averaged over the country.)

shoo 6y ago

The Economist's weekly US election podcast "Checks & Balance" interviewed Elliott Morris about election modelling & this model: https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2020/06/12/modelled-citizens-how-useful-is-polling-in-predicting-the-result-of-the-us-presidential-election https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2020/06/12/modelled-citiz... The podcast is for a general audience so it doesn't go into details of statistical modelling used in this model, but it does touch on polling, failures of polling to accurately predict results.

thedudeabides5 6y ago

Maybe Nate is just way less confident after getting caught w his pants down in 2016.