4 ms·

FiveThirtyEight.com: Electoral Projections Done Right

56 points by pg 18y ago

fnazeeri 18y ago
Nate Silver (the guy behind 538) is a pretty famous baseball statistician who has applied his trade to politics and polling. It's politics for geeks. I wrote more at http://www.altgate.com/blog/2008/10/nate-silver---t.html http://www.altgate.com/blog/2008/10/nate-silver---t.html He just started last year, but over time I bet he's going to discover things about politics that have been overlooked (in the same way Billy Bean found out OBP was overlooked).
- cosmo7 18y ago
  Funny, five minutes ago I was reading fivethirtyeight while watching the Dodgers game and thinking that the two were somehow entwined.
tptacek 18y ago
You want to start at the FAQ: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/03/frequently-asked-questions-last-revised.html http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/03/frequently-asked-ques... His methodology is pretty crazy; he's used historical data from all the pollsters from the tail end of the last few election cycles to rate them, and uses that to weight poll results; he has a regression model for each of the battleground states that he uses to reconcile polling results with on-the-ground reality; he uses monte carlo simulations to give percentage odds on who's going to win in each state. It's pornographic. Sean Quinn's state-by-state tour of the ground operations of the two campaigns is also fascinating. Obama apparently has 2-1 and 3-1 field office advantages in the battleground states, and his offices are open 7 days a week; McCain's are a ghost town. Nate Silver was recently on Colbert, also worth watching: http://blog.indecision2008.com/2008/10/08/the-colbert-report-nate-silver-predicts-barack-obama-to-win-the-election/ http://blog.indecision2008.com/2008/10/08/the-colbert-report...
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
- jedc 18y ago
  Perhaps more important is the reputation he already built through predictions on the primaries. From a recent New York Magazine article here: http://nymag.com/news/features/51170/ http://nymag.com/news/features/51170/ on the Clinton/Obama primaries... "Reading the polls, most pundits predicted she’d win Indiana by five points and noted she’d narrowed the gap with Obama in North Carolina to just eight. Silver, who was writing anonymously as “Poblano” and receiving about 800 visits a day, disagreed with this consensus. He’d broken the numbers down demographically and come up with a much less encouraging outcome for Clinton: a two-point squeaker in Indiana, and a seventeen-point drubbing in North Carolina. On the night of the primaries, Clinton took Indiana by one and lost North Carolina by fifteen. The national pundits were doubly shocked: one, because the results were so divergent from the polls, and two, because some guy named after a chili pepper had predicted the outcome better than anyone else." It will be great to see how his model stacks up against reality on election night.
antiismist 18y ago
I'm still going to use electoral-vote.com to track the election, because it is so much easier to see who is going to win and to check out the map. The stats are of course interesting, but isn't it insane to have a "win percentage" down to the tenth of a percent?
- robg 18y ago
  Not when the WPCT is based on 10,000 state-by-state daily simulations with every new stream of polls included.
  - antiismist 18y ago
    I agree that the numbers reflect the model. But there is no way that the model can fit reality that well. So it is a misleading number.
    - robg 18y ago
      It's a probability estimate. There is no reality to which it corresponds - that's the popular vote and electoral college projections. And there I expect the model will do exceedingly well, as it did during the primaries.
- moonpolysoft 18y ago
  I think they run something like 10000 simulations per polling update, so having the win percentage down to a tenth of a percent is significant.
- jonknee 18y ago
  How is it easier? FiveThirtyEight has all that electoral-vote does and a lot more. You can just go and check the map, but you can also see a lot more data.
icey 18y ago
538 is pretty awesome, and Nate was doing great work even when people thought he was named after a pepper (he went by "Poblano" for a short period of time to maintain anonymity). However, seeing this posted by pg makes me think that this is the post that people will point to as an excuse for posting politics on YC.
- rms 18y ago
  >However, seeing this posted by pg makes me think that this is the post that people will point to as an excuse for posting politics on YC. This is election silly season... things will calm down after Obama wins next month. At least until there is more info about his proposal to eliminate the capital gains tax for startups.
  - icey 18y ago
    Well, I can appreciate that this is "election silly season"... I'm very politically active for one of the candidates; I just think that politics is a very touchy subject. It can cause deep divisions amongst people who would otherwise get along just fine.
- alecco 18y ago
  Oh, please no...
ryanwaggoner 18y ago
I'm addicted to this site.
fallentimes 18y ago
As an independent, I would be extremely bummed if I was never allowed to travel or live in any of the blue states (on the site page). Can't say the same for the red states.
- rms 18y ago
  Austin is supposed to be pretty good.
  - fallentimes 18y ago
    It is. It feels like you're on another planet (relative to Texas).
- noodle 18y ago
  grand canyon is in az and yellowstone's in wy. i'd be bummed if i couldn't ever travel to either again.
  - fallentimes 18y ago
    I've been to them - I'd be slightly bummed, not extremely.
- nihilocrat 18y ago
  Personally, I would trade Iowa for Louisiana if I could.
  - fallentimes 18y ago
    DONE.
rms 18y ago
http://nymag.com/news/features/51170/ http://nymag.com/news/features/51170/ (print link at the bottom)
trapper 18y ago
For non-americans, what happened a month ago (see supertracker) that caused what looks like the start of a landslide for obama. Was it palin?
- rms 18y ago
  It was the changing of the campaign narrative from being about all sorts of things to being solely about the economy in wake of the financial crisis. Barack Obama is widely viewed as being more sound on economic issues.
  - robg 18y ago
    I think Palin is a big part of that dynamic, especially after the Paris Hilton line of attack. Say McCain had picked Romney, they could have been hammering away at the experience card on both foreign and economic policy. By picking Palin, McCain basically killed the experience campaign, especially when she started blathering in uncontrolled settings, and they've gyrated around ever since trying to find a compelling narrative without sufficient knowledge or experience to address the economic realities. As evidence, independents now break in a big way for Obama where they weren't prior to Palin. EDIT: Just to be clear - Palin got the ball rolling downhill, after an initial and short bounce. The economy kicked it that much further.
  - ajross 18y ago
    Actually, no, the elbow in the curve is a little before the bailout crisis. It corresponds roughly with the first debate and with Palin's more or less disastrous interviews with Gibson and Couric. What seems to have happened since is a feedback reaction.
- DanielBMarkham 18y ago
  What I'm hearing is that the economic crisis is the cause. When polled for "keywords", people vote the economy at 55% and the rest of the issues are in single digits. The economy went up as a major issue as McCain's numbers went down. In general, McCain should be at double-digits according to most of the fundamentals. I'm amazed that it is as close as it is.
maxklein 18y ago
You know what really caused the change in polling numbers, in my opinion? People just got used to seeing barack. It's like you meet a paralysed guy for the very first time. The first few times you are very consious of him being paralyed, and are all gingerly and careful with him. But after a while, you stop noticing it and you just speak to him normally and have fun with him. I think that Barack is no longer the 'black guy running for president', people have stopped paying attention to his blackness and have started noticing the other stuff. He's the cosby show of politics - after season 1, it was not really important anymore what color they were.

56 points by pg 18y ago

Nate Silver (the guy behind 538) is a pretty famous baseball statistician who has applied his trade to politics and polling. It's politics for geeks. I wrote more at http://www.altgate.com/blog/2008/10/nate-silver---t.html http://www.altgate.com/blog/2008/10/nate-silver---t.html He just started last year, but over time I bet he's going to discover things about politics that have been overlooked (in the same way Billy Bean found out OBP was overlooked).

cosmo7 18y ago
Funny, five minutes ago I was reading fivethirtyeight while watching the Dodgers game and thinking that the two were somehow entwined.

tptacek 18y ago

You want to start at the FAQ: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/03/frequently-asked-questions-last-revised.html http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/03/frequently-asked-ques... His methodology is pretty crazy; he's used historical data from all the pollsters from the tail end of the last few election cycles to rate them, and uses that to weight poll results; he has a regression model for each of the battleground states that he uses to reconcile polling results with on-the-ground reality; he uses monte carlo simulations to give percentage odds on who's going to win in each state. It's pornographic. Sean Quinn's state-by-state tour of the ground operations of the two campaigns is also fascinating. Obama apparently has 2-1 and 3-1 field office advantages in the battleground states, and his offices are open 7 days a week; McCain's are a ghost town. Nate Silver was recently on Colbert, also worth watching: http://blog.indecision2008.com/2008/10/08/the-colbert-report-nate-silver-predicts-barack-obama-to-win-the-election/ http://blog.indecision2008.com/2008/10/08/the-colbert-report...

deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
jedc 18y ago
Perhaps more important is the reputation he already built through predictions on the primaries. From a recent New York Magazine article here: http://nymag.com/news/features/51170/ http://nymag.com/news/features/51170/ on the Clinton/Obama primaries... "Reading the polls, most pundits predicted she’d win Indiana by five points and noted she’d narrowed the gap with Obama in North Carolina to just eight. Silver, who was writing anonymously as “Poblano” and receiving about 800 visits a day, disagreed with this consensus. He’d broken the numbers down demographically and come up with a much less encouraging outcome for Clinton: a two-point squeaker in Indiana, and a seventeen-point drubbing in North Carolina. On the night of the primaries, Clinton took Indiana by one and lost North Carolina by fifteen. The national pundits were doubly shocked: one, because the results were so divergent from the polls, and two, because some guy named after a chili pepper had predicted the outcome better than anyone else." It will be great to see how his model stacks up against reality on election night.

antiismist 18y ago

I'm still going to use electoral-vote.com to track the election, because it is so much easier to see who is going to win and to check out the map. The stats are of course interesting, but isn't it insane to have a "win percentage" down to the tenth of a percent?

robg 18y ago
Not when the WPCT is based on 10,000 state-by-state daily simulations with every new stream of polls included.
- antiismist 18y ago
  I agree that the numbers reflect the model. But there is no way that the model can fit reality that well. So it is a misleading number.
  - robg 18y ago
    It's a probability estimate. There is no reality to which it corresponds - that's the popular vote and electoral college projections. And there I expect the model will do exceedingly well, as it did during the primaries.
moonpolysoft 18y ago
I think they run something like 10000 simulations per polling update, so having the win percentage down to a tenth of a percent is significant.
jonknee 18y ago
How is it easier? FiveThirtyEight has all that electoral-vote does and a lot more. You can just go and check the map, but you can also see a lot more data.

icey 18y ago

538 is pretty awesome, and Nate was doing great work even when people thought he was named after a pepper (he went by "Poblano" for a short period of time to maintain anonymity). However, seeing this posted by pg makes me think that this is the post that people will point to as an excuse for posting politics on YC.

rms 18y ago
>However, seeing this posted by pg makes me think that this is the post that people will point to as an excuse for posting politics on YC. This is election silly season... things will calm down after Obama wins next month. At least until there is more info about his proposal to eliminate the capital gains tax for startups.
- icey 18y ago
  Well, I can appreciate that this is "election silly season"... I'm very politically active for one of the candidates; I just think that politics is a very touchy subject. It can cause deep divisions amongst people who would otherwise get along just fine.
alecco 18y ago
Oh, please no...

ryanwaggoner 18y ago

I'm addicted to this site.

fallentimes 18y ago

As an independent, I would be extremely bummed if I was never allowed to travel or live in any of the blue states (on the site page). Can't say the same for the red states.

rms 18y ago
Austin is supposed to be pretty good.
- fallentimes 18y ago
  It is. It feels like you're on another planet (relative to Texas).
noodle 18y ago
grand canyon is in az and yellowstone's in wy. i'd be bummed if i couldn't ever travel to either again.
- fallentimes 18y ago
  I've been to them - I'd be slightly bummed, not extremely.
nihilocrat 18y ago
Personally, I would trade Iowa for Louisiana if I could.
- fallentimes 18y ago
  DONE.

rms 18y ago

http://nymag.com/news/features/51170/ http://nymag.com/news/features/51170/ (print link at the bottom)

trapper 18y ago

For non-americans, what happened a month ago (see supertracker) that caused what looks like the start of a landslide for obama. Was it palin?

rms 18y ago
It was the changing of the campaign narrative from being about all sorts of things to being solely about the economy in wake of the financial crisis. Barack Obama is widely viewed as being more sound on economic issues.
- robg 18y ago
  I think Palin is a big part of that dynamic, especially after the Paris Hilton line of attack. Say McCain had picked Romney, they could have been hammering away at the experience card on both foreign and economic policy. By picking Palin, McCain basically killed the experience campaign, especially when she started blathering in uncontrolled settings, and they've gyrated around ever since trying to find a compelling narrative without sufficient knowledge or experience to address the economic realities. As evidence, independents now break in a big way for Obama where they weren't prior to Palin. EDIT: Just to be clear - Palin got the ball rolling downhill, after an initial and short bounce. The economy kicked it that much further.
- ajross 18y ago
  Actually, no, the elbow in the curve is a little before the bailout crisis. It corresponds roughly with the first debate and with Palin's more or less disastrous interviews with Gibson and Couric. What seems to have happened since is a feedback reaction.
DanielBMarkham 18y ago
What I'm hearing is that the economic crisis is the cause. When polled for "keywords", people vote the economy at 55% and the rest of the issues are in single digits. The economy went up as a major issue as McCain's numbers went down. In general, McCain should be at double-digits according to most of the fundamentals. I'm amazed that it is as close as it is.

maxklein 18y ago

You know what really caused the change in polling numbers, in my opinion? People just got used to seeing barack. It's like you meet a paralysed guy for the very first time. The first few times you are very consious of him being paralyed, and are all gingerly and careful with him. But after a while, you stop noticing it and you just speak to him normally and have fun with him. I think that Barack is no longer the 'black guy running for president', people have stopped paying attention to his blackness and have started noticing the other stuff. He's the cosby show of politics - after season 1, it was not really important anymore what color they were.