14 ms·

512 Paths to the White House

365 points by jashkenas 14y ago

cedrichurst 14y ago
Thanks Jeremy, Shan and Mike. I'm continually blown away by the data journalism you're doing over at nytimes on the election. It's truly an inspiration.
- patio11 14y ago
  Ditto. I'm no fan of the paper, but they're doing things practically every week which are ahead of everyone else in the industry.
  - 001sky 14y ago
    Agree. Idea of having "reactive" documents came up in another HN thread recently, and this seems to be an implementation of such. Very cool. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4715978 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4715978
- jashkenas 14y ago
  I've got nothing whatsoever to do with this one -- it's a Shan + Mike joint. But thanks for the kudos. We should have some fun stuff for y'all on Tuesday night...
  - waterlesscloud 14y ago
    It's a really nice project. There are some routes that are surprising and yet seem possible in reality. Those explain some of the choices the candidates have been making, particularly with "safe" states they can't really afford to ignore completely.
  - riordan 14y ago
    We're really looking forward to seeing what you've got in store on Tuesday. It's been a while since the Interactive News Team profile a few years back; I think we'd all like to know how a major night goes down in the newsroom for your team.
tomasien 14y ago
I think this is a great way to explain to someone who's not intimately familiar with electoral politics why people think Obama is going to win despite razor thing polls. Predictions mean nothing of course but: If Obama wins Florida, Romney has exactly 1 path to victory: winning every other swing state. If Obama wins Ohio, Romney has only 11 ways to win. If Obama loses Florida, Virginia, NC, and Ohio he could still potentially win if he wins the rest of the swing states, all of which he's slightly ahead in in recent polling. Election day will be interesting, but that's what makes it hard to pundits to predict a Romney victory.
- leif 14y ago
  Obama's going to win. The only reason you hear pundits talking about it is because they get paid to talk about it. The media controls the messaging these days, not the candidates or the people, and it's in the media's interest to maintain as close a race as possible until the bitter end. That's why even the most partisan pundits, even when everything's in their candidate's favor, keep claiming that "this is such a close race". TBH the only way Romney is going to be contentious is through voter suppression, and that's been so heavily exposed in critical areas that it's not going to have any effect as long as the justice system holds its ground. removes tinfoil hat (BUT EVERYONE PLEASE VOTE IF YOU ARE ABLE, IT'S CRUCIALLY IMPORTANT NO MATTER WHERE YOU LIVE)
  - drivebyacct2 14y ago
    NO BUT [insert crude reduction of Nate's science down to the level of tv pundits]. I'd love to know more about Nate's model, but I trust it a hell of a lot more than the raw data of Gallup (seeing as Gallup's nearly the only one left giving him a chance. Dick back-peddaled today, Rasmussen did more or less too.) Nate actually has a book about why this occurs and what it does to the conversation of politics in elections in the US.
    - drivebyacct2 14y ago
      Stay classy silent downvoters. Downvotes make you right.
ck2 14y ago
The five ways to tie are the most freaky and stressful. The only problem with this nifty tree is that it must be followed in order to determine the outcome. Oh wait, I didn't realize the boxes at the top were selectable. I guess that allows out-of-order traversal. Only thing I'd like to see added to this is using url hash to bookmark the result set so I can share it.
- RyJones 14y ago
  If you use the buttons at the top, you can in effect zoom the chart to see how it plays out.
ninetax 14y ago
This is amazing! It's everything a visualization should be: simple, to the point, interactive.
- lbarrow 14y ago
  It's also pretty deceptive, as it gives each path equal visual weight when they aren't all equally likely
- amalag 14y ago
  Seriously this is an amazing infographic/visualization. Intrade http://electoralmap.net http://electoralmap.net was pretty accurate in 2008. Also predicting an obama victory.
- pjscott 14y ago
  It should also be weighted by probability, so it's not quite ideal.
nextstep 14y ago
Damn, I wish I lived in one of the states that gets to choose our president.
- ck2 14y ago
  Trust me you do not want. Watching TV or the radio is impossible without being inundated. It's time to switch to popular vote and end this gaming of the system.
  - gwright 14y ago
    A purely popular vote system has its own flaws. In particular, national elections would be reduced to politicians catering to voters in a few high-density regions rather than attempting to appeal to a geographically dispersed electorate.
    - nitrogen 14y ago
      There are other voting systems that should yield less catering to the extremes: http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/ http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/
    - drewrv 14y ago
      So what? Why should some peoples vote matter more than others?
      - leif 14y ago
        It's all about what kinds of questions get discussed and addressed during campaigns. The point of the campaigning process is chiefly to elect new representation, but secondarily (and closely so) to debate and test competing theories on the primary problems of the time. In the electoral college model, the concerns of the swing states get the most attention, for reasons which are far too numerous and obvious to go in to. This is unfair to people that don't live in the swing states. In the popular model, it's a bit subtle. At first, you think "well everyone's vote counts equally so everyone's concerns get counted according to the proportion of the constituents with those concerns." But this is not correct when you get down to the details. If you're a candidate, you have to spend your resources in the most efficient way possible. Politicians do this (spend resources) by paying for messaging, spending their time campaigning in person and with volunteers/staffers, and by adopting policy positions (this is a resource in the political landscape). In the electoral college model, the best return on your time, money, and issue consideration is found in the swing states, because everywhere else you have basically zero probability of success, which cannot be balanced out by any weight that electoral votes afford. In the popular model, the best return is to target the largest population possible. People get divvied up into geographical regions no matter what---be it by local news network, regional speaking venue, or major political issue---and it's to these regions that our votes then become divided. In the popular model, the only places worth considering are those places with the largest populations, that still stand a chance of being easy to target with a single message, TV ad, or speaking appearance. If you're in a rural town, a candidate coming to speak to you only gets to speak to you, not to the nearest million voters. But in a city, the candidate that comes to you does get an audience of a million or more. So in the popular model, candidates will only bother to work for the concerns of those who live in population centers. You get skewed either way. Personally, I think skewing toward regions with lots of people, even if they may not be the overall majority, is the best thing to do, but that's just my opinion, I don't have an optimal solution. The problem is that "optimal" means that everyone's concerns get addressed in an equal manner, not necessarily that everyone gets an equivalent vote. The game theory involved is subtle and the emotions on all sides even more so.
ianstormtaylor 14y ago
Does anyone know if I should be as scared as I am that there are 5 paths to tie? Is that the norm in a presidential election? because it sounds crazy.
- knowtheory 14y ago
  They're pretty low likelihood events. Wikipedia appears to have a pretty solid writeup of the electoral college system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_(United_States)#Alternative_methods_of_choosing_electors http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_(United_State... ) which includes the various mechanisms states use to select their electors. The vast majority of the states are winner-take-all, which presumably reduces but doesn't eliminate the possible ways to split 538 down the middle, but some states either only have a single electoral vote or use mechanisms which can divide their electoral votes between the candidates. So, yeah, every election has this chance. Probably isn't going to happen though. This is conjecture, but I'd hazard a guess that a Bush v. Gore style dispute over a single large state which holds the balance of the election is way more likely than an actual numerical tie where the House would choose the president and the Senate the VP.
- mlinsey 14y ago
  Dunno why that would be scary. Ties (or really, any allocation of electoral votes where no candidate gets to 270) are resolved in the House of Representatives, and this was common practice in the early 19th century. If it were to happen now, there would be a lot of complaining, but overall it would be less of a constitutional crisis than the 2000 election. If anything, it might be a spark for true electoral reform.
  - ianstormtaylor 14y ago
    Ah yeah, I stupidly misinterpreted the bottom row of the graph and thought there were 5 ties out of the 20 or so possibilities (forgetting the branches that didn't need to be resolved by New Hampshire), but now I realize that was only for decisions ultimately decided by New Hampshire. That Wikipedia article talking about the 1800 tie is pretty awesome.
  - 14y ago
mbostock 14y ago
A couple hidden features: 1. You can option-click on any of the buttons to see the transition in super slo-mo. (This was mainly for debugging, but it's fun to see how the transitions work in more detail.) 2. You can double-click on any part of the tree, and it will zoom in by one level. Also, we did a variation that used state-level probabilities to weight the tree. This gave a sense not just of the logical possibilities, but of the likelihood of each, which I liked. However, the FiveThirtyEight state-level probabilities are not fully independent, so you can't multiply them together to compute conditional probabilities. Perhaps next election!
- raganesh 14y ago
  That is cool. And thanks Mike, for your incredible d3.js library.
- 001sky 14y ago
  However, the FiveThirtyEight state-level probabilities are not fully independent This is interesting, are they linked in some manner to national polls, or is their something more nuanced?
  - usaar333 14y ago
    538 derives their probabilities by running simulated elections. http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/methodology/ http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/methodology/ Somewhat intuitively, the simulations themselves have concepts of "national movements", where a candidate can (with some probability) gain 1%, 2%, etc. across all states. The state probabilities are then derived from how many simulations/total candidate A won. However, partly because these simulations actually had national movement effects, you'll find that odds of winning both Florida and Ohio (as in # simulations/total candidate A wins both states) are not the state odds multiplied (they odds actually should be higher). That said, with the raw simulation data, the graphic could show probabilities for every combination.
    - waterlesscloud 14y ago
      I wonder if that national movement concept explains that weird spike in his histogram at 330 EV. Maybe it's because there's some "movement" concept that tips several states at the same point?
trueluk 14y ago
I'm not sure why Nebraska's second congressional district isn't included. According to FiveThirtyEight, Obama's chance (14%) of winning one vote from Nebraska is higher than Romney's chance (11%) of winning Nevada. As a matter of fact, the last FiveThirtyEight visualization I saw linked here (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4657826 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4657826) didn't include the one electoral vote Obama won in 2008 from Nebraska either.
- agildehaus 14y ago
  Maybe they're not counting that electoral vote here. Can anyone tell? This diagram needs an electoral vote count.
ecmendenhall 14y ago
If you're sufficiently convinced by this, the 538 model, or your favorite electoral vote map, and you are willing to bet your beliefs (and you are in a jurisdiction that has not regulated prediction markets out of existence), Intrade contracts on an Obama victory were trading around $6.70 today.
- usaar333 14y ago
  This should be legal for any American: http://tippie.uiowa.edu/iem/ http://tippie.uiowa.edu/iem/ Sadly, if you don't already have money there, your transfer is unlikely to go through until after the election.
- icelancer 14y ago
  It will be impossible to get money on Intrade before the election.
robomartin 14y ago
The electoral college is incredibly unfair to voters who live in states that lean opposite their view. I fully understand that the popular vote option has its issues (focusing on large population areas, etc.). However, a lot of this can be mitigated through legislation and regulation of the process. Here's a random set of ideas: - Candidates are only allowed to visit each state capital once. That's it. - Candidates are not allowed to trash the other candidates. They are only allowed to discuss their views. - Candidates are awarded an amount of money to run their campaigns. No external contributions from any source whatsoever. None. - Candidates must participate in detailed interviews for a period of several weeks. Some of these interviews are aired in national networks and the rest made available online. - Candidates are obligated to participate in detailed debates - Television networks are prohibited from endorsing or communicating bias - The publication of poll data is illegal - A candidate must post a huge bond. If he or she is found telling lies they end-up in prison and have huge financial consequences. - Campaign promises are recorded and signed in a document that is publicly available. A politician that does not deliver on promises made is exposed to financial and criminal liability. Don't make promises you can't keep. - Public endorsement of any candidate is illegal. They have to float and survive on their platform and track record. - The incumbent is not allowed to campaign in any way at all. His or her opponents cannot trash him/her. The incumbent can only rely on having done a good job and kept promises. People will vote and want to keep someone who is doing a good job. The only thing they are allowed to do is announce their running for office and participate in scheduled debates or interviews. - Politicians are limited to serving in public office for a certain period of time, perhaps ten years. After that they must return to private life --no connection whatsoever to government and politics-- for five years before they can run for office again. This is to infuse balance and perspective and not have a race of politicians, by politicians and for politicians. There are probably a number of other interesting ideas out there. What we have it horribly broken in many ways. It'd be nice to see real dialog and actions to change it.
- anigbrowl 14y ago
  This would be great if voting were restricted to smart people with halos.
- ewillbefull 14y ago
seldo 14y ago
A really great way to show why Ohio is so important: 1. Give the democrats Wisconsin (I don't know why people are treating it as a swing state) 2. Give the democrats Ohio 3. Give the democrats any other state (except New Hampshire) Basically, as long as Obama takes Ohio, Obama wins.
- james-skemp 14y ago
  Re Wisconsin, as someone who has lived in the state all his life, and been confident that we'd elect a Democrat as president since the mid-90s (and definitely in the last 12+ years I've been voting), I believe the state is swinging. Walker's recall showed how red the state is, once the people outside Madison and Milwaukee actually vote. (Disclaimer: I live in Madison, and commented to others that I didn't realize Wisconsin had turned red.) Obama is back in Madison shortly, but he really needs to head up to the north of the state. Unless he thinks he can carry it by getting the vote out in obviously blue areas. On the other hand, I don't think he can sway people in two days, so getting people excited where he knows a vote will be a vote for him might be the best bet.
marcamillion 14y ago
I LOVE this. I have always wondered what such a visualization might look like. Now, when the results come in, I can be my very own 'electoral college pundit' and be right :)
cletus 14y ago
Well I guess it's that time in the cycle again: for people to complain about the electoral college (disclaimer: I'm not American). Over the years in different elections in different countries I've heard this complaint [1] > The electoral college is incredibly unfair to voters who live in states that lean opposite their view. Translation: > It's unfair that I don't get my way even though I'm in the minority. Also, this isn't just an election for president. There are Senate (in 2 out of 3 elections) and Congressional races, probably local races too. But let me address the common "solution" for this "problem": the popular volte (for president). That is a terrible idea. The electoral college doesn't only exist for the reasons of state rights (although that's a pretty big part of it). It exists to avoid a deadlock. The delegate almost without exception vote as their state did. The possibility of no decision coming out of the electoral college is practically zero. For those of you who were paying attention in 2000, just look at what a mess Florida became. Now watch me get downvoted into oblivion (but that doesn't make me any less right) but the optional nature of the US voting system has resulted in: - the left buying votes (cigarettes to homeless people, that sort of thing); and - the right trying to disenfranchise groups that tend to vote left with such measures as removing the right of felons to vote (and even people who aren't felons). HOWEVER, by the rules that were in place at the time of the election Florida was always a Bush win (seriously, please don't downvote siimply because you disagree). Even extensive analysis (by the likes of the New York Times, etc) after the fact supports this. My point was that Florida turned into a circus of trying to change the rules after the fact (eg what constitutes a vote, the whole dimpled and pregnant chad business). You just can't do that. Imagine that circus on a national level with an incredibly close popular vote. On a personal note, as someone who resides in New York, one of the most expensive media markets in a state that is safely blue, I appreciate the minimal amount of election ads. Anyway, the electoral college is not the problem here. There are however two glaring problems (IMHO): 1. Voting is optional; 2. Elections are first-past-the-post ("FPTP"). The argument for (1) is that mandatory voting leads to uninformed people voting. I assure you that uninformed people are already voting. Voter turnout nationally is something like 50% (IIRC). Of those 40% always vote Democrat, 40% always vote Republican and the 20% in the middle decide the election. So 10% of the population is deciding the election even key states. The problem with optional voting is it creates the wrong incentives. Measures like voter ID, removing felons right to votes are a consequence of this. If voting were mandatory (as it is in Australia) then a lot of these problems go away. Also, in many parts of the US it is hard to vote with long lines. It should be moved to a Saturday but this difficulty is, in many places, a natural consequence of voting being optional. Election officials are partisans too so you shouldn't be surprised if a right-leaning official under-resources an area with a lot of poor people. As for (2) the problem is that this reinforces a two-party system. A vote for a minor party is often a vote for the other side (eg voting for the Greens is a vote that would probably otherwise go to a Democrat so is effectively a vote for the Republicans). Australia has a preferential voting system. Given a field of 5 candidates you number then 1 to 5. When votes are counted you allocate all the "1"s. The candiate with the least number of "1"s is eliminated and their votes are distributed to the "2"s. This continues until something has more than 50% of the vote. This means you could vote [1] Green [2] Democrat [3] Republican and protest the Democrat candidate without losing your vote. One last point, as much as people focus on key states deciding the election, the reality is that the states are on a spectrum based on the popular vote. If a Republican wins the popular vote by 8% or more they'll probably carry California, otherwise they won't. A Democrat will have to win by 5-8% to carry Texas. When the popular vote is close, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida and Wisconsin are in play. Were it not close they wouldn't be. Over time states change their "bias". For example, Florida is becoming more Democratic with retirees from blue states in the Northeast. California used to be a safe red state but is now safely blue. These changes aren't sudden and the variations possible are actually quite small. Whatever the case, the popular vote at the national level would be a disaster. [1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4736105 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4736105
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tisme 14y ago
This is all window dressing. Elections do not decide who wins. Funding does. And as long as corporations can outspend private citizens companies decide elections. If you wanted to reform elections in the USA then you would have to start to curb the direct influence of corporations on the elections, compared to that the electoral college is a minor detail.
- InclinedPlane 14y ago
  You're just translating the problem one level, you're not actually addressing the root problem. The problem isn't that money is allowed to be spent in elections, or even that corporations can outspend individuals or truly grass roots organizations (unions are a big part of the top political donors, for example). Ultimately, buying a TV spot or radio advertisement does not constitute "buying" a vote. The problem is that the whole system is too shallow. And that starts at the electorate and extends to political pundits and the media. If you magically sucked money out of the system tomorrow then we'd be absolutely no better off. Neither individuals nor the media would suddenly decide that it's important to discuss the real issues and be open and honest. No, it would still be the same old popularity/celebrity contest and the same old "gotcha" game.
  - spoiledtechie 14y ago
    Actually, They are right. I really think you should take the time to watch this video, understand it, let it sink in and totally mold your brain around it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ik1AK56FtVc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ik1AK56FtVc
cincinnatus12 14y ago
The argument that the EC is there to the avoid a deadlock situation is quite inaccurate. In fact, given there are only 538 EC votes to distribute, the likelihood of a tie (269-269) is much, much higher than the likelihood of a tie in the popular vote (where in 2008 both candidates received > 50 million votes). Nate Silver's 538 blog estimates the current chances of a EC "deadlock" at 0.2% -- small, yes, but not so small as to ignore the possibility entirely. The "solution" under this scenario? If the election doesn't produce a candidate with 270 or more electoral college votes, the race gets decided by the House of Representatives. Can you imagine the reaction if Obama won the popular vote, but only received 269 EC votes and then the (Republican) House awarded the election to Romney? There is precedent for this, of course. The 1824 election saw Andrew Jackson getting a plurality in both the popular vote and the Electoral College, but not a majority in either. Ultimately, a Congress hostile to Jackson would award to the Presidency to his arch-rival, John Quincy Adams. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1824 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_elec... In terms of worrying about deadlock, a simple popular vote total is far superior than any permutation of the Electoral College.
nhebb 14y ago
This is interesting, but it leaves out Pennsylvania. Penn is a long shot for Romney, but the Romney campaign's internal polling must indicate that it's in play, otherwise they wouldn't be spending time in the final weekend campaigning there.
joeycfan 14y ago
That is one heck of a web page.
deleted 14y ago
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theltrj 14y ago
is there a library out there that mimics this visualization? very powerful stuff
mistercow 14y ago
Fascinatingly, 84% of these scenarios are Obama wins, which is surprisingly closeto fivethirtyeight's current projection of 85%.
protomyth 14y ago
If you want more campaigning in your area, then start a petition and vote for a change to your state's constitution to allocate electoral votes by house district. This is a change that could happen if your state wants it. I believe on real problem is the state's voice is not heard in DC and a lot of crap is done that is not in the State's best interest. I wish they would repeal the Seventeenth Amendment so people would concentrate a lot more on the State's politics. Or perhaps, replace the senators with the sitting governor. Then the Senate would think about the state's budget and regulation burden before passing things.
Evbn 14y ago
Hmm. I wanted to go reqd that page tonight to see you what is left that matters, but it has been replaced by the link be results map. Lame.

365 points by jashkenas 14y ago

Thanks Jeremy, Shan and Mike. I'm continually blown away by the data journalism you're doing over at nytimes on the election. It's truly an inspiration.

patio11 14y ago
Ditto. I'm no fan of the paper, but they're doing things practically every week which are ahead of everyone else in the industry.
- 001sky 14y ago
  Agree. Idea of having "reactive" documents came up in another HN thread recently, and this seems to be an implementation of such. Very cool. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4715978 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4715978
jashkenas 14y ago
I've got nothing whatsoever to do with this one -- it's a Shan + Mike joint. But thanks for the kudos. We should have some fun stuff for y'all on Tuesday night...
- waterlesscloud 14y ago
  It's a really nice project. There are some routes that are surprising and yet seem possible in reality. Those explain some of the choices the candidates have been making, particularly with "safe" states they can't really afford to ignore completely.
- riordan 14y ago
  We're really looking forward to seeing what you've got in store on Tuesday. It's been a while since the Interactive News Team profile a few years back; I think we'd all like to know how a major night goes down in the newsroom for your team.

tomasien 14y ago

I think this is a great way to explain to someone who's not intimately familiar with electoral politics why people think Obama is going to win despite razor thing polls. Predictions mean nothing of course but: If Obama wins Florida, Romney has exactly 1 path to victory: winning every other swing state. If Obama wins Ohio, Romney has only 11 ways to win. If Obama loses Florida, Virginia, NC, and Ohio he could still potentially win if he wins the rest of the swing states, all of which he's slightly ahead in in recent polling. Election day will be interesting, but that's what makes it hard to pundits to predict a Romney victory.

leif 14y ago
Obama's going to win. The only reason you hear pundits talking about it is because they get paid to talk about it. The media controls the messaging these days, not the candidates or the people, and it's in the media's interest to maintain as close a race as possible until the bitter end. That's why even the most partisan pundits, even when everything's in their candidate's favor, keep claiming that "this is such a close race". TBH the only way Romney is going to be contentious is through voter suppression, and that's been so heavily exposed in critical areas that it's not going to have any effect as long as the justice system holds its ground. removes tinfoil hat (BUT EVERYONE PLEASE VOTE IF YOU ARE ABLE, IT'S CRUCIALLY IMPORTANT NO MATTER WHERE YOU LIVE)
- drivebyacct2 14y ago
  NO BUT [insert crude reduction of Nate's science down to the level of tv pundits]. I'd love to know more about Nate's model, but I trust it a hell of a lot more than the raw data of Gallup (seeing as Gallup's nearly the only one left giving him a chance. Dick back-peddaled today, Rasmussen did more or less too.) Nate actually has a book about why this occurs and what it does to the conversation of politics in elections in the US.
  - drivebyacct2 14y ago
    Stay classy silent downvoters. Downvotes make you right.

ck2 14y ago

The five ways to tie are the most freaky and stressful. The only problem with this nifty tree is that it must be followed in order to determine the outcome. Oh wait, I didn't realize the boxes at the top were selectable. I guess that allows out-of-order traversal. Only thing I'd like to see added to this is using url hash to bookmark the result set so I can share it.

RyJones 14y ago
If you use the buttons at the top, you can in effect zoom the chart to see how it plays out.

ninetax 14y ago

This is amazing! It's everything a visualization should be: simple, to the point, interactive.

lbarrow 14y ago
It's also pretty deceptive, as it gives each path equal visual weight when they aren't all equally likely
amalag 14y ago
Seriously this is an amazing infographic/visualization. Intrade http://electoralmap.net http://electoralmap.net was pretty accurate in 2008. Also predicting an obama victory.
pjscott 14y ago
It should also be weighted by probability, so it's not quite ideal.

nextstep 14y ago

Damn, I wish I lived in one of the states that gets to choose our president.

ck2 14y ago
Trust me you do not want. Watching TV or the radio is impossible without being inundated. It's time to switch to popular vote and end this gaming of the system.
- gwright 14y ago
  A purely popular vote system has its own flaws. In particular, national elections would be reduced to politicians catering to voters in a few high-density regions rather than attempting to appeal to a geographically dispersed electorate.
  - nitrogen 14y ago
    There are other voting systems that should yield less catering to the extremes: http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/ http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/
  - drewrv 14y ago
    So what? Why should some peoples vote matter more than others?
    - leif 14y ago
      It's all about what kinds of questions get discussed and addressed during campaigns. The point of the campaigning process is chiefly to elect new representation, but secondarily (and closely so) to debate and test competing theories on the primary problems of the time. In the electoral college model, the concerns of the swing states get the most attention, for reasons which are far too numerous and obvious to go in to. This is unfair to people that don't live in the swing states. In the popular model, it's a bit subtle. At first, you think "well everyone's vote counts equally so everyone's concerns get counted according to the proportion of the constituents with those concerns." But this is not correct when you get down to the details. If you're a candidate, you have to spend your resources in the most efficient way possible. Politicians do this (spend resources) by paying for messaging, spending their time campaigning in person and with volunteers/staffers, and by adopting policy positions (this is a resource in the political landscape). In the electoral college model, the best return on your time, money, and issue consideration is found in the swing states, because everywhere else you have basically zero probability of success, which cannot be balanced out by any weight that electoral votes afford. In the popular model, the best return is to target the largest population possible. People get divvied up into geographical regions no matter what---be it by local news network, regional speaking venue, or major political issue---and it's to these regions that our votes then become divided. In the popular model, the only places worth considering are those places with the largest populations, that still stand a chance of being easy to target with a single message, TV ad, or speaking appearance. If you're in a rural town, a candidate coming to speak to you only gets to speak to you, not to the nearest million voters. But in a city, the candidate that comes to you does get an audience of a million or more. So in the popular model, candidates will only bother to work for the concerns of those who live in population centers. You get skewed either way. Personally, I think skewing toward regions with lots of people, even if they may not be the overall majority, is the best thing to do, but that's just my opinion, I don't have an optimal solution. The problem is that "optimal" means that everyone's concerns get addressed in an equal manner, not necessarily that everyone gets an equivalent vote. The game theory involved is subtle and the emotions on all sides even more so.

ianstormtaylor 14y ago

Does anyone know if I should be as scared as I am that there are 5 paths to tie? Is that the norm in a presidential election? because it sounds crazy.

knowtheory 14y ago
They're pretty low likelihood events. Wikipedia appears to have a pretty solid writeup of the electoral college system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_(United_States)#Alternative_methods_of_choosing_electors http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_(United_State... ) which includes the various mechanisms states use to select their electors. The vast majority of the states are winner-take-all, which presumably reduces but doesn't eliminate the possible ways to split 538 down the middle, but some states either only have a single electoral vote or use mechanisms which can divide their electoral votes between the candidates. So, yeah, every election has this chance. Probably isn't going to happen though. This is conjecture, but I'd hazard a guess that a Bush v. Gore style dispute over a single large state which holds the balance of the election is way more likely than an actual numerical tie where the House would choose the president and the Senate the VP.
mlinsey 14y ago
Dunno why that would be scary. Ties (or really, any allocation of electoral votes where no candidate gets to 270) are resolved in the House of Representatives, and this was common practice in the early 19th century. If it were to happen now, there would be a lot of complaining, but overall it would be less of a constitutional crisis than the 2000 election. If anything, it might be a spark for true electoral reform.
- ianstormtaylor 14y ago
  Ah yeah, I stupidly misinterpreted the bottom row of the graph and thought there were 5 ties out of the 20 or so possibilities (forgetting the branches that didn't need to be resolved by New Hampshire), but now I realize that was only for decisions ultimately decided by New Hampshire. That Wikipedia article talking about the 1800 tie is pretty awesome.
- 14y ago

mbostock 14y ago

A couple hidden features: 1. You can option-click on any of the buttons to see the transition in super slo-mo. (This was mainly for debugging, but it's fun to see how the transitions work in more detail.) 2. You can double-click on any part of the tree, and it will zoom in by one level. Also, we did a variation that used state-level probabilities to weight the tree. This gave a sense not just of the logical possibilities, but of the likelihood of each, which I liked. However, the FiveThirtyEight state-level probabilities are not fully independent, so you can't multiply them together to compute conditional probabilities. Perhaps next election!

raganesh 14y ago
That is cool. And thanks Mike, for your incredible d3.js library.
001sky 14y ago
However, the FiveThirtyEight state-level probabilities are not fully independent This is interesting, are they linked in some manner to national polls, or is their something more nuanced?
- usaar333 14y ago
  538 derives their probabilities by running simulated elections. http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/methodology/ http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/methodology/ Somewhat intuitively, the simulations themselves have concepts of "national movements", where a candidate can (with some probability) gain 1%, 2%, etc. across all states. The state probabilities are then derived from how many simulations/total candidate A won. However, partly because these simulations actually had national movement effects, you'll find that odds of winning both Florida and Ohio (as in # simulations/total candidate A wins both states) are not the state odds multiplied (they odds actually should be higher). That said, with the raw simulation data, the graphic could show probabilities for every combination.
  - waterlesscloud 14y ago
    I wonder if that national movement concept explains that weird spike in his histogram at 330 EV. Maybe it's because there's some "movement" concept that tips several states at the same point?

trueluk 14y ago

I'm not sure why Nebraska's second congressional district isn't included. According to FiveThirtyEight, Obama's chance (14%) of winning one vote from Nebraska is higher than Romney's chance (11%) of winning Nevada. As a matter of fact, the last FiveThirtyEight visualization I saw linked here (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4657826 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4657826) didn't include the one electoral vote Obama won in 2008 from Nebraska either.

agildehaus 14y ago
Maybe they're not counting that electoral vote here. Can anyone tell? This diagram needs an electoral vote count.

ecmendenhall 14y ago

If you're sufficiently convinced by this, the 538 model, or your favorite electoral vote map, and you are willing to bet your beliefs (and you are in a jurisdiction that has not regulated prediction markets out of existence), Intrade contracts on an Obama victory were trading around $6.70 today.

usaar333 14y ago
This should be legal for any American: http://tippie.uiowa.edu/iem/ http://tippie.uiowa.edu/iem/ Sadly, if you don't already have money there, your transfer is unlikely to go through until after the election.
icelancer 14y ago
It will be impossible to get money on Intrade before the election.

robomartin 14y ago

The electoral college is incredibly unfair to voters who live in states that lean opposite their view. I fully understand that the popular vote option has its issues (focusing on large population areas, etc.). However, a lot of this can be mitigated through legislation and regulation of the process. Here's a random set of ideas: - Candidates are only allowed to visit each state capital once. That's it. - Candidates are not allowed to trash the other candidates. They are only allowed to discuss their views. - Candidates are awarded an amount of money to run their campaigns. No external contributions from any source whatsoever. None. - Candidates must participate in detailed interviews for a period of several weeks. Some of these interviews are aired in national networks and the rest made available online. - Candidates are obligated to participate in detailed debates - Television networks are prohibited from endorsing or communicating bias - The publication of poll data is illegal - A candidate must post a huge bond. If he or she is found telling lies they end-up in prison and have huge financial consequences. - Campaign promises are recorded and signed in a document that is publicly available. A politician that does not deliver on promises made is exposed to financial and criminal liability. Don't make promises you can't keep. - Public endorsement of any candidate is illegal. They have to float and survive on their platform and track record. - The incumbent is not allowed to campaign in any way at all. His or her opponents cannot trash him/her. The incumbent can only rely on having done a good job and kept promises. People will vote and want to keep someone who is doing a good job. The only thing they are allowed to do is announce their running for office and participate in scheduled debates or interviews. - Politicians are limited to serving in public office for a certain period of time, perhaps ten years. After that they must return to private life --no connection whatsoever to government and politics-- for five years before they can run for office again. This is to infuse balance and perspective and not have a race of politicians, by politicians and for politicians. There are probably a number of other interesting ideas out there. What we have it horribly broken in many ways. It'd be nice to see real dialog and actions to change it.

anigbrowl 14y ago
This would be great if voting were restricted to smart people with halos.
ewillbefull 14y ago

seldo 14y ago

A really great way to show why Ohio is so important: 1. Give the democrats Wisconsin (I don't know why people are treating it as a swing state) 2. Give the democrats Ohio 3. Give the democrats any other state (except New Hampshire) Basically, as long as Obama takes Ohio, Obama wins.

james-skemp 14y ago
Re Wisconsin, as someone who has lived in the state all his life, and been confident that we'd elect a Democrat as president since the mid-90s (and definitely in the last 12+ years I've been voting), I believe the state is swinging. Walker's recall showed how red the state is, once the people outside Madison and Milwaukee actually vote. (Disclaimer: I live in Madison, and commented to others that I didn't realize Wisconsin had turned red.) Obama is back in Madison shortly, but he really needs to head up to the north of the state. Unless he thinks he can carry it by getting the vote out in obviously blue areas. On the other hand, I don't think he can sway people in two days, so getting people excited where he knows a vote will be a vote for him might be the best bet.

marcamillion 14y ago

I LOVE this. I have always wondered what such a visualization might look like. Now, when the results come in, I can be my very own 'electoral college pundit' and be right :)

cletus 14y ago

Well I guess it's that time in the cycle again: for people to complain about the electoral college (disclaimer: I'm not American). Over the years in different elections in different countries I've heard this complaint [1] > The electoral college is incredibly unfair to voters who live in states that lean opposite their view. Translation: > It's unfair that I don't get my way even though I'm in the minority. Also, this isn't just an election for president. There are Senate (in 2 out of 3 elections) and Congressional races, probably local races too. But let me address the common "solution" for this "problem": the popular volte (for president). That is a terrible idea. The electoral college doesn't only exist for the reasons of state rights (although that's a pretty big part of it). It exists to avoid a deadlock. The delegate almost without exception vote as their state did. The possibility of no decision coming out of the electoral college is practically zero. For those of you who were paying attention in 2000, just look at what a mess Florida became. Now watch me get downvoted into oblivion (but that doesn't make me any less right) but the optional nature of the US voting system has resulted in: - the left buying votes (cigarettes to homeless people, that sort of thing); and - the right trying to disenfranchise groups that tend to vote left with such measures as removing the right of felons to vote (and even people who aren't felons). HOWEVER, by the rules that were in place at the time of the election Florida was always a Bush win (seriously, please don't downvote siimply because you disagree). Even extensive analysis (by the likes of the New York Times, etc) after the fact supports this. My point was that Florida turned into a circus of trying to change the rules after the fact (eg what constitutes a vote, the whole dimpled and pregnant chad business). You just can't do that. Imagine that circus on a national level with an incredibly close popular vote. On a personal note, as someone who resides in New York, one of the most expensive media markets in a state that is safely blue, I appreciate the minimal amount of election ads. Anyway, the electoral college is not the problem here. There are however two glaring problems (IMHO): 1. Voting is optional; 2. Elections are first-past-the-post ("FPTP"). The argument for (1) is that mandatory voting leads to uninformed people voting. I assure you that uninformed people are already voting. Voter turnout nationally is something like 50% (IIRC). Of those 40% always vote Democrat, 40% always vote Republican and the 20% in the middle decide the election. So 10% of the population is deciding the election even key states. The problem with optional voting is it creates the wrong incentives. Measures like voter ID, removing felons right to votes are a consequence of this. If voting were mandatory (as it is in Australia) then a lot of these problems go away. Also, in many parts of the US it is hard to vote with long lines. It should be moved to a Saturday but this difficulty is, in many places, a natural consequence of voting being optional. Election officials are partisans too so you shouldn't be surprised if a right-leaning official under-resources an area with a lot of poor people. As for (2) the problem is that this reinforces a two-party system. A vote for a minor party is often a vote for the other side (eg voting for the Greens is a vote that would probably otherwise go to a Democrat so is effectively a vote for the Republicans). Australia has a preferential voting system. Given a field of 5 candidates you number then 1 to 5. When votes are counted you allocate all the "1"s. The candiate with the least number of "1"s is eliminated and their votes are distributed to the "2"s. This continues until something has more than 50% of the vote. This means you could vote [1] Green [2] Democrat [3] Republican and protest the Democrat candidate without losing your vote. One last point, as much as people focus on key states deciding the election, the reality is that the states are on a spectrum based on the popular vote. If a Republican wins the popular vote by 8% or more they'll probably carry California, otherwise they won't. A Democrat will have to win by 5-8% to carry Texas. When the popular vote is close, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida and Wisconsin are in play. Were it not close they wouldn't be. Over time states change their "bias". For example, Florida is becoming more Democratic with retirees from blue states in the Northeast. California used to be a safe red state but is now safely blue. These changes aren't sudden and the variations possible are actually quite small. Whatever the case, the popular vote at the national level would be a disaster. [1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4736105 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4736105

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tisme 14y ago

This is all window dressing. Elections do not decide who wins. Funding does. And as long as corporations can outspend private citizens companies decide elections. If you wanted to reform elections in the USA then you would have to start to curb the direct influence of corporations on the elections, compared to that the electoral college is a minor detail.

InclinedPlane 14y ago
You're just translating the problem one level, you're not actually addressing the root problem. The problem isn't that money is allowed to be spent in elections, or even that corporations can outspend individuals or truly grass roots organizations (unions are a big part of the top political donors, for example). Ultimately, buying a TV spot or radio advertisement does not constitute "buying" a vote. The problem is that the whole system is too shallow. And that starts at the electorate and extends to political pundits and the media. If you magically sucked money out of the system tomorrow then we'd be absolutely no better off. Neither individuals nor the media would suddenly decide that it's important to discuss the real issues and be open and honest. No, it would still be the same old popularity/celebrity contest and the same old "gotcha" game.
- spoiledtechie 14y ago
  Actually, They are right. I really think you should take the time to watch this video, understand it, let it sink in and totally mold your brain around it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ik1AK56FtVc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ik1AK56FtVc

cincinnatus12 14y ago

The argument that the EC is there to the avoid a deadlock situation is quite inaccurate. In fact, given there are only 538 EC votes to distribute, the likelihood of a tie (269-269) is much, much higher than the likelihood of a tie in the popular vote (where in 2008 both candidates received > 50 million votes). Nate Silver's 538 blog estimates the current chances of a EC "deadlock" at 0.2% -- small, yes, but not so small as to ignore the possibility entirely. The "solution" under this scenario? If the election doesn't produce a candidate with 270 or more electoral college votes, the race gets decided by the House of Representatives. Can you imagine the reaction if Obama won the popular vote, but only received 269 EC votes and then the (Republican) House awarded the election to Romney? There is precedent for this, of course. The 1824 election saw Andrew Jackson getting a plurality in both the popular vote and the Electoral College, but not a majority in either. Ultimately, a Congress hostile to Jackson would award to the Presidency to his arch-rival, John Quincy Adams. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1824 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_elec... In terms of worrying about deadlock, a simple popular vote total is far superior than any permutation of the Electoral College.

nhebb 14y ago

This is interesting, but it leaves out Pennsylvania. Penn is a long shot for Romney, but the Romney campaign's internal polling must indicate that it's in play, otherwise they wouldn't be spending time in the final weekend campaigning there.

joeycfan 14y ago

That is one heck of a web page.

deleted 14y ago

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theltrj 14y ago

is there a library out there that mimics this visualization? very powerful stuff

mistercow 14y ago

Fascinatingly, 84% of these scenarios are Obama wins, which is surprisingly closeto fivethirtyeight's current projection of 85%.

protomyth 14y ago

If you want more campaigning in your area, then start a petition and vote for a change to your state's constitution to allocate electoral votes by house district. This is a change that could happen if your state wants it. I believe on real problem is the state's voice is not heard in DC and a lot of crap is done that is not in the State's best interest. I wish they would repeal the Seventeenth Amendment so people would concentrate a lot more on the State's politics. Or perhaps, replace the senators with the sitting governor. Then the Senate would think about the state's budget and regulation burden before passing things.

Evbn 14y ago

Hmm. I wanted to go reqd that page tonight to see you what is left that matters, but it has been replaced by the link be results map. Lame.