evgen

49 ms·

661.
by evgen 6y ago
I guess history is difficult when you only learn it through random-walk in Wikipedia. The Nazis were not in government in the 20s when this feeble attempt occurred. In fact, they were a relatively unknown regional party at this point. Af
662.
by evgen 6y ago
They do not yet have a majority. The Alaska race is still being counted and two Georgia seats are going to run-off. If the Dems win two of those three they control the Senate.
663.
by evgen 6y ago
It takes a certain level of complete ignorance to not know that for the past 30+ years the economy and stock market has grown more under Democratic presidents than Republican ones.
664.
by evgen 6y ago
It is both incredibly simple and readily apparent. What is interesting/amusing is how the further up the right-wing food chain you climb the closer you get to people who you _know_ understand the difference and can see what is happeni
665.
by evgen 6y ago
> I have no idea what the solution is to this. It is a solution that has its own problems, but mandatory voting would solve this problem. The polling failures are primarily in trying to weight the sample that you manage to capture in a
666.
by evgen 6y ago
He may know a lot about the topic, but has little experience in actually modeling elections. He also has skin in the game and an incentive to make sure everyone knows that his miss was completely not his fault and was in fact due to failur
667.
by evgen 6y ago
All digital surveys skew heavily to a younger demographic and heavily male. You have basically captured the political opinions of the fraction of the potential electorate least likely to vote. How exactly is that worthwhile?
668.
by evgen 6y ago
Probably worth noting that the asymmetric break of the undecideds in 2016 was what won the election for Trump. There were a lot of undecided voters and a lot of them decided for Trump late in the process so models that assumed a traditiona
669.
by evgen 6y ago
Ah yes. Mr 'let me tell you why Nate is wrong' Gelman, who is now Mr 'let me tell you why the fact that I missed bigger than Nate is not my fault and in fact is entirely the fault of these other people' Gelman. Forgive
670.
by evgen 6y ago
Trump's only business experience is in running them into the ground. He is horrible at business and even worse at understanding the sort of macro-economics you would hope that a president might know a little something about. His path
671.
by evgen 6y ago
Bernie only won a single primary, Nevada, prior to South Carolina. He lost in Iowa and tied in New Hampshire. Just prior to Super Tuesday several candidates who were polling in single digits dropped out and endorsed Joe Biden. Maybe it w
672.
by evgen 6y ago
By 'quite badly early on in the primaries' you mean the first two where Pete won one and then tied Bernie in the state next to Bernie's home state, and then one that Bernie won, right? After that was South Carolina where Joe
673.
by evgen 6y ago
If a weather forecaster can predict the temperature next week to within a few degrees and can tell you when they are sure it will rain, when they are sure it will be sunny, and provide a good guess as to rain or shine on most of the other d
674.
by evgen 6y ago
Biden is leading in most states by more votes than there are outstanding ballots; that does not really qualify as hair thin. The margin may be small in a few states, but it is large enough in a sufficient collection of states right now tha
675.
by evgen 6y ago
Everyone is bad at probability and statistical distributions, not just you. The problem with modeling elections is that there are so few of them and the data is very noisy and until quite recently rather suspect. Let's not pretend th
676.
by evgen 6y ago
The Nazi party was the second largest in the 1930 elections and became the largest party in parliament in 1932. They didn't need to use violence to size power when they could cut a deal with the Centre (Catholic) party and the Conserv
677.
by evgen 6y ago
We have had more than a decade of social media and internet message boards to learn that this whole 'expose the lie' myth promulgated mostly by free speech absolutists turns out to be complete bullshit. Masses of people are dumb,
678.
by evgen 6y ago
Elections are run by the states and so in almost all instances the federal courts will defer to the state courts when it comes to things like determination of fact. So far there has been no evidence of either fraud or misconduct and the th
679.
by evgen 6y ago
They provided the probability distribution. The fact that you can’t handle math and need some sort of absolute certainty for a future event is not 538’s problem.
680.
by evgen 6y ago
Individual polls were sometimes outside the margin, but collectively the polls were not far off the mark and collectively they were within the margin of error. This is why sites like 538 were able to model the various outcomes with some de
681.
by evgen 6y ago
> polling in most European countries doesn't go this far wrong, on almost all polls. Brexit and UK elections would like to have a word with you... Polling everywhere sucks. Pick a country and chances are it either has no polling to
682.
by evgen 6y ago
You obviously have no understanding of either polling or statistics. This is like saying that if computer programmers were not incompetent we would not have bugs in programs, but since they all obviously do not know what they are doing we
683.
by evgen 6y ago
Prior to 1992 the only time California had two Democratic senators was post-Watergate and then prior to that single term for Tunney you have to go all the way back to 1863 to get two Dem senators. California had frequently elected Republic
684.
by evgen 6y ago
Everyone would be surprised if Trump wins, because at this point it is so mathematically improbable that even gun-shy decision desks at major news networks are able to make the call without fearing they will look like idiots. Recounts have
685.
by evgen 6y ago
It was both the sample (read actual reports from pollsters on how hard it is to get a sample these days... people DO NOT want to participate in polls) and an underestimate of the number of voters the Republicans would get to the polls. If
686.
by evgen 6y ago
Once Biden's team let Trump paint him as socialist I was not surprised to see the Cubanos go Trump (or the Venezuelans for the same reason) but I will be interested to see some of the breakdowns of the Puerto Rican vote in FL and some
687.
by evgen 6y ago
Unfortunately you cannot just wish away the cause-effect here. Did Democrats piss away a hundred million in South Carolina on a race Jamie Harrison was never going to win, or did Jamie Harrison get within striking distance because of that
688.
by evgen 6y ago
In a sense, this was a bit of a worst-case scenario for the GOP. Trump is out of office and wounded, but not destroyed and so able to try to play kingmaker from the sidelines. A large, centrist portion of the GOP would probably have liked
689.
by evgen 6y ago
If the 'outsider' does nothing but lie, threaten, and harass opponents then I think Twitter will continue to do it job and suppress the assholes. If you happen to be a political ally of the asshole then I guess it sucks to be you
690.
by evgen 6y ago
In just about every model, but let's use 538 as the canonical example, there was a reasonable chance for the Dems to lose seats but a very, very low chance they would lose control. We are looking at a two or three standard deviation v

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