Voting Predictions

Nate Silver is giving Obama a 91.6 percent chance of winning today. Conservatives seem to have stopped writing evil tweets about Silver. Either someone explained probability to them or they realized that this was a stupid fight. 

Silver says that 70% of Nevada has already voted. Really? Wow. 

He's right about Ohio being a problem for Romney. White, working-class guys, like my brother-in-law, are not backing him. Why? Because they work in the auto industry. 

7 thoughts on “Voting Predictions

  1. I think if white, working-class guys in Ohio are backing Romney to a lesser degree than white, working-class guys in other states.

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  2. I am always fearful when the outcome depends on Florida and Ohio, especially when I read the NY times article about provisional ballots, early voting, and recount procedures in Ohio. So, Nate Silver (or Sam Wang’s) predictions don’t make me happy.

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  3. A WA post article said that 1/3 of voters in the swing states have already voted. The early voting and permissive absentee ballots are making a real difference in when people vote.

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  4. I am just surprised at how innumerate people are, or at least pretend to be. Probability can be counterintuitive some times, but it’s not that complicated a concept to understand. What annoys me is people who say that Nate Silver will be discredited if Mitt Romney wins. First, a low probability is not a no probability, and even an 8% predicts that 8% of the time Romney will win. Romney winning doesn’t really mean the current odds are wrong, but rather that the less likely outcome is realized. Secondly, he’s doing statistical aggregation of polls. If the data was majorly off, that’s a problem with the data, not the model. Nate can look at historical trends and decide which polls have in the past been more accurate (which he does), but if there’s a systematic bias in 99% of all polls, that’s not something that is the fault of his model.

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