[HN Gopher] An election forecast that's 50-50 is not "giving up"
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An election forecast that's 50-50 is not "giving up"
Author : luu
Score : 114 points
Date : 2025-03-08 22:20 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Nate Silver also had an article saying that the most likely
| scenario would be a blowout. There was a 25% chance that Trump
| would win all 7 battleground state, a 15% chance Harris would win
| all 7. No other permutation of the 7 states was anywhere close.
| bombcar wrote:
| If they're not completely independent variables, that should be
| the expected outcome (e.g., they all trend the same direction).
|
| And if they're not that close, they're not battleground.
| fullshark wrote:
| They are where the campaign money and attention is going,
| what about battleground implies independence? Whoever wins
| them will win the election.
| chicagobob wrote:
| True, but the word "blowout" in this case is just a crazy side-
| effect of our weird electoral college system.
|
| Everyone knows that in all the swing states (except Arizona),
| the final vote margin was just a few percent, and that was well
| within the MOE for all the "50-50" polling in each of those
| states.
|
| No one seriously believes that any President has had a blowout
| election since maybe Obama in 2008 or Bush in 2004, but the
| media sure loves the word "blowout".
| nightski wrote:
| So basically, if you ignore how the entire system works then
| it wasn't a blowout lol. I'm guessing the media was taking
| into account that we indeed use an electoral college system
| so that is all that matters.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| I think "blowout" to some (most? vast majority?) without
| more context implies that the voting citizens strongly
| preferred a candidate. So people pushback against the
| clickbait word being used to drive engagement.
| rayiner wrote:
| The only score that matters is the one used to call the
| game, because that's the only score anyone is trying to
| win. We simply don't know what would have happened under
| a different set of rules.
|
| The "ground game" is extremely expensive:
| https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/4934604-kamala-
| harris-g.... Especially for republicans, whose voters are
| spread out over rural areas. In post-election interviews,
| Trump campaign strategists revealed that to save money
| they largely eschewed a traditional ground game in favor
| of target outreach to low propensity voters. Even then,
| Trump received a lot of criticism on the right for doing
| a handful of rallies in California and New York.
|
| As it is, both campaigns focused most of their resources
| on the seven swing states, and Trump swept all of them.
| Had the election been close you would've expected by
| sheer chance each candidate to get some of the swing
| states, but that didn't happen.
| toast0 wrote:
| Certainaly there are no rules for what is a blowout or a
| mandate... But we can look back and see Reagan won all
| but one state, and say yeah, that was a blow out, and
| Reagan had a mandate.
|
| IMHO, if you don't win in any of your opponent's
| stronghold states, it's not much of a blowout. Yes, it
| was a win and any win gets you the whole four years, so
| it doesn't really matter what you want to call it, but
| it's yet another gaslighting IMHO.
| rayiner wrote:
| To be clear, I don't think it was a blowout or a
| landslide or anything like that. I'm just saying it's not
| as close as the PV would make it seem. Harris's campaign
| said their internal polling never showed her ahead, and
| the result was consistent with that.
|
| In particular, he wiped out two decades of immigration-
| driven leftward shift in the electorate, which was how
| Biden was able to win traditionally red states like
| Arizona and Georgia. Trump won Nevada, which is now under
| 45% white, by more than Bush did in 2000, when it was 65%
| white. He lost New Jersey by less than six points, doing
| better now that the state is only 55% white than Bush did
| in 2004 when it was 70% white. He won Texas by a similar
| margin to Bush in 88 and Florida by more than Reagan did
| in 1980.
| notTooFarGone wrote:
| no, he means a blowout is entirely dependent on the few
| people that are in the states that count. Therefore your
| MoE is higher because your population size is significantly
| lower.
|
| You can pretty much ignore every non-swing state and the
| result of polls would be the same.
| ta1243 wrote:
| When 0.1% of the total voters can swing the vote from being
| 60 for red to being 60 for blue, polling is obviously going
| to be pretty tricky to predict.
| kelnos wrote:
| How the specific electoral system works is irrelevant. In
| our case, our electoral system is designed to make most
| voters' votes not actually matter, so I really don't care
| about it one bit when talking about who had more or less
| support in the country as a whole. Trump only got 1.5% more
| votes than Harris did. That's not a blowout.
|
| Even if you insist on going by electoral votes, 58% to 42%
| isn't a blowout either.
| culi wrote:
| Trump won the popular vote by 1.5%. That's the 8th closest
| election in all of US history.
|
| Maybe he meant an EC blowout. But that's easier to predict.
| Most polling had almost all the swing states as extremely
| close. The outcome was likely to swing in the same direction
| across all swing states so an EC blowout is likely
| wakawaka28 wrote:
| As I recall none of the big polls the mainstream media was
| pushing projected Trump to win. They even refused to call the
| election until the wee hours of the morning, when the results
| were pretty clear. Just like in 2016, the polls were intended
| to deceive people into thinking there was no hope for an
| alternative candidate.
| culi wrote:
| Major decisions desks (AP, Edison, and Fox News; plus a
| recent newcomer called DDHQ) have made about 3 incorrect
| calls in their entire history (they were house races, not
| senate or presidential calls). An incorrect call is a HUGE
| deal and they have an extremely high bar for certainty.
| Even for Obama, who's wins were basically a landslide
| compared to the past 3 elections, calls weren't made until
| around midnight. Historically it's even common for
| presidential candidates to concede even before decision
| desks have made an official call (another norm Trump has
| challenged).
|
| Anyways Decision Desks are a very different topic than
| pollsters and have no overlap.
|
| I don't know what "mainstream media" you were consuming but
| as a bettor, I definitely didn't get the sense that the
| race was locked in. All major polls had Biden trailing
| Trump. Harris got a big boost but that only pushed her to
| being neck and neck with Trump. We can check the Wayback
| Machine to verify your claim
|
| * NYTimes frontpage the day before the election says
| "turnout is a focus in a closely divided race" https://web.
| archive.org/web/20241105011526/https://www.nytim...
|
| * Vox frontpage says "5 reasons Harris could win and 4
| reasons Trump could" and "Should it really be this hard to
| beat Trump?" https://web.archive.org/web/20241106000611/htt
| ps://www.vox.c...
|
| * CNN frontpage does not include any particular
| characterization of chances https://web.archive.org/web/202
| 41105000156/https://edition.c...
|
| A cursory look at other "mainstream" media sources will
| easily verify that the race was clearly represented as a
| very close tossup.
| colonCapitalDee wrote:
| > complains about mainstream media
|
| > has no idea what mainstream media says because only
| source of information is unreliable fringe news sources
|
| many such cases
| wakawaka28 wrote:
| I get information from everywhere. Don't project your
| ignorance of alternatives on me.
| kleiba wrote:
| _> Just like in 2016, the polls were intended to deceive
| people into thinking there was no hope for an alternative
| candidate._
|
| And who, in your opinion, executed this coordinated
| deception, and to what end?
| t-3 wrote:
| That's just not true. Even the _New York Times_ had Trump
| projected to win on election day '24, before any state had
| finished polling.
| asdf6969 wrote:
| Why does it matter? If the system was different the whole
| campaign would have changed. Only the votes that matter
| actually matter. The rest is just speculation and you really
| have no idea what would happen to the popular vote if that's
| what was important. He won!
| milesrout wrote:
| Also the idea that people's votes don't count because they
| are in a "safe seat" is bananas. Of course it counts: they
| count it, and it goes towards the final result. It is like
| saying that the only purchase to _really_ bankrupt you is
| the last one you made. No, of course not, it is the
| aggregate. The straw did not _actually_ break the camel 's
| back, and seven states do not decide the election. 271
| electoral votes do! All 271+ of them.
| notTooFarGone wrote:
| So how many seats is a vote worth in Iowa vs California?
| Is it the same? If Elections would be done via tokens and
| you had 10 and another person gets 60 to vote, would you
| say that is unfair?
| kelnos wrote:
| I think it's a bit more complicated than you make it
| sound. I live in California, so of course all my state's
| electoral votes went to Harris. I could have not bothered
| to vote, but the problem is that if everyone like me were
| to think the same way, those electoral votes could go to
| someone else.
|
| So yes, in a literal, technical sense, my vote counted.
| But in reality, my vote had little to do with the
| outcome, whereas the votes of someone in Pennsylvania or
| Arizona had everything to do with the outcome. Those
| seven states absolutely did decide the election.
|
| I do think that tallying the overall popular vote is a
| useful metric, even if the election's outcome doesn't
| depend on it, so I guess in that sense my vote "counted"
| as well.
| flanked-evergl wrote:
| Using the popular vote in a system where the popular vote
| means nothing seems a bit odd. Why not use the candidate's
| hand sizes instead? It's just as arbitrary.
| kelnos wrote:
| No, that's not just as arbitrary. Please don't make bad-
| faith arguments.
|
| The popular vote count is a measure of the level of support
| for the candidate.
|
| The electoral vote count is, unfortunately, how we
| determine who gets the office, and that's literally it. It
| just tells us who did better at influencing voters in a
| handful of states that actually matter in the idiotic
| electoral college system, putting the result of the
| election into the hands of a small minority of voters. That
| says _nothing_ about the overall support a candidate has.
|
| In the end, Trump had the support of 1.5% more actual
| voters than Harris did. It wasn't a blowout, he has no
| mandate. And we really have no idea what would have
| happened if our system was based on the popular vote. If
| candidates had to campaign in every state, to get every
| voter out that they can to support them, the final results
| would probably not look the same as what we go.
| weberer wrote:
| >putting the result of the election into the hands of a
| small minority of voters
|
| Are you referring to the final 538 electors who actually
| make the final vote? Most of them are bound to vote based
| on who their state voted for. Aside from some rare
| exceptions (like that WA elector that voted for Chief
| Spotted Eagle in 2016 as some sort of weird protest).
|
| Or are you trying to claim that only swing voters in
| swing states are responsible for the outcome of the
| election? Because that's a fallacy I've seen a lot of
| people make recently that I'm just going to start calling
| "the tiebreaker fallacy". If you have a panel of 101
| voters where 50 people vote one way, 50 vote the other
| way, and one person is the tiebreaker, you can not make
| the claim that only the tiebreaker's vote counts. All 101
| voters were part of the process. At any time, any of the
| other 100 voters could have changed their votes and the
| outcome would have changed.
| coldpie wrote:
| > At any time, any of the other 100 voters could have
| changed their votes and the outcome would have changed.
|
| This is where your analogy is getting tripped up. The EV
| outcome for the vast majority of states is certain.
| California's EVs were never going to go to Trump in any
| possible reality. Louisiana's EVs were never going to go
| for Harris. These states cannot "change their votes."
|
| If the makeup of the 50-50 split voters in your scenario
| is fixed and known with certainty ahead of the election,
| then it really is the case that only that 101st vote
| matters and the other 100 people have to live with that 1
| person's vote.
|
| This is how the EC works. The EV outcomes for most states
| are fixed and known ahead of time. The only votes that
| matter for the presidential election are those in the ~7
| or so states that we call "swing states," because the
| outcome of the election in the other ~43 states is known
| with certainty ahead of time.
|
| _Note: I 'm using "fixed" here to mean "unchangeable,"
| not something like "rigged"._
| weberer wrote:
| >The EV outcome for the vast majority of states is known
| ahead of time.
|
| There's a world of difference between being predicatively
| partisan and not being able to vote at all.
|
| >only that 101st vote matters and the other 100 people
| have to live with that 1 person's vote
|
| No, its actually that 50 people have to live with 51
| people's votes. That one person is not voting alone. Your
| post is the perfect example of the tiebreaker fallacy.
| coldpie wrote:
| This seems like a distinction without a difference. It is
| still the case that the only people influencing the
| election outcome are the voters in the swing states. The
| outcome will always be "40% + swing-states" versus "40% +
| other-swing-states." If you're in one of those 40%s, your
| vote does not matter to the result, because your state's
| result is already determined. This is unlike your
| analogy, which supposes that no votes are fixed.
| Izkata wrote:
| > California's EVs were never going to go to Trump in any
| possible reality.
|
| California was reliably Republican in the 80s, so no, you
| can't really say that for certain.
|
| All states shifted to the right in this election.
| Illinois for example has been reliably Democrat, but if
| it shifts as much in the next election as it did in this
| past one, it would become a swing state.
| flanked-evergl wrote:
| > The popular vote count is a measure of the level of
| support for the candidate.
|
| This would only be true if the popular vote result would
| be entirely unchanged if the election system was changed
| to be based on popular vote. And the popular vote would
| almost definitely have been different if the election
| results were based on popular vote, so it's then not a
| measure of the level of support for the candidate.
|
| > The electoral vote count is, unfortunately, how we
| determine who gets the office
|
| Why is it unfortunate?
|
| > That says nothing about the overall support a candidate
| has.
|
| Can you cite any evidence that the popular vote is a
| better indication of the candidate's popular support than
| the electoral college?
|
| > In the end, Trump had the support of 1.5% more actual
| voters than Harris did.
|
| Again this would only be true if the popular vote would
| be unaffected if the election was based on popular vote,
| which is a false assumption.
|
| > he has no mandate.
|
| Please cite.
|
| > And we really have no idea what would have happened if
| our system was based on the popular vote.
|
| This seems to contradict everything else you wrote as
| your reasoning is only valid if you work under the
| assumption that the popular vote would not have changed
| at all if the system was based on the popular vote.
| sigzero wrote:
| He absolutely has a mandate. You don't have to have a
| "blowout" to have a mandate. He has several mandates
| actually.
| culi wrote:
| It's helpful in the same way opinion or approval polls are
| helpful.
|
| It also shows potential for how things could've otherwise
| gone.
|
| If you wanna use the electoral college, be my guest. But
| know that making that data is useful is MUCH more
| difficult. In theory a candidate could win every single
| state by 0.01% and lose a state by 99%. They would win in a
| blowout in the EC but in the popular vote they actually
| lost. And you would get a highly skewed and unhelpful
| representation of the actual election results
| xienze wrote:
| > Trump won the popular vote by 1.5%. That's the 8th closest
| election in all of US history.
|
| You're kind of glossing over the fact that a Republican
| hasn't won the popular vote since 1988 and the prevailing
| wisdom was that the EC was the _only_ thing giving Republican
| candidates a fighting chance in presidential elections (so
| much so that every election we hear much wailing and gnashing
| of teeth that the EC system should replaced by popular vote,
| and in fact there is an "electoral vote compact" that several
| states have entered into that pledges to give all electoral
| votes to the popular vote winner as a way to nullify the EC).
| For Trump, with his MANY issues, to win the _popular vote_ by
| 1.5% is monumental, and I guarantee you not a single model
| predicted that in any way whatsoever.
|
| You put a Nikki Haley up there and she would've won the
| popular vote by 5-10%, easily. Which would be astounding
| numbers for a Republican candidate in this day and age.
| Hasu wrote:
| > You're kind of glossing over the fact that a Republican
| hasn't won the popular vote since 1988
|
| George W. Bush won the popular vote in 2004. There are
| several other factual errors in your comment that are
| ruinous for your conclusions.
| xienze wrote:
| My bad, you're right. So instead of happening in 1/9
| elections before this last one it's 2/9. A dramatic
| difference indeed. What else is incorrect?
| bitshiftfaced wrote:
| An accurate model can output a 50-50 prediction. Sure, no problem
| there. But there is a human bias that does tend to make 50% more
| likely in these cases. It is the maximum percentage you can
| assign to the uncomfortable possibility without it being higher
| than the comfortable possibility.
|
| 538 systematically magnified this kind of bias when they decided
| to rate polls, not based on their absolute error, but based on
| how close their bias was relative to other polls'
| biases.(https://x.com/andrei__roman/status/1854328028480115144)
| This down-weighted pollsters like Atlas Intel who would've
| otherwise improved 538's forecast.
| culi wrote:
| I'm not sure how to verify your comment since 538 was cut by
| ABC a month or 2 ago. But Nate Silver's pollster rating
| methodology is pretty much the same as 538's was during his
| tenure there and can be found here:
| https://www.natesilver.net/p/pollster-ratings-silver-bulleti...
|
| It actually explicitly looks for statistical evidence of
| "herding" (e.g. not publishing poll results that might go
| against the grain) and penalized those pollsters.
|
| In both rating systems, polls that had a long history of going
| against the grain and being correct, like Ann Seltzer's Iowa
| poll, were weight very heavily. Seltzer went heavily against
| the grain 3 elections in a row and was almost completely
| correct the first 2 times. This year she was off by a massive
| margin (ultimately costing her her career). Polls that go
| heavily against the grain but DON'T have a polling history
| simply aren't weighted heavily in general.
| tantalor wrote:
| 538 was cut by ABC 6 days ago.
|
| https://archive.is/E2nre
| culi wrote:
| Wow thanks. As a former regular reader it's felt a lot
| longer
|
| They've had several major cuts in the past couple of years
| so maybe that's why it's felt like that
| bitshiftfaced wrote:
| > I'm not sure how to verify your comment
|
| Here's how 538 explains how they factor in bias into their
| grading:
|
| > Think about this another way. If most polls in a race
| overestimate the Democratic candidate by 10 points in a given
| election, but Pollster C's surveys overestimate Republicans
| by 5, there may be something off about the way Pollster C
| does its polls even if its accuracy is higher. We wouldn't
| necessarily expect it to keep outperforming other pollsters
| in subsequent elections since the direction of polling bias
| bounces around unpredictably from election to election.
|
| - https://abcnews.go.com/538/best-pollsters-
| america/story?id=1...
| mmooss wrote:
| > Seltzer went heavily against the grain 3 elections in a row
| and was almost completely correct the first 2 times. This
| year she was off by a massive margin (ultimately costing her
| her career).
|
| Why did one mistake cost her career?
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Because it pissed off Donald Trump and the media is busy
| kowtowing to him.
| culi wrote:
| you're being downvoted but you're actually pretty much
| right. She got a lot of backlash from the right accusing
| her poll of being politically motivated. To the point
| where they pressured institutions to force her out
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/19/us/politics/ann-
| selzer-io...
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| I'm fine with the downvotes. There are others saying the
| same thing as me much more cogently -- they should be
| upweighted and mine downweighted.
| gowld wrote:
| Who pressured what institutions?
|
| Trump sued her, after she retired as planned. Trump sues
| everyon.
| mmooss wrote:
| Trump and others were attacking her and physically
| threatening her before she retired. See my other comment
| for evidence.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Why did one mistake cost her career?_
|
| It didn't. She retired before Trump came for her and before
| the election outcome was known.
| mmooss wrote:
| So I looked around a bit ...
|
| > before the election outcome was known.
|
| Selzer announced her retirement November 17th in the op-
| ed below, which was after the election results were
| known. All the news I saw about her retirement is dated
| the same day, so that appears to be the announcement. In
| the article, she claims to have informed some people
| privately in 2023 that she would retire after the
| election.
|
| https://eu.desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/columnists
| /20...
|
| > before Trump came for her
|
| I can easily find earlier news saying Trump attacked
| Selzer; for example, this is from when her poll came out,
| pre-election.
|
| https://edition.cnn.com/2024/11/04/politics/video/ann-
| selzer...
|
| This November 18 article - from the next day - says the
| police had warned her that her safety was at risk. It
| doesn't say when that warning happened, but it seems
| likely it was not in the 24 hours since announcing her
| retirement.
|
| https://www.kttc.com/2024/11/19/iowas-ann-selzer-
| responds-tr...
|
| (For all: it's Selzer, not Sel _t_ zer - there's no 't'.)
| ilikehurdles wrote:
| It's more of a systemic failure than a single mistake. If
| you're a business that releases one major product version
| every year or two that accounts for your entire revenue,
| and you completely blow the product on the last release,
| there's a good chance you're not getting another chance if
| you're a small-medium business. Compare her firm to any
| number of smaller gaming and entertainment studios.
|
| Selzer wasn't gallup or some other big player that was
| continuously releasing a wide range of evolving polls, but
| a once-an-election shop that was multiple standard
| deviations away from reality in the wrong direction, on the
| biggest stage in history. Who would contract Selzer ever
| again?
| gowld wrote:
| Someone who understands that 97% success rate is better
| than much smaller success rate?
| rurp wrote:
| > Who would contract Selzer ever again?
|
| Presumably anyone who is familiar with her overall body
| of work and the concept of an outlier.
|
| Pollsters are increasingly herding. Perhaps after this
| election all unexpected results will be suppressed or
| adjusted, which seems to be what you're advocating for.
| amalcon wrote:
| The most likely scenario is that it didn't. Selzer, a
| successful 68-year-old, was likely about to retire anyway.
| mmooss wrote:
| That is pure speculation without evidence, which isn't
| helpful. There is evidence in other parts of this
| subthread.
| ownlife wrote:
| Huh? It's evidence-based speculation. Of course it's
| conceivable that a 68-year-old would have less concerns
| about putting her career on the line. I'm trying to
| understand how you think a conversation on HN should
| operate
| chimeracoder wrote:
| > Why did one mistake cost her career?
|
| It didn't.
|
| > Over a year ago I advised the Register I would not renew
| when my 2024 contract expired with the latest election poll
| as I transition to other ventures and opportunities.
|
| > Would I have liked to make this announcement after a
| final poll aligned with Election Day results? Of course.
| It's ironic that it's just the opposite. I am proud of the
| work I've done for the Register, for the Detroit Free
| Press, for the Indianapolis Star, for Bloomberg News and
| for other public and private organizations interested in
| elections. They were great clients and were happy with my
| work.
|
| You can of course choose to interpret this if you wish as
| her conveniently inventing a narrative after-the-fact, but
| that seems unlikely. The polling industry doesn't work that
| way, and it's particularly unlikely that the Register would
| have cut ties with her over a single poll after her
| impressive track record for _nearly forty years_.
|
| Since there's no real evidence that's what happened, the
| most reasonable conclusion is that, as she said, she
| decided to retire after spending four decades doing the
| same thing.
|
| [0] https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/columni
| sts/2...
| mmooss wrote:
| The idea is not that the Register cut ties with her, but
| that her personal safety was at risk and she was getting
| brutally harassed by millions of people and the POTUS-
| elect. See my other comment for details.
| chimeracoder wrote:
| Yeah, after reading the NYT article[0], I'll amend my
| earlier statement "since there's no real evidence that's
| what happened," since that is some pretty strong evidence
| that something happened (albeit more complicated than
| simply "her poll was wrong, so she lost her job").
|
| [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/19/us/politics/ann-
| selzer-io...
| culi wrote:
| She faced heavy retribution from Donald Trump who claimed
| the poll was a politically motivated one to shift the
| narrative
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/19/us/politics/ann-selzer-
| io...
|
| Seems like an absurd claim given it was less than 2 weeks
| out from the election and polls that show a side losing can
| often have a motivating effect on a base
|
| Truth is that voter behavior changes more radically than
| pollsters admit from election to election. We can
| statistically model direction of "error" but we can't
| statistically model direction of "bias". A grade A pollster
| like Ann Selzer could have the perfect formula one election
| but that formula could be a total miss the next
|
| The important thing that forecasters like Silver point out
| is that we need those pollsters to stick around and use the
| SAME methodology. Even if gets less useful at predicting
| the outcome, having a consistent signal with the same
| methodology can still be of immense statistical importance.
| And it's extremely important that we don't scare away
| pollsters from publishing "outlier" results. Doing so only
| encourages herding which is a growing problem in polling
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _since 538 was cut by ABC a month or 2 ago. But Nate Silver
| 's pollster rating methodology is pretty much the same as
| 538's was during his tenure there_
|
| Nate took his model with him. After he left, 538 rolled a new
| model.
| culi wrote:
| I'm aware. It's sad to see 538 gone though. I was looking
| forward to seeing how the new 538 model would compare to
| silver's model
| jsight wrote:
| It isn't just human bias that makes this problematic. Their
| definition of success is that a prediction of 70% should be
| right about 70/100 times.
|
| Give a model a big reward for "success" under this criteria and
| it will have a tendency to converge on the long term average.
| As long as the long term average stays the same, no one will be
| able to say the estimate was wrong.
|
| If you've ever seen the YT videos from aspiring data scientists
| learning sequence prediction, you've inevitably seen a
| variation from people trying to predict stock prices. "Look how
| low the loss is!" - Sure, but it gets the direction wrong, and
| just consistently predicts a close value to the previous day's
| close. But the model is technically correct, just useless.
|
| A 50-50 model for an election might not be giving up and might
| not be wrong, but it is often useless.
| gowld wrote:
| 50-50 means "I have 0 no useful information". Some facts are
| more useful than others.
| rurp wrote:
| Forecasts will always have some level of uncertainty and if
| a race is very close a prediction around 50/50 will be the
| most honest result. A prediction like that does have value,
| just like a prediction that candidate A is a large
| favorite, it's informing you about the future state of the
| world.
|
| I'm not sure what you're expecting forecasters to do when
| they have a 50/50 result. Put a thumb on the scale in a
| random direction so that you will think they are providing
| useful information, even though they'll be less accurate?
| jdoliner wrote:
| I don't know about the framing of "giving up." But I think anyone
| who's been following election models since the original 538 in
| 2008 has probably gotten the feeling that they have less alpha in
| them than they did back then. I think there's some obvious
| reasons for this that the forecasters would probably agree with.
|
| The biggest one seems to be a case of Goodhart's Law, leading to
| herding. Pollsters care a lot now about what their rating is in
| forecasting models, so they're reluctant to publish outlier
| results, those outlier results are very valuable for the models
| but are likely to get a pollster punished in the ratings next
| cycle.
|
| Lots of changes to polling methods have been made due to polls
| underestimating Trump. Polls have become like mini models unto
| themselves. Due to their inability to poll a representative slice
| of the population they try to correct by adjusting their results
| to compensate for the difference between who they've polled and
| the likely makeup of the electorate. This makes sense in theory,
| but of course introduces a whole bunch of new variables that need
| to be tuned correctly.
|
| On top of all this is the fact that the process is very high
| stakes and emotional with pollsters and modellers alike bringing
| their own political biases and only being able to resist pressure
| from political factions so much.
|
| The analogy I kept coming back to watching election models during
| this last cycle was that it looked like an ML model that didn't
| have the data it needed to make good predictions and so was
| making the safest prediction it could make given what it did
| have. Basically getting stuck in this local minima at 50-50 that
| was least likely to be off by a lot.
| genewitch wrote:
| okay, now change "election prediction models" to "Climate
| models" and see if you feel like downvoting me merely for
| pointing out the (slight?) hypocrisy in "excusing" every other
| model we humans use for being "inaccurate" or "not having the
| full details" or the "whole slice of"...
|
| when none of the models tend to agree... and the IPCC
| literature published however often they do it is hung upon the
| framework of _models_.
| sojournerc wrote:
| All models are wrong, but some are useful.
|
| Climate modeling is way messier than the media portrays, yet
| even optimistic models show drastic change.
|
| I'm not in the catastrophy camp, but it's worth preparing for
| climate change regardless of origin. It's good for humanity
| to be resilient to a hostile planet.
| genewitch wrote:
| A++ would upvote again
| milesrout wrote:
| Yeah my view is a little trite but... "we cleaned the air
| and closed the ozone hole and reduced our dependency on oil
| from a small number of OPEC countries all for nothing?".
|
| I support the climate change mitigation and adaptation
| moves that would be nice anyway (many of the most important
| ones) and would prefer alternatives to things like turning
| all the arable land into pinus radiata plantations to
| generate ETS credits or voluntarily paying "climate fines"
| to shadowy international organisations if we don't hit
| certain "targets".
| johngladtj wrote:
| That's a great of sidesteping the massive costs of doing
| all those things
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| There are massive costs of _not_ doing those things -
| and, as far as I can tell, those costs are greater. Coal
| is expensive and irradiates the atmosphere. Oil drilling
| causes spills, fracking causes earthquakes, and oil
| dependency has been a major driver of war for the past
| century.
| gonzobonzo wrote:
| > Coal is expensive and irradiates the atmosphere. Oil
| drilling causes spills, fracking causes earthquakes, and
| oil dependency has been a major driver of war for the
| past century.
|
| Fracking lowers emissions. As far as I've been able to
| tell, earthquakes aren't a major problem with it.
|
| This is where the activists end up showing their true
| colors, and why many people have grown to distrust them
| over time. On the one hand, they claim Global Warming is
| going to bring us to the brink of human extinction unless
| we act rapidly. On the other, they're trying to stop
| things that will lower emissions if it doesn't follow
| their preferred course of action.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Relevant news article regarding earthquakes:
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-49471321
|
| And I'm not sure how fracking lowers emissions? It
| results in large quantities of methane being emitted:
| methane is a _very_ potent greenhouse gas (which
| eventually decays to carbon dioxide, also a greenhouse
| gas albeit a less potent one). Seems like fracking
| increases emissions, to me - not that I 'm an expert.
| roelschroeven wrote:
| > Fracking lowers emmissions?
|
| How? Burning fuel from fracking emits CO2 into the
| atmosphere, just like any other fossil fuel. On top of
| that unburned methane is often released into the
| atmosphere, which is much more potent than CO2 is a
| greenhouse gas.
|
| > On the one hand, they claim Global Warming is going to
| bring us to the brink of human extinction unless we act
| rapidly.
|
| Extinction is exaggerated (I'm not even sure who exactly
| claims that?), but we are indeed making our environment
| tougher and tougher to live in. There are already places
| that have become too hot to live in for parts of the
| year, to name just one thing.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Jevons Paradox tells us that embracing fracking to reduce
| coal emissions isn't enough, because any gains in
| lowering emissions will be offset by people burning more
| oil. There's a lot of underserved demand for energy, so
| gradual increases in efficiency (or, in this case, per-
| watt emissions) do not actually reduce total consumption.
|
| Unless your plan to reduce emissions by embracing
| fracking comes with laws to restrict consumption - like,
| the kind of laws you'd have the villain in an Ayn Rand
| novel pass - then all you will do is increase emissions.
|
| Of course, deliberately enforcing energy poverty is a bad
| idea and most[0] environmentalists aren't in favor of it.
| The reason why activists push renewables so hard is
| because the externalities on those are way better. i.e.
| pollution will not 'catch up' on solar and wind nearly as
| quickly, if at all, because solar panels don't emit
| anything when you're harvesting energy with them.
|
| Also, solar is really, _really_ cheap. It 's pretty hard
| to argue against an energy source that gives you energy
| too cheap to meter, even if it's only during the day.
|
| [0] i.e. the ones that aren't outright enviro-fascists.
| Though, if you were an enviro-fascist, your best bet
| would be to just do nothing and embrace fossil fuel
| accelerationism.
| nextts wrote:
| Also the best model (current reality) is showing climate
| change!
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| Even if polling had been exactly right, you wouldn't have been
| that confident in the outcome.
|
| In my unsophisticated toy model, plugging in the exact actual
| result as the polling average (but not telling it how the
| actual vote went) spits out 66% R-34% D. Clearly one side
| favored, but hardly a guarantee. Because the result was _close_
| , and even highly accurate data in a close result yields an
| uncertain forecast.
|
| Remember that asteroid a month ago? We knew what its position
| would be seven years in the future with a precision of a few
| hours. But because the position was very close to an impact,
| even that high precision was not enough to rule out an impact.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Due to their inability to poll a representative slice of the
| population they try to correct by adjusting their results to
| compensate for the difference between who they've polled and
| the likely makeup of the electorate.
|
| This is where polling becomes race science.
|
| > This makes sense in theory
|
| It does not make sense in theory. It is a necessity for the
| profession, but all justifications for it are specious. Polls
| only get it right when _everybody_ is getting it right. What
| they offer is false precision and justification for the current
| narratives.
|
| It's similar to AI in that way. It's also similar to the
| mythical prediction markets that polls have been compared to
| lately, the "mythical" here meaning with no insiders involved.
| On issues where there are no real insiders, like close
| elections, the prediction markets are simply a lagging
| indicator of what pundits said in the paper this morning. That
| goofy Iowa poll swung them so hard that I thought Seltzer
| should have been investigated for whatever the prediction
| market equivalent to securities fraud is.
|
| It might be more accurate in light of the OP to say that polls
| get it right when everybody is getting it right, and when
| everybody isn't sure what's going to happen, polling accuracy
| is around _50 /50_.
|
| The best book to read about polling is _The Full Facts Book of
| Cold Reading_ by Ian Rowland. It also tells you how to write
| defenses like this, which are part of the con.
|
| -----
|
| edit:
|
| Section headings from "The Win-Win Game" from TFFBoCR, which
| teaches 10+1 ways how to make failures seem like successes:
|
| > 1. Persist, wonder and let it linger.
|
| > (Phase A: The psychic persists with the official statement
| and tries to encourage at least partial agreement. B: she acts
| puzzled, and invites the client to share the blame for the
| 'discrepancy.' C: she leaves the discrepancy unresolved, in
| case the client finds a match later on.)
|
| > 2. I am right, but you have forgotten.
|
| > 3. I am right but you do not know.
|
| > 4. I am right but nobody knows.
|
| > 5. I am right, but it's embarrassing.
|
| > 6. I am wrong now, but I will be right soon.
|
| > 7. I am wrong, but it doesn't matter.
|
| > 8. I am wrong in fact, but right emotionally.
|
| > 9. I am wrong in fact, but right within [the] system.
|
| > 10. Wrong small print, right headline.
|
| > [+1]. Accept, apologise, and move on.
|
| > (In this way the psychic cuts her losses and moves on. She
| leaves the problem behind, where it will be quickly forgotten,
| and at the same time she comes across as extremely honest.)
|
| Very much worth reading for entrepreneurs looking for
| investment or any other confidence men. Rowland even tried to
| brand it a few years ago in _Cold Reading For Business_ as the
| "CRFB" system.
| lyu07282 wrote:
| At the end of the day it was a 312 vs. 226 in the Electoral
| College. Seems a bit odd that this is supposed to be impossible
| to be predicted with any useful amount of certaintly. But perhaps
| that says more about the nature of the Electoral College than it
| says about pollsters.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efforts_to_reform_the_United_S...
| culi wrote:
| Almost every major model had this outcome as very likely.
|
| There was an inordinate amount of very close swing states in
| 2024. Whichever way the swing was gonna be was likely to apply
| across the board.
|
| If you're going by popular vote, then this was actually the 8th
| closest election in all of US history.
| stevenwoo wrote:
| Not that I'm claiming this for this particular discussion,
| but a lot of people in favor of what is happening in the USA
| want to justify what's going on by claiming this was some
| sort of overwhelming political sweep in this country instead
| of being a close race at all levels (roughly handful of votes
| in House and Senate to achieve parity). Who would have picked
| a Arab American protest vote as major factor in swing states
| in 2024 when asked in 2020?
| culi wrote:
| It's beyond the Arab American vote. It's also the youth
| vote
|
| When the George Floyd uprising happened, it was the largest
| civil rights protest in human history. Over 70 nations held
| demonstrations. Where I was, the Students for Justice and
| Peace in Palestine organized most of the protests. Black-
| Palestinian solidarity has an extremely long history. So
| does Irish-Palestinian and Palestinian-Native American
| solidarity. They've been engaged in building a worldwide
| network of solidarity with oppressed people for decades
| now. Almost every George Floyd protest included chants
| about freeing Palestine and it's shocking how little
| coverage this got
|
| I think people continue to radically underestimate how much
| youth, Black, and other minorities will continue to follow
| the lead of Palestinian organizers. And the Democratic
| party needs to take it seriously if they want to win again
| wakawaka28 wrote:
| They have to claim it was hard to predict, because they
| deliberately led people to believe that the establishment-
| favored candidate was going to win. They knew better the whole
| time but hoped to help their candidate by making the situation
| look hopeless for the true popular choice.
| alphazard wrote:
| Highly recommend this video by NNT about why prediction markets
| tend towards 50-50.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRvPF__du9w
|
| Prediction markets are usually implemented as binary options.
| Like vanilla options, their price depends not just on the most
| likely outcome, but the whole distribution. When uncertainty
| increases (imagine squishing a mound of clay), you end up pushing
| lots of probability mass (clay) to the other side of the bet and
| the expectation of the payoff (used to make a price) tends
| towards 1/2.
| gruez wrote:
| > When uncertainty increases (imagine squishing a mound of
| clay), you end up pushing lots of probability mass (clay) to
| the other side of the bet and the expectation of the payoff
| (used to make a price) tends towards 1/2.
|
| This doesn't make any sense. If you think the chances of
| someone of getting elected is very high (eg. Putin getting re-
| elected), nobody will be buying shares in him losing. True, the
| shares of "putin loses" is dirt cheap, but that doesn't mean
| much if he has a high chance of getting elected.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _the shares of "putin loses" is dirt cheap, but that
| doesn't mean much if he has a high chance of getting elected_
|
| This absolutely happens when you can make bets across
| multiple markets. But it doesn't lead to every market with
| two outcomes drifting towards 50/50.
|
| The reason _election_ markets in competitive democracies tend
| towards 50 /50 is because the outcome really isn't that
| predictable.
| ngriffiths wrote:
| It matters a lot what the price is of "putin loses." If Putin
| does in fact lose 5% of the time, but the odds are 3%, you
| should bet on it. It may feel silly to do that _in this
| instance_ but consider what happens if you regularly bet in
| prediction markets. Always betting on the "putin wins"
| outcome _loses money_ in the long run.
| lores wrote:
| It's the same as bookies, right? They are often seen as
| predicting the odds of an event happening, but that's actually
| the odds they estimate so that the bets are roughly divided
| 50/50, to limit their exposure, which is pretty different and
| depends on their market. English bookies will always overrate
| the chance of England winning at football, because English
| people will disproportionately place a bet for their team to
| win.
| ngriffiths wrote:
| I don't think it's that simple - if other people find out
| English bookies overrate England, then they make a profit by
| betting against. I'm not saying every market is perfectly
| efficient but it would be surprising if a major inefficiency
| lasted for a while. And if "enough" bets are placed the set
| odds will always be an unbiased estimate of the true odds.
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| Sports bookies have a significant informational advantage
| over the everyday gambler; they index massive amounts of
| historical data and have access to live data which is
| lower-latency than radio or television broadcasts. That
| helps make the market inefficient.
| TheDong wrote:
| You're welcome to bet against my prediction market about
| whether the quarter I flip will land on mars.
|
| Or on the two markets for "New pope by tomorrow" and "new pope
| by 2030", I'm sure those should both be 50% yes.
|
| My experience is that the vast majority of prediction markets
| do not tend towards 50/50 because reality isn't 100% uncertain.
| moduspol wrote:
| Agreed with the points in OP. Though we did have the story that
| came out shortly after the election that apparently internal
| polling for the Harris campaign never showed her ahead [1].
|
| Obviously it says in the article that they did eventually fight
| it to a dead heat, which is in-line with a 50-50 forecast, but I
| do wonder what, if anything, failed such that this key detail was
| never reported on publicly until after the election.
|
| As the article notes, public polls started appearing in late
| September showing Harris ahead, which they never saw internally.
| Are internal polls just that much better than public ones? Is the
| media just incentivized to report on the most interesting outcome
| (a dead heat)?
|
| [1]
| https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/...
| t-3 wrote:
| > As the article notes, public polls started appearing in late
| September showing Harris ahead, which they never saw
| internally. Are internal polls just that much better than
| public ones? Is the media just incentivized to report on the
| most interesting outcome (a dead heat)?
|
| Intentional bias for motivational purposes is a thing - it
| doesn't make any logical sense, but people want to vote for the
| winner.
| HKH2 wrote:
| Well, trying to have 'safe' opinions is not completely
| illogical. It's a survival strategy.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| People want to vote for whomever.
|
| People want to DONATE to winners.
| roenxi wrote:
| Don't rule out Harris' internal polling just being bad and the
| public polling was superior. We're looking at a team whos
| message was "our opponent is a racist, homophobic, sexist,
| rapist, felonic avatar of Hitler" and then saw him gain margin
| which is quite remarkable. What did voters have to see in
| Harris' team for that to happen? They're clearly doing
| _something_ wrong. If the team managed that I wouldn 't assume
| their pollsters were a lone beacon of competence.
|
| It seems quite plausible they hired bad pollsters and their
| internal data was off.
| kubb wrote:
| What they did wrong was picking the candidate - she wasn't
| popular. It wasn't the time to try this kind of candidate,
| but they did it because of their own priorities. It's OK,
| they won't learn.
|
| Democrats need to start nominating famous actors and
| influencers.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| They had all of Hollywood this year and quite a lot of
| nonpolitcal content creators came out for Harris in the
| last days.
| cwillu wrote:
| Having hollywood endorse a candidate is not the same as
| having hollywood _be_ a candidate.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| And who is the mythical hollywood figure untainted by the
| culture war that could pull voters from the other side.
| The only thing you have to do with any hollywood
| celebrity to thank their presidential campaign is just
| post screenshots of their Covid and BLM tweets. And if
| they don't have stupid Covid and BLM tweets then they
| will have antisemitic ones.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Your point restated, nobody cares about endorsements.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Michael Bloomberg already tried the "hey, I'm like that guy
| but without the wrong think" xerox strategy and it didn't
| go well. Mark Cuban has toyed with it too but keeps getting
| cold feet, maybe due to lack of confidence or maybe due to
| analysis that shows being Them-Lite rarely works.
|
| Trump's reality tv show is not a major part of what got him
| elected but if someone wants to fund and convince Mark
| Cuban to try a doppelganger campaign, a fool and his money
| are soon parted. Cuban seems to know better than to try
| with his own fortune.
| kubb wrote:
| If Cuban ran against Kamala he wouldn't even have to
| campaign.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Cuban would have done much better against Trump. Any
| white southern male would have but Cuban might have
| pulled in Texas.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Their mistake was much more basic than that. They kept
| assuming that they could re-run Biden until it was too late
| for a switch to work.
|
| When they did decide to switch, it had to be Harris,
| because she was the only one who could legitimately claim
| to use Biden's election funds, and they didn't have time to
| raise money for anyone else.
|
| From there, they didn't fix the other mistake - the one
| Democrats have been making for at least a decade. The
| Democrats' natural constituency is the working class. They
| can't win without it. But much of the working class is
| rather socially conservative. The Democrats have spent the
| last decade telling working class people that if they, the
| working class, don't think gay marriage is a good idea, or
| don't think trans people belong on womens' sports teams and
| in womens' restrooms, or aren't comfortable with abortion,
| then they are moral lepers and their entire culture needs
| to be completely eradicated. Well, the natural result is
| that at least some of those people are going to flip you
| the bird and vote for the other guy. Democrats wonder "how
| could people be so stupid?" I ask, "How could _you_ be so
| stupid? What did you think was going to happen? "
| adastra22 wrote:
| They didn't "have" to run anybody. They could've, and
| should've gone with someone else. Everyone knew when
| Harris was selected that the Democrats had lost. The DNC
| tried to turn that sentiment around, but they started
| from a losing position and never recovered. There were
| alternatives...
| pjc50 wrote:
| > don't think gay marriage is a good idea
|
| That's the culture war of a decade ago: Obergefell v
| Hodges was in 2015.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| And Roe v Wade was in 1973. That that war didn't end
| then, though.
| kubb wrote:
| The gay and trans thing was a wedge issue pushed by
| Republicans, because they saw that it worked, and the
| only way Dems could have appeased the riled up masses
| would be to straight up start oppressing LGBT people.
|
| I don't hold it against them that they didn't budge on
| this one. Beating up on a minority for political points
| is morally repugnant, and the whole appeal of Democrats
| is that they have _some_ kind of integrity.
|
| The "moral lepers" thing feels to me like a distortion of
| reality. The actual Democratic politicians generally
| didn't engage in denigrating their base. Maybe you mean
| people on the disgusting website.
| wessex wrote:
| It was picked as a wedge issue but the Republicans chose
| very wisely, as the Democrats' incessant pushing of trans
| issues without any consideration towards the negative
| impact upon women and girls was unpopular even amongst
| many traditionally left-leaning voters.
| kubb wrote:
| If you mean that the Democrats' policy of supporting
| transgender rights through legislation was hard to defend
| (not from a scientific or medical standpoint, but from a
| populist, political one) and Trump effectively attacked
| it then yes you're right.
|
| If you mean that the messaging on trans rights alienated
| swing voters then I think it's probably true, but
| moderates and swing voters do support general anti-
| discrimination laws but are wary of policies on sports
| participation and youth medical care.
|
| If you mean that it was the centerpiece of their identity
| and everything that were campaigning for, and their
| pivotal, most important issue, then I don't think that's
| accurate.
|
| But they did deliberately elevate transgender rights as a
| moral and civil rights issue. This was a trade off
| (energize progressives, lose some moderates).
| Conservatives effectively focused on targeted attacks
| (bathrooms, sports).
|
| I think that maybe the gamble didn't pay off. The
| messaging should have probably been about protecting from
| discrimination, and debate should be focused on attacking
| republican establishment for being aggressive and
| hateful.
|
| But really all of this doesn't matter. A better
| candidate, a white or latino strong charismatic man would
| have beaten Trump.
| rurp wrote:
| This pretty much covers it. Harris ran a terrible campaign
| in 2020 and was never popular. Biden picked her anyway,
| against his better judgement, because that was what the
| Left wanted and he was trying to appease them. His
| disastrous decision to run again for so long left the party
| with no other options.
|
| Harris tried to correct some of her past mistakes and did
| better this time around but she should have never been in
| that position to begin with. Most of the blame should go to
| Biden and the activists who want to self-immolate the party
| on the altar of tokenism.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| >What did voters have to see in Harris' team for that to
| happen? They're clearly doing something wrong.
|
| Perhaps there is clearly something wrong with the voters to
| opt for a
|
| > racist, homophobic, sexist, rapist, felonic avatar of
| Hitler
| roenxi wrote:
| Well sure, but if that is the attitude they're not going to
| bother hiring good pollsters. Pollsters are going to do
| what, come back and explain that the Devil himself is
| outpolling your campaign. Now what? They were already
| catastrophising as hard as they could and the entire
| English speaking world knows how the US Dems feel about
| Trump. A majority (although admittedly a slim one) of
| voters just don't believe them.
|
| Good pollsters would have been a waste of money in that
| environment and I'm sure the Harris campaign was
| judiciously watching their budget.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| What's surprising to me is how many ex government
| employees they're able to find who voted for Trump and
| just didn't think they would get downsized because
| they're actually doing what they're supposed to be doing.
| I think it's interesting that Trump consistently gets the
| benefit of the doubt even in cases where the people he
| puts in positions of power pretty clearly intended to
| demoralize people by firing them.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lbj-convince-the-
| lowest-wh...
|
| > If you can convince the lowest white man he's better
| than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking
| his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and
| he'll empty his pockets for you."
|
| This quote doesn't apply just to white men, or even just
| men.
| nosianu wrote:
| Riiiight....
|
| https://youtu.be/eVddGSTjEd0?t=51
|
| Or maybe the explanation is that everybody behaved
| "responsibly" but they never got the changes they wanted,
| and chances for anything different looked more and more
| bleak. Why do you treat this like a single event? It is
| not. Lots of prior experiences fed into this.
|
| For example, as bad as this is for us (I'm German, but I
| lived many years in the US once), for Europe I think it is
| good what is happening. Now we are forced to move and
| mature. Crisis are not always bad. The personalities
| involved this time make it especially hard to look at the
| whole thing calmly. I admit I have a harder time seeing
| what the US may get out of this except for the shakeup as a
| general chance. However, too much is concentrated on the
| personalities, and, like you did, on blaming everybody. How
| about Democrats look what _they_ did wrong? I mean, other
| than reverting to "we didn't think the voters would be so
| stupid", in which case I have little hope for them to get
| anything positive out of this.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Democrats' mistake was putting up a woman in a leadership
| popularity contest, even after the previous woman lost to
| the same
|
| > racist, homophobic, sexist, rapist, felonic avatar of
| Hitler
|
| And a black woman at that, to further reduce Democrats'
| chances.
|
| I'm basing this on the anecdotal evidence from many
| people who I spoke to, who have zero problem telling me a
| woman cannot be a leader. Including my own non white
| immigrant grandmother, who grew up without rights.
|
| Many people don't like to see people of a perceived lower
| socioeconomic status pass them up. It makes themselves
| feel inferior.
| zaphar wrote:
| I'll counter your anecdotal experience with my own. I can
| count on one hand the number of people I know well who
| voted against Harris because of her gender or color. And
| I live in the rural south. The simple truth is that
| Harris failed to make a compelling case to enough of the
| nation in enough of the right states to win. The reasons
| for that failure are going to be complex and varied
| depending on area. Any attempt to pin it on a single
| trait or activity is going to be somewhat wrong. This is
| way too nuanced a topic for "She lost because she was a
| black woman" to be at all useful.
| sjsdaiuasgdia wrote:
| > I can count on one hand the number of people I know
| well who voted against Harris because of her gender or
| color.
|
| You can count on one hand the number of people you know
| well _who are willing to admit_ they voted against Harris
| because of her gender or color. This is a critical
| distinction.
| zaphar wrote:
| I know a lot of people well enough that they know they
| don't have to be afraid to admit such things to me. This
| is not a critical distinction because assuming you know
| what people think is a great way to completely
| misunderstand them.
| sjsdaiuasgdia wrote:
| As someone who spent 30 years living in the rural south,
| I can state this with the confidence of personal
| experience: some people _will not_ reveal their worst
| opinions until they are _extremely_ sure in the safety of
| doing so. In some cases, they 'll only reveal those
| opinions to someone else who has repeatedly shared the
| same opinions with them.
|
| So unless you're giving big racist or misogynist vibes in
| how you communicate with them, the racists and
| misogynists you know "well" may be keeping their opinions
| to themselves.
| bjourne wrote:
| Why is it so hard to accept that hundreds of millions of
| Americans are racist, sexist, dumb fucks who don't know
| what's in their own best interests? They elected a crazy,
| raging megalomaniac over two sensible women. _Twice_.
| "How about Democrats look what they did wrong?" Well,
| maybe the obvious explanation is the best? They ran with
| women. So the solution is to only field male candidates
| in the future? You can see why that doesn't work for a
| "liberal" (< 100% right-wing) political party.
| sepositus wrote:
| I always get a chuckle out of this. Both parties are full
| of NPCs who have mostly lost the ability to reason
| themselves out of anything partisan. This becomes even
| more apparent when you see each side hurl the same
| insults at each other, trying to rationalize the state of
| the world through ad hominem attacks.
|
| It's depressing not to fit into either side, to be
| honest. I'm both a racist, sexist homophobe, and a
| libtard, depending on which echo chamber I am engaging
| in.
| sigzero wrote:
| No, they ran with "horrible" women. Had they not screwed
| Tulsi Gabbard over and pretty much pushed her out of the
| party, I would have loved to have voted for Democrat
| woman.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Gabbard is a Republican.
| t-3 wrote:
| She used to be a Democrat.
| tetromino_ wrote:
| She was a Democrat until 2022.
| t-3 wrote:
| Trump got ~77M votes, not hundreds of millions.
|
| Sexism was probably a small part of why Democrats lost,
| but much more important reasons were the economy,
| alienating their base with their Israel policy, moving to
| the right on immigration instead of permissive policies
| which are popular with their base and strategically
| important for future demographics, and focusing most of
| their attention on highly divisive culture war issues
| that effect a vanishingly small portion of the
| population.
| xienze wrote:
| Why is it so hard to accept that Harris was _that bad_ of
| a candidate? Democrat voters didn't want her in the 2020
| primaries (not a single delegate won) and she was
| basically invisible during the entire Biden campaign
| until the massive pre-election astroturf campaign that
| tried to revamp her image.
| bjourne wrote:
| You don't get it. I agree with you. She is a woman and
| thus "that bad" of a presidential candidate. But to argue
| that it somehow was rational for the Americans to reelect
| Trump over her is to engage in some seriously dangerous
| mental gymnastics.
| andrepd wrote:
| Principal Skinner "am I so out of touch" meme
| juped wrote:
| Bertolt Brecht "dissolving the people and electing
| another" quote
| seanw444 wrote:
| > Hitler
|
| Please keep using the same tired comparisons. It helps a
| lot.
| 4bpp wrote:
| A quip (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_L%C3%B6sung)
| from a more innocent era comes to mind-
|
| > Would it not in that case / Be simpler for the government
| / To dissolve the people / And elect another?
| pjc50 wrote:
| > What did voters have to see in Harris' team for that to
| happen?
|
| Biden should have pulled out a _lot_ sooner. When? At least a
| year before the election. But you can easily make arguments
| for earlier and earlier all the way back to having been too
| old to run for President in the first place, despite having
| had a really good term.
|
| Also Harris needs to fire her consultants, who were still
| trying to play "fair" in an unfair fight and pulled back on
| the one attack line which was working: that Republicans are
| "weird".
|
| Things are unlikely to improve until voters start primarying
| out anyone still trying to do bipartisan equivocation.
| roenxi wrote:
| > ...and pulled back on the one attack line which was
| working: that Republicans are "weird".
|
| Isn't the Democrat brand supposed to be that weird is
| encouraged? When did they start being against weird people?
| delecti wrote:
| Yes, but different kinds of weird. There's dem's "be
| yourself" kinda weird that supports queer people's right
| to exist, and there's the GOP "passes laws that require
| genital inspections of children in the bathroom" kinda
| weird that Tim Walz was calling out.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| His approval rating was in "it would be unprecedented if
| you won" territory early enough that he should have been
| out in time to have a real primary. Folks who think
| switching was any kind of a mistake are going on gut and
| not numbers. The mistake was that he stayed in as long as
| he did. Even so, switching was better than not, despite
| still losing.
|
| And yes, it's so goddamn frustrating that Clinton-era
| consultants are still given meetings.
| danem wrote:
| Clinton era consultants were the only ones saying the
| obvious: "it's the economy stupid". On the other hand it
| was the Obama era consultants who were fixated on the
| massive loser that is identity politics
| alabastervlog wrote:
| Democrats are screwed on economic messaging until they
| join Republicans in dropping neoliberalism. Was never
| popular, but both parties could stick to it as long as
| neither "defected". Now one has.
|
| Even when the economy's good, they're going to be
| hindered on messaging until they drop that.
|
| Meanwhile a bunch of them are running around like "the
| problem's that we were too nice to trans people!" lol no,
| the problem is the _latent_ one that 's been hanging
| there waiting to be triggered by one party or the other
| since the '80s, the one any expert should have been
| watching for a shift in--or looking to move first on--
| _this entire time_.
| danem wrote:
| > Democrats are screwed on economic messaging until they
| join Republicans in dropping neoliberalism.
|
| I disagree. What we're witnessing today is that while
| people are happy with many of the fruits of globalization
| (cheap Chinese junk, cheap flights, ability to travel
| anywhere, remote work, etc, etc) our politicians have
| just about done everything in their power to increase the
| price of the things that actually matter: housing,
| healthcare, childcare, and education.
|
| A Democrat party that could actually deliver on these
| things (rather than exacerbate the problems as they have
| done) would fare far better electorally. No need to put
| in place unpopular, destructive tariffs.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > happy with many of the fruits of globalization
|
| i.e. things from overseas
|
| > increase the price of the things that actually matter:
| housing, healthcare, childcare, and education.
|
| i.e. things that have large skilled labor inputs within
| the US and can't be exported, plus housing which half the
| population doesn't _want_ to be cheaper. This is just
| "Baumol cost disease". The major component of healthcare,
| childcare, and education is the wages of other Americans.
|
| Let's not kid ourselves that the election was a fair
| comparison of economic policies.
| pjc50 wrote:
| The economy was doing fine apart from a transitory
| inflation spike especially in eggs. Meanwhile the US is
| now involved in a pointless trade war with Canada before
| even getting to the budget; people are going to have an
| economic disaster that dwarfs the price of eggs, _because
| they got invested in identity politics_ of the right-
| wing.
|
| I predict the Trump term will be an economic disaster on
| the numbers, but this will have no effect on people's
| stuck belief that Republicans are better than Democrats
| at economic management.
| rdtsc wrote:
| That is interesting. Presenting public poll results is not
| really about poll results, but about shaping opinion. The
| struggle with the media in general is between reporting on the
| reality that they see vs the reality they want to create. It's
| an infantile make-belief: "If I put my gloves on, it will start
| snowing". But, take a large outfit like WP or NYT and it could
| sort of work that way, too!
|
| But, this also doesn't disagree with the original article that
| there was a large margin of uncertainty. In that case, a
| newspaper had a choice of mentioning the uncertainty and
| emphasizing it, or presenting the 3% in favor or their
| candidate. I think they went with the latter.
|
| Also, when Bezos blocked WP from endorsing Harris, I always
| wondered if he had his own better polling results, and he was
| pretty sure Trump would win, or he just gambled. It's like
| there are these secret reliable set of poll results to which
| billionaires get access too, while the public gets the watered
| down version. Going by the article at hand, perhaps him or his
| team could better read the results and didn't drink the kool-
| aid.
| delichon wrote:
| There's a pretty clear test of whether a pollster is about
| reporting or influencing: the partisanship of their errors.
| Neutral pollsters have differences with the results randomly
| distributed across parties. Propagandists have errors that favor
| their patrons. This essay leans on the magnitude of the errors,
| but that's less probative than their distribution.
|
| Does any poll aggregator order by randomness of polling error?
| culi wrote:
| This mixes up accuracy with precision and 538 had written at
| length about this.
|
| There's a big difference between pollster bias correction vs
| rating.
|
| There are many pollsters that are pretty consistently +2D/R but
| are reliably off from the final result in that direction. These
| polls are actually extremely valuable once you make the
| correction in your model. Meanwhile, polls that can be off from
| the final result by a large amount but _average out_ to about
| correct should not be trusted. This is a yellow flag for
| herding
|
| A pollster can have an A+ rating while having a very consistent
| bias in one direction or another. The rating is meant to
| capture consistency/honesty of methodology more than result
| delichon wrote:
| A fair scale does not favor the grocer.
| culi wrote:
| In this case it does. What pollsters sell is their
| reputations
| ForTheKidz wrote:
| This doesn't account for poll bias that biases both parties, of
| course. Not all polling is designed to wage parties against
| each other: some is designed to pit parties against populace.
| aredox wrote:
| Except the methodology biases the response: phone-only vs. in-
| person for example.
| notfried wrote:
| For each of the 2024 7 swing states, the winner was <1% ahead on
| average, so what good are these polls if the results are going to
| be within their margin of error?
|
| They need to either find a more accurate way, or... give up!
| culi wrote:
| We had a pretty weird year in general. Harris did bad across
| most safe states but seemed to do much better than her average
| in swing states (not enough to win them, but much better than
| she did in non-competitive states)
|
| Many election models rely heavily on historical correlation.
| States like OH and IN might vote quite differently but their
| _swings_ tend to be in the same direction.
|
| The weirdness this year (possibly caused by the Harris campaign
| having a particularly strong ground game in swing states)
| definitely challenged a lot of baked in assumptions of
| forecasts.
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| What they're good for is telling you that things are close. A
| tied poll or a 50-50 model can tell you that if your beliefs
| think it's 99% to go one way, you're probably overconfident,
| and should be more prepared for it to go the other way.
|
| I cared about the result, because it was going to decide
| whether I settled down in the US or whether I wanted to find a
| different place to live. And because I paid attention to those
| polls, I knew that what happened was not particularly unlikely.
| I prepared early.
|
| A lot of people I know thought it couldn't happen. They ignored
| the evidence in front of them, because it was distasteful to
| them (just as it was to me). And they were caught flat-footed
| in a way that I wasn't.
|
| That's not the benefit of hindsight: I brought receipts. You
| can see the 5,000 equally-likely outcomes I had at the start of
| the night (and how they evolved as I added the vote coming in)
| here:
| https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11nn9y9fusd-6LQKCof3_...
| .
| dionian wrote:
| The changes in the polls over time are useful and the campaigns
| often change based on the changes in the polling.
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| Tell me you don't know the difference between bias and variance.
| The longest article/comment wins.
| jmyeet wrote:
| It is insufficient to make a prediction like 50-50 in a US
| election unless you also can explain turnout. Anyone can throw
| out numbers like "51-49" or "55-45" but how did you get to those
| numbers? How are different demographics voting? How is there
| turnout changing? I've seen people laud their own accuracy in
| 2020 while being off by about 30 million in predicted turnout.
|
| The way different demographics vote in US elections doesn't
| change much from election to election. What does change is
| turnout and turnout is a function of many things: enthusiasm for
| the candidate, voter suppression, ease of access to voting and so
| on.
|
| 2020 was unprecedented because of the pandemic. We greatly
| expanded early voting and mail-in ballots, which greatly
| increased participation.
|
| A perfect example of this is Arizona. In 2020, Native Americans
| were crucial to flipping the state to Biden. Arizona state
| lawmakers responded to this by essentially punishing them and
| making it way more difficult to vote. Voter ID requirements,
| birth certificates and even having a physical address are all
| impediments to people who were born on and/or reside on
| reservations. There were fewer voting places and voting options.
| A rural voting place might randomly close early too after being
| an hours long drive.
|
| Some looked at this and said Native Americans in Arizona swung
| hard to Trump. No, they were simply largely prevented from voting
| such that the only Native Americans who could reliably vote were
| more affluent and thus more likely to be Trump voters.
|
| My point is: what polling model captured this prior to the 2024
| election? I guarantee you it's none.
|
| What really happened in 2024 was:
|
| 1. Biden voters swung to the couch in the millions;
|
| 2. Trump basically didn't lose white women, despite the abortion
| issue; and
|
| 3. Trump activated a previously low-propensity voter demographic:
| angry, young, terminally online white males, basically the Andrew
| Tate and 4chan crowd.
|
| Any model has a difficulty with low-propensity demographics. Did
| any model capture this? I think it only started to become
| apparent with early voting exit polls.
|
| I don't think the 2024 polls were particularly accurate. I do
| think they threw their hands up and simply converged to 50-50.
| Small differences in turnout predictions for different
| demographics can massively impact the result.
| asdf6969 wrote:
| more cope from the "experts"
| atoav wrote:
| My pet conspiracy theory is that the monetary influence in US
| politics is a deciding factor in keeping it close to 50/50 as
| this allows for the biggest footballification of politics and
| thus allows politicans/donors to extract the most from people who
| vote against their interest just to see the other side lose.
|
| The only thing I am unsure about is whether this needs
| coordination (a conspiracy) or is just a systemic dynamic that
| emerges from the rules of the system.
| darkerside wrote:
| Per Occam's Razor, it's usually the systemic dynamic
| anovikov wrote:
| I think polling these days is all but useless just because a very
| small proportion of people actually respond to pollsters and it's
| next to impossible to statistically account for "what would the
| other 80% say if they did't tell the pollster to fuck off".
| There's no way to build a "representative sample" to account for
| that. People are way more likely to respond to a "friendly"
| pollster and if they don't know whether pollster is "friendly"
| (works for the organisation aligned with their party), they
| assume they are from the other camp. It's a mess.
| arrrg wrote:
| But the surveys were pretty accurate this election. So I'm not
| sure why you say they are useless.
| antman wrote:
| There is the statisticians aphorism often attributed to George
| Box that "All models are wrong but some are useful". This goes
| against the core argument of this essay that pretty much says
| that "The models were mostly right, but not useful" which not a
| useful argument itself, even if its right
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Predict 100 fair coin flips..
|
| My result didn't match yours. The model isn't useful?
| jdietrich wrote:
| The odds on Polymarket (and other betting markets) started
| diverging at the start of October; by the end of the month, the
| odds were 65/35 in favour of Trump.
|
| At the time, many commentators were arguing that this was obvious
| market manipulation. It turned out that the trader who had
| supposedly manipulated the market had in fact commissioned
| private polls using an alternative methodology - rather than
| asking people how they would vote, it asked how they expected
| their _neighbours_ to vote.
|
| https://polymarket.com/event/presidential-election-winner-20...
|
| https://www.ft.com/content/e8b2ff85-a4dd-40cd-a4c1-e3d706869...
|
| https://www.ft.com/content/4b302ab8-7e40-4d1a-bbe6-3d46f6811...
| thierrydamiba wrote:
| Was this a new development in polling?
| DrillShopper wrote:
| Can't wait to check the DraftKings odds on the presidential
| election before I head to the polls to see if it's worth
| bothering to vote./s
| Izkata wrote:
| No, it was fairly well known a decade or more ago as a very
| good way to remove bias for how low-effort it is. We were
| using a variation of it at work back then for an unrelated
| subject.
|
| How much it's used in political polling I can't say.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Interesting. If you think about it, that's how the stock market
| works. It's not how much you think a stock is worth; it's
| really how much you think _everyone else_ thinks the stock is
| worth.
| ngriffiths wrote:
| Yes but unlike with stocks, you don't want to agree with
| them: if you think people overrate the chances of an event,
| you'd against it.
| qznc wrote:
| That is similar with stocks. I'd say the difference is that
| PolyMarket has an end date where everything gets resolved
| one way or another. Stocks can go on forever.
| ngriffiths wrote:
| Oh you're right, it is basically the same, the
| undervalued stock is the one to buy. I guess I was
| thinking about another difference which is that the value
| of stocks seems more vibes-based and a really stupid
| product (from the investor's perspective) can sometimes
| become popular. In prediction markets the outcome is more
| concrete.
| Uehreka wrote:
| I'm gonna take this opportunity to clarify a comment I wrote
| earlier this week: Sure, polling may be difficult to interpret
| when uncertainty is high and margins are small, but there are
| many elections every year that are easily predictable blowouts,
| but which are often not portrayed that way depending on your
| information diet.
|
| Like, I can't count the number of times someone will show me an
| awesome political ad for an awesome person who's going up against
| an awful politician I hate, and there'll be all this hope and the
| person showing me the ad will be thinking this person has a
| chance of winning. And then I'll look at the polling and realize
| they're down by 20 points in a state Trump carried by 30 and the
| error bars are only 3 points in each direction.
|
| So even if polling close races can get messy, polling overall
| provides an extremely powerful antidote to a lot of propaganda
| and echo-chamber thinking.
| hoseja wrote:
| In fact it is the result of much effort to keep the people as
| perfectly divided as possible.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| I think it's fascinating that the colorized maps of each voting
| precinct are always almost perfect population maps where high-
| population centers are blue and low-population areas are red.
| sannysanoff wrote:
| It seems to be a matter of indifference to many that a persistent
| societal division of fifty-fifty is symptomatic of a profound
| societal schism. This is because such a division, in any
| configuration, maximizes the number of those who are
| discontented. As it is written, "A house divided against itself
| cannot stand." To my mind, this matter is of far greater
| significance than any secondary, tangible processes that may be
| occurring in consequence.
|
| Furthermore, the mechanisms that ensure the mathematical
| expectation of electoral outcomes to hover around a fifty-fifty
| split -- a phenomenon observable in many nations -- are
| fundamentally economic in nature. Both factions commit resources
| to the electoral contest to secure a mere one percent advantage,
| as such is the foundational principle of democracy: a majority of
| fifty-one percent prevails.
|
| Thus, economic factors -- for an electoral campaign is, in
| essence, a contest of capital--having, in effect, subverted the
| very system of democratic elections, inevitably lead to the decay
| of nations that religiously adhere to the mathematics of a single
| percentage point as the sole criterion of legitimacy. In
| optimizing for democratic representation, social stability and
| equilibrium have been forfeited.
|
| It is akin to the psychological paradox: "I am correct, and all
| acknowledge it, yet why do I not experience contentment?" It is
| because one has optimized for correctness -- or in the context of
| elections, for fairness and representativeness -- rather than for
| overall well-being. Such is the predicament inherent in the
| pursuit of a mere fifty-one percent majority.
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| > Furthermore, the mechanisms that ensure the mathematical
| expectation of electoral outcomes to hover around a fifty-fifty
| split -- a phenomenon observable in many nations -- are
| fundamentally economic in nature.
|
| What? No they are not.
|
| This is 100% created by the FPTP voting system. It is the
| single cause that leads to this, everywhere where it's used.
| FPTP means that if your party cannot hoover up a base that gets
| 50%+1 of the votes, you change your platform until it can. The
| stable equilibrium is two parties at very nearly 50% split.
| Then both parties have to cater to their 50%, can ignore the
| other 50%, and do not benefit from co-operation across party
| lines.
|
| This equilibrium is not visible in democratic countries that
| use some kind of proportional representation. In such systems,
| parties tend to be smaller, and necessarily have to co-operate
| to form government.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Yes, this, exactly. I was going to write the same thing. FPTP
| produces this result.
|
| In the US, the combination of FPTP voting and campaign
| finance rules lead to congress being fundamentally broken.
| foobarian wrote:
| Moreover, I'm thinking that modern information tools
| (Internet, polls, tracking, etc). have lead to better and
| more accurate forecasting, which in turn allowed the parties
| to apply ever narrower targeting at hyper-focused groups and
| minimize wasted effort past getting the majority needed to
| win elections. Basically as there is less and less noise the
| battles get closer and closer to the theoretical equilibrium
| point.
|
| And this is bad because it causes huge shifts based on the
| whims of what, fractions of a percent of the population?
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| The mechanisms are economic in nature if you assume the
| context of a first past the post electoral system.
|
| It's worth repeating that FPTP maximizes the number of those
| who are discontented: Parties lose all incentives to appeal
| to more than 50%+1, so the remaining 49.9% are left high and
| dry. This implies that a proportional representation system
| will be more stable, because a higher percentage of the
| voters will be represented.
| credit_guy wrote:
| I disagree. I think the US system with 2 parties is superior to
| the systems in many other nations where there are multiple
| parties. The problem with multiple parties is that it is
| difficult to form a governing coalition. In the US the problem
| of coalition building simply does not exits (I wonder how many
| people in the US are even aware of the concept). Basically, the
| coalition building is done ahead of the elections, by various
| interest groups aligning themselves with one of the two
| parties. This alignment is voluntary and dynamic, so the shape
| of the two parties continuously changes. The debate seems quite
| polarized and this is indeed a problem. But I think it stems
| more from the way people's exposure to information has changed
| with the advent of the internet and social media, and less from
| how the US organizes its electoral process.
| ipaddr wrote:
| The problem with two parties is everything is left or right.
| Coalition building can be hard but the work bridges
| ideas/approaches which pull more people together.
|
| Two party systems end up governing from their extreme
| positions while trying to pull 1% over.
| zo1 wrote:
| All the more reason why we shouldn't vote for parties and
| politicians but rather vote on specific individual
| decisions/topics/choices.
|
| It's 2025, we should be able to have more granular control
| over the direction our governments take, and not have to
| rely on some nebulous "party" or politicians grouping that
| forces us to deal with compromises. And not only
| compromises, but all the deal-making and trading that the
| groups make with eachother.
| squigz wrote:
| > All the more reason why we shouldn't vote for parties
| and politicians but rather vote on specific individual
| decisions/topics/choices.
|
| This sounds nice but if people can't even vote for
| favorable outcomes now, how can we expect them to make
| informed decisions on dozens of matters of public policy?
| pegasus wrote:
| The solution usually proposed in systems like Liquid
| Democracy, is in the form of an online platform where
| issues to be voted on are presented alongside all the
| different opinions and perspectives relevant to that
| decision. Education needs to go hand-in-hand with
| empowerment.
| squigz wrote:
| Having all the information available is but one part of
| the challenge. It has never been easier to get educated
| on all sides of every issue we face, yet...
|
| The problem still remains that we can't expect
| individuals (let alone millions of them) to be able to
| appropriately weigh in on things that require more than 5
| minute reading on an online platform. One cannot gain an
| expert understanding, nor an appreciation of the nuances
| that come with that, in that situation.
| Tadpole9181 wrote:
| Representative democracy is not a technical challenge,
| it's a human challenge. If reigned in, electing
| representatives to act on your behalf is a _far_ better
| system because being even close to informed on the topics
| and nuance and long-term thinking it takes to govern is a
| full time job that most people simply are not equipped -
| in terms of time and expertise - to handle. And we don 't
| even have guaranteed holiday time to research and vote
| once every year, let alone every few days as this would
| require.
|
| Sucks that they keep electing lunatics. But do you
| _really_ think the party who ran almost entirely on
| hurting others wouldn 't independently vote for hurting
| others? Or that the 100,000,000 people who didn't vote to
| stop it would suddenly vote? Or that people wouldn't look
| toward leaders and form parties so they can quickly get a
| feel of the room based on like minds?
|
| Politicians being corrupt is, at the end of the day,
| mostly the fault of the people. They refuse to hold them
| accountable. I mean, they elected a convicted felon - a
| convicted rapist - an impeached president - a known con
| man and womanizer - who works with dictators and mafias
| and tried to overthrow America. And they're still
| cheering on every insane idea.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > Two party systems end up governing from their extreme
| positions while trying to pull 1% over.
|
| Why must it be so? If one party was non-extreme, would it
| not be better at pulling the 1% over? (In fact, there are a
| lot more than 1% who don't bother to vote because neither
| party speaks to them.)
|
| It seems to me that the thing that pushes parties in the US
| to the extremes is the primary system.
| pasc1878 wrote:
| The problem is not in getting the 1% at the end but it si
| the primary system.
|
| But that is true in all two party states.
|
| The people who take part and organise the party will not
| be in the centre undecideds they will be those who are
| off centre. To become the leader you need to get the
| votes from the party workers, these will tend away from
| the centre so you get more extreme leaders.
|
| With the two party system the coalitions are made behind
| closed doors in the party.
| hollerith wrote:
| >To become the leader you need to get the votes from the
| party workers
|
| That can't be the whole story because Trump never
| bothered to win over party workers when he won in 2016.
| rayiner wrote:
| It's the primary system and, ActBlue/WinRed, the
| ideological composition of party apparatchiks, and
| diversity.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| > Why must it be so? If one party was non-extreme, would
| it not be better at pulling the 1% over? (In fact, there
| are a lot more than 1% who don't bother to vote because
| neither party speaks to them.)
|
| Primary elections are the problem. The moderates who
| would win bigly in the real election are rapidly washed
| out during the primary season.
| nerbert wrote:
| It's not all or nothing. Within EU nations, you will find
| many systems that sit within a spectrum between a rigid 2
| party system like the US, and a full blown multi-party
| coalition type government broken down into specific levels,
| like Belgium.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| It's well documented how harmful the two party system is and
| I don't find this even close to convincing me it's not _the_
| biggest problem with the US, as far as our system of
| government. Many of our other problems stem from it.
| somenameforme wrote:
| Without nitpicking the typical coalition details here, I want
| to consider a more general point. It's somewhat self
| evidently not a great thing for countries to be swapping
| systems back and forth dramatically based on margins of a few
| percent. It's unstable and will inevitably lead to a systemic
| collapse as the shifts grow greater and greater over time.
| It's rocking a boat back and forth.
|
| I would go one step further and say that executive power
| should be _dramatically_ reigned in, and that laws should
| take an 80% consensus to pass. And laws also have to be
| renewed every 'x' years with a similarly large consensus,
| perhaps with a method similar to constitutional amendment to
| allow for permanent laws. Under such a system you'd
| absolutely have to collaborate to ever do anything. And I
| think this would be a very good thing.
|
| Such a system would also completely do away with divide and
| conquer as a political strategy, which again is also a very
| good thing - as that's likely one of the biggest causes of
| instability in the Western world today.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| > you'd absolutely have to collaborate to ever do anything
|
| You could also refuse to collaborate to do everything. This
| would result in an anarchist system where power/money has
| the ability to do whatever they want without regulatory
| oversight and the public are unable to vote to give
| themselves any rights they can't take by force.
| somenameforme wrote:
| I think that's assuming the status quo of horrible
| divides. In the past many social bills passed with
| overwhelming bipartisan support. For instance the Pure
| Food and Drug Act [1], which would lead to the FDA, was
| passed in 1906 by a 90%+ margin in both the House and
| Senate. I mean who's going to oppose outlawing mislabeled
| products? In a country that hasn't been trained to hate
| 'the other side', basically nobody.
|
| But in modern times a typical social experiment (of which
| there are a zillion on YouTube) is to describe some
| policy passed by a President/party but swap the names to
| 'the other side.' People's response to the policy will
| invariably sharply shift. People aren't even thinking
| about what they think is a good idea anymore, but seeing
| everything through a hyper-partisan lens. That's
| obviously not conducive to bipartisan acts, pretty much
| ever.
|
| [1] -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_Food_and_Drug_Act
| Tadpole9181 wrote:
| The party that actively attempts to destroy a government by
| blocking all bills, then point to the underfunded, broken
| system and say "government does work, you should sell all
| of that to a billionaire" would _LOVE_ your idea.
| mech9879876 wrote:
| The median voter theorem does some work to dampen the
| rocking.
| openasocket wrote:
| > and that laws should take an 80% consensus to pass.
|
| I think this is trying to solve the wrong problem. If our
| concern was that the second the new party gets that 51%
| margin they suddenly start passing a ton of laws, that
| would help reign it in. But that's not really what is
| happening. Congress has become profoundly unproductive in
| the last few decades. As an example, the last time Congress
| passed a budget on time, which is the bare minimum of
| functioning, was in the 1990s. By basically any metric,
| Congress is becoming less and less capable of passing laws.
| Requiring 80% consensus would make that even harder. And
| requiring laws to be reviewed every X years would greatly
| increase the responsibilities of Congress to keep the
| government functioning.
| tremon wrote:
| That persistent societal division of fifty-fifty is
| emblematic of a failed political system. There's never just
| two sides to any real-life issue, but having only two parties
| forces everything to be viewed through that binary lens. This
| damage runs much deeper than just politics, everything in
| society has to be all-or-nothing: it's always good vs evil,
| you're with us or against us, you're successful or an utter
| failure, you're either rich or poor, etc.
| brummm wrote:
| How can you say this with the current state of US politics?
| It's clearly inferior leading to such poor outcomes.
| vintermann wrote:
| People act as if it's a fluke, as if "if we could get back
| to how things were _just_ before all this, things would
| stay better! ". No, we don't want to drive off the cliff,
| but we do want back to that time we barged full speed past
| all the "road closed ahead" signs.
| BariumBlue wrote:
| By that logic a one party system is the most superior system,
| since by definition everyone is on the same page.
|
| We got Trump in part because people felt unable to fully
| express their opinion - they felt it was either the status
| quo person or the anti status quo person, with no nuance in
| between.
|
| And there are still divisions - the freedom caucus, the
| progressive "squad", the swing politicians. Those politicians
| should be in parties that reflect them rather than
| Frankenstein's monsters of parties.
|
| Coalitions are made to enable things like voting on
| government budgets before funding runs out .... But that
| problem does not seem solved in the US
| kweingar wrote:
| Coalition building is not a problem, but it is still very
| difficult to govern in the US. In order to enact meaningful
| legislation aside from a budget, you need a majority of the
| House of Representatives, 60 Senators (in practice, because
| of the filibuster), the President, and the Supreme Court to
| all align.
| mppm wrote:
| These problems could be prevented by a ranked choice vote
| (your vote transfers to your next candidate when your
| favorite is eliminated) to determine the executive, and your
| first choice used to determine legislative seats
| proportionally. This would often mean that the winning party
| is governing without majority in the parliament (or
| equivalent), but I actually see that as a good thing. I mean,
| what happened to Checks and Balances?
| amalcon wrote:
| The U.S. did have a brief flirtation with what other
| countries call "failure to form a governing coalition" in
| 2023. It was a bit less embarrassing than elsewhere because
| (for somewhat related reasons) our legislature is
| historically weak right now, but it did happen.
|
| I think we'll see more of this, now that the parties are so
| ideologically separate from each other. With such a narrow
| majority, any tiny intraparty fracture has the potential to
| break a coalition.
| api wrote:
| > as such is the foundational principle of democracy: a
| majority of fifty-one percent prevails.
|
| There are other ways of doing voting and organizing a democracy
| that are less prone to this winner take all dynamic. The
| foundational principle of democracy is consent of the governed.
| The details of how that's achieved can vary widely.
|
| One is to do the vote differently, such as with ranked choice
| voting where voters are free to choose the candidate they
| actually want without "wasting" their vote.
|
| Another is parliamentary style systems with proportional
| representation, which allow more than just two parties to have
| a voice and require the parties to form coalitions to govern.
|
| Lastly, you can vote on actual policy proposals instead of just
| on politicians and parties. It's not either-or -- it's possible
| to have a system with both representatives and direct voting on
| major points of contention.
| sannysanoff wrote:
| That is indeed the case. Perhaps I should have clarified that
| my comments are directed at the current political system of
| the United States. The purpose of my message was to highlight
| that there is a certain opposing force at play, one that is
| shifting the working system - specifically, the US electoral
| system - towards a range of diminished effectiveness.
| Essentially, the rules are being manipulated in such a way
| that while they may technically function, the fundamental
| objectives are still being undermined. These objectives, as
| outlined in the US Constitution, are to ensure domestic
| tranquility and promote the general welfare. It is necessary
| to address this systemic vulnerability, as this issue is
| becoming increasingly relevant in many places.
| christkv wrote:
| Thats why no laws should be possible to pass without a 2/3
| vote. 50% + 1 vote will always lead to a weak mandate and an
| accusation of tyranny. Let them haggle and if it's not worth
| passing at 2/3 of a vote it's not worth passing at all.
| vintermann wrote:
| > Both factions commit resources to the electoral contest to
| secure a mere one percent advantage
|
| That only makes sense if the factions are interchangeable for
| their members, i.e. if it's the same to them whether they win
| as part of one faction or the other, as long as they're on the
| winning side in the end.
|
| And I'm pretty sure that's not true for most regular people.
|
| It may be true for large corporations and wealthy individuals,
| though.
| 827a wrote:
| Rambling about why a 50-50 forecast on a blowout election is
| "fine" and actually, like, totally cool and actually you're the
| dumb one for thinking it isn't, holds no water in my book.
| Election forecasters are not scientists discovering the nature of
| the universe, where it might be ok to say "yeah there's nothing
| to discover here" / "we don't know what we don't know". They're
| businesspeople selling a product. If AWS says "well, actually,
| hosting servers is just really really hard and its totally normal
| that 10% of your requests are failing!" they'd go out of
| business, full stop. No one is going to buy your product.
|
| Trump did not win by a little bit. They missed something about
| the 2016 election, and it is _wild_ that they missed it again
| EIGHT years later. Don 't let them hide behind the veil of "we
| said it was 50-50!"
| rexpop wrote:
| > blowout
|
| Trump won 49.8% of the popular vote, compared to Harris's
| 48.2%, giving him a margin of 1.6% (approximately 2.3 million
| votes).
|
| This margin ranks as one of the smallest in modern history,
| smaller than Joe Biden's 4.45% margin in 2020 and smaller even
| than George W. Bush's narrow win in 2004 (2.46%).
|
| Trump won 312 Electoral College votes to Harris's 226, marking
| a margin of 86 votes.
|
| This is larger than his 2016 victory (304-227) and Biden's 2020
| win (306-232), but it does not approach historical landslides
| like Reagan's 1984 victory (525-13) or Lyndon B. Johnson's in
| 1964 (486-52).
|
| Trump's popular vote margin is the fifth smallest since 1960,
| ie #12 in the last 17 largest, #13 by vote % margin.
|
| > Trump did not win by a little bit.
|
| Yeah, he did.
|
| 0. https://infogram.com/untitled-1hnq41on3mjwp23
|
| 1. https://infogram.com/untitled-1h0n25oz3rxjz4p
| sigzero wrote:
| It was who he won that mattered. Democrats are using 1.5% to
| justify a "we didn't do that badly" attitude and yes, they
| did do badly. Trump won demographics he had no reasonable
| right to win and He took all of the swing States. He won the
| popular vote that no Republican has been able to do since
| 2004.His Electoral College win was resounding. That and the
| Republicans winning the House and Senate. The Democrats
| really really need to rethink things.
| rexpop wrote:
| Again, Reagan's 1984 victory (525-13) and Lyndon B.
| Johnson's in 1964 (486-52) were electorally "resounding,"
| not Trump's margin of 84.
| 827a wrote:
| The President is not elected by popular vote, and I should
| hope that the polling probabilities take that into account.
|
| 312 to 226 (58%/42%) was the final electoral college count.
| Do you know what the Polymarket odds for the race were at
| 11:30pm on November 4th, the day before election day? 59.8%
| Trump, 40.2% Harris. Yes, actually, seriously, go look them
| up, they didn't just correctly predict the winner, the odds
| themselves were within an incredibly accurate margin for the
| actual electoral vote share. The Robinhood election market
| odds were similarly placed. The Harris campaign said recently
| that they basically knew they were going to lose very early
| on. This information was out there, everyone knew it, except
| the "professional pollsters" who are now begging/pleading
| that their 50-50 models aren't worth giving up on.
|
| You don't need to white knight the pollsters. They're selling
| a defective product. The marketplace for their product will
| punish them in 2026 and 2028 far more than any of our
| comments on HackerNews will.
| skybrian wrote:
| Suppose you want to know whether it will rain on your wedding
| day. Without any forecast, there are two scenarios you need to
| prepare for: it will rain, or it won't.
|
| A 50-50 forecast doesn't change anything. You still need to
| prepare for both scenarios. There's a sense in which it's
| "useless" even though it's a valid forecast.
|
| Forecasts are most useful when they allow you to eliminate a
| possibility, so you don't need to prepare for it. This means even
| something like an 80% chance might be of limited use, if you
| still need to prepare for the 20% case.
|
| (Gambling and investing are different, because you can accept
| losses and make up for them with repeated bets. You still need to
| be prepared for losses, but that's a matter of not betting too
| much compared to your bankroll.)
|
| Even if the forecasters don't do anything wrong, for many people,
| presidential election forecasts are of limited use. Either they
| don't have anything they need to do to prepare, or they still
| have to prepare for either candidate to win.
| CJefferson wrote:
| 50-50 forecasts can be massive depending on your priors. If
| someone (who I trusted) told me there was a 50-50 chance I
| would get shot tomorrow if I went outside, you couldn't pay me
| enough to go leave the house.
| skybrian wrote:
| Absolutely! It didn't work that way for recent presidential
| elections, though. The prior odds weren't always 50:50, but
| they were well within the range of "both sides could win" and
| didn't go outside that.
| mannykannot wrote:
| In the case of an election, a 50:50 forecast is a clear
| reminder to the wise of the importance of voting, no matter
| how certain the outcome might seem from the necessarily
| limited perspective of your acquaintances and your
| consumption of possibly (or likely) biased news media.
| wenwolf wrote:
| If a modern US election went far outside that that would
| just mean some fool was burning a huge amount of money and
| probably to no purpose as it would cause a response from
| donors on the other side who would like an outcome but also
| aren't going to throw money away.
| skybrian wrote:
| It's less likely for the presidency, but for other
| offices, it's often the case that an incumbent has only
| token competition.
| billfor wrote:
| You have a choice to go out or not but the example of the
| wedding is a given obligation, so the apples-apples
| comparison would be "if you had to go outside, would a 50-50
| chance of being shot change anything"
| neogodless wrote:
| This is an interesting hypothetical, and I hope people with
| better understanding of statistics would weigh in.
|
| But lets change the example a bit:
|
| - There's a 10% chance of getting shot on any day you leave
| the house - You are able to get 5 days of food any time you
| leave the house - There's a 100% chance of starving if you go
| 8 days without leaving your house
|
| How long can you avoid getting shot or starving?
|
| Presumably if you don't want to go hungry at all, you have to
| leave the house every 5 days to get more food. After 50 days,
| the odds of you having been shot are pretty darn high.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Respectfully, how is this noteworthy or add to the
| discussion?
| neogodless wrote:
| I guess I was trying to get the parent comment to
| reconsider their position on 50/50 being useful because
| they would never leave the house. But I guess it's still
| "more" useful than 90/10 even, in their example, the
| chance during one day isn't reflective of long term odds.
|
| But an election (particularly presidential) is only once
| every 4 years. And it's not "50/50" or "90/10" every
| election - it's typically a different match up of
| options, and a slightly different mix of percentages.
|
| But fair criticism, I didn't successfully make a good
| point with my attempt.
| Retric wrote:
| Weddings are unusually locked in dates. Canceling a hotel a few
| days out is generally free and 50% odds of rain can easily be
| high enough to postpone a weekend trip. 10% odds however may be
| worth the gamble even if both possibilities exist.
|
| With elections you need to take both a short term and long term
| perspective. True 50/50 odds mean doubling down at the last
| minute is likely more valuable vs saving that money for the
| next election. I think the pollsters got things wildly wrong
| with that estimate because their underlying assumptions where
| off, but that's a different issue.
| mannykannot wrote:
| The utility of consulting weather forecasts prior to events
| like weddings lies in the non-trivial possibility that it will
| give you a clear indication of what will happen.
| James_K wrote:
| Suppose it rains on 50% of days. One forecaster gives a 50%
| chance of rain every day. Another gives a 90% chance of
| rain/not rain and is "wrong" 10% of of time. Both stations are
| giving you accurate information from a probability perspective
| (when station A says a 50% chance, you know there's a 50%
| chance of rain tomorrow, when station B says 90%, you know
| there's a 90% chance of rain tomorrow) but the 50% chance
| station is less useful as the number is lower. They have
| effectively given up in the same way pollsters have given up.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| This is the best response in thread, imo. Is there a term for
| this phenomenon?
| James_K wrote:
| I don't think so, though I often find someone has thought
| of the same thing I have and given it a name. The root of
| the issue is a matter of language. Events don't have
| probabilities. You don't predict a 50% chance of rain, you
| predict rain with a 50% certainty. (There are a lot of
| internet brain teasers that exploit this subtle ideological
| difference.) The 50% is talking about how often you're
| correct, not how likely the rain is to happen.
| Probabilities don't really exist; it either rains or it
| doesn't.
| gowld wrote:
| It's statistical information arbitrage.
|
| Let's say you go to the futures market:
|
| Seller pays a contract-buyer $1 if it rains tomorrow. How
| much will seller charge for that contract?
|
| Bookmaker using forecaster A will sell that contract for
| $0.51 every day, and earn a profit of $0.01/contract, on
| average.
|
| Bookmaker using forecaster B and their clients will buy
| that contract on probably sunny says, and bankrupt
| Forecaster A.
|
| Similar result if Bookmaker B sells contracts to Bookmaker
| A, at $0.11 on probably-sunny days, and $0.90 on probably-
| rainy days.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| The problem is that there are two 50-50 odds definitions.
|
| First one, is where you have no information about the event
| what so ever.
|
| Second is where you have information, and it turns out that the
| outcome is still 50-50.
|
| While the use of that information in planning (pricing things,
| betting, investing) is identical, they fundamentally represent
| 2 different sets of information.
| SirMaster wrote:
| >Trump and Harris are both a normal polling error away from a
| blowout
|
| If this is the conclusion from all the data gathering and
| analysis then what's even the point? If the conclusion is: it
| could be a blowout either way, we have no idea. Seems like a
| waste of a lot of time and resources, for what gain exactly?
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Seems like there is a hidden function when 50-50 polls exist:
| 100% uncertainty with 100% certainty. This is the equivalent to
| having no data at all.
|
| Maybe we should just start saying "This is the equivalent
| scenario/situation to having no data at all." instead of 50-50.
| geysersam wrote:
| Having no data at all is better than having the wrong
| information.
|
| If you were previously pretty sure one side would win you gain
| information from a study that says it's 50-50.
|
| If you already though it was even then the new study is
| pointless.
| ttctciyf wrote:
| I think the lack of signal from the electorate does represent
| an entropic state and is likely because available information
| channels are saturated with noise.
| swid wrote:
| Lets says I have a coin. I have no data on it. I do not know if
| it will come up heads or tails or if it is a fair coin.
|
| I throw the coin N number of times and determine the coin is
| fair. I still do not know which side the coin will come up.
|
| But this isn't the same as having no data on the coin. I've
| determined the coin is fair by gathering data, which otherwise
| I would not know. Often this added piece of information is
| crucial to making good decisions and not at all equivalent to
| the first case.
|
| For instance, I might want to bet you that the next 10 throws
| in a row will all be heads. If you know the coin is fair, this
| is a good bet - but without data on the coin, it could be a
| trap.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| The goal of polls is not to determine if an election is or is
| not a fair election. The goal of polls is to predict the
| final outcome of the election.
| swid wrote:
| You state the case of no knowledge vs knowing 50/50
| probability are equivalent, but they are clearly not.
|
| If you have no data but one side is actually heavily
| favored to win, you cannot determine how much you should
| bet on that probability even though there is an opportunity
| to make good sized bets. If neither side is favored to win,
| then you can still make good sized bets if the payout is
| not 1:1.
|
| The Kelly Criterion formulates all this - the probability
| of win/loss does in fact matter, and if you don't "know"
| that, you cannot make a good bet. Knowing it is 50/50, you
| can bet on it.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| 50-50 event with no edge, the Kelly Criterion suggests
| not to bet. (ChatGPT)
| swid wrote:
| And this is exactly why you should not rely on AI without
| fundamental understanding.
|
| That would only be true if the payout odds are even. And
| in my comment I explicitly say not 1:1 payout. Go ahead
| and ask the AI for clarification, I'm sure it can explain
| it to you. On Wikipedia, the factor is "b" - ie 2:1
| payout and you would bet on a 50/50 event.
|
| The intuition should be incredibly obvious here. I have a
| fair coin and will pay you 200 dollars for heads and take
| 1 dollar for tails. You would flip that coin as many
| times as I let you.
|
| Even in your reply to this - ChatGPT is telling you in
| one situation you should not bet because the expected
| gain is nothing, and the other you don't know what to do
| - which is not equivalent. But the edge it is talking
| about is the expected gain over the probability of the
| event with the payout odds. If there is no edge, you
| won't bet. But you can have an edge with 50/50 odds, and
| if so you would bet.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Fails to see any difference other than "N/A" and
| "unpredictable": In the 50/50 case,
| the Kelly Criterion does provide an answer: don't bet,
| because there's no edge and no expected growth.
| In the unknown probabilities case, you can't apply the
| formula at all, and you don't have enough information to
| make an informed decision. You're essentially in the dark
| about how much to bet, and thus you cannot use the Kelly
| Criterion.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| A close race, creates more excitement and more cash for the
| media.
|
| If you get on a horses and your horse keep losing and losing
| ground, watching the race becomes quite boring. If the horses are
| neck on neck you will be captivated watching it till the very
| end.
|
| The media has a strong incentive to sell the elections as close
| to keep more people seeing their ads and buying subscriptions.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| I guess the article says that election polling in the US given
| the current landscape, or rather the landscape during the past
| election, is useless.
|
| Today Biden is up 2%, please remember that the polls have a +-3%
| uncertainty built in, so we have nothing to report
| joshdavham wrote:
| I always get annoyed when people look at election outcomes and
| say "the polls were wrong" when the most likely outcome didn't
| happen. It'd be like saying there's a 5/6 chance that a 6-sided
| dice will not roll a 4, rolling a 4, and then concluding that the
| initial proposed probability was wrong.
| afavour wrote:
| I came away from 2016 wondering if any of the electoral outcome
| stuff is worth doing given how much it gets misunderstood.
|
| "They said Hillary had a 90% but Trump won! They're idiots!"
|
| No! They said Trump had a 10% chance and he won. It was a
| predicted outcome!
| knightfall21 wrote:
| The problem is using statistical models at all for predicting
| the probability of one time events. (elections are every 4
| years, but those future models will be different).
|
| You can't validate such a model, and it's not useful since
| any upset victory was "accounted for" simply because its
| possibility was named.
| jefftk wrote:
| 538 had Trump at 30.7% the night before, FWIW: https://web.ar
| chive.org/web/20161107224336/https://projects....
| staticman2 wrote:
| But is your 10% chance of Trump winning model a better model
| than one that gave Trump a 40%, 50%, 60%, 70%, 80%, or 90%
| chance of winning?
|
| If you can't show that why should anyone listen to you?
| oersted wrote:
| It is a rational behavior to question a prediction if an
| event that was deemed to have low probability actually
| happened, I don't like the implication that it is stupid to
| do so.
|
| In fact, after thorough investigation, most polling agencies
| did identify significant factors that let to bias, and almost
| all major pollsters have adapted their methods in later
| elections as a result: education weighting, compensating for
| nonresponse bias, diversified polling channels beyond phone
| calls (online surveys, text messages, in-app polling),
| likely-voter modeling...
|
| I don't think any professional pollster will tell you that
| the prediction you mentioned was reasonably accurate in
| retrospect, regardless of affiliation.
|
| I don't attribute malice or incompetence, it's clear that the
| game changed suddenly and new confounding factors became
| significant. People that would previously vote together
| diverged significantly, lots of politically inactive people
| became involved, people were afraid to be honest, and people
| that were harder to reach were voting much differently to
| those that were more accessible to pollsters. That will
| really mess with any sampling strategy that proved reliable
| for many years before.
| devsda wrote:
| If someone says there is an x% chance of an event happening,
| is there a value of x other than 0 & 100 where they can be
| wrong?
|
| What is the value that someone can derive out of such
| predictions ?
| bmandale wrote:
| If someone predicts something will happen with a 90%
| probability, then they should be wrong roughly 10% of the
| time. We can't determine that from a single event, but we
| could look at 10 events predicted by the same model. In the
| case of election forecasts, we would expect 1/10 elections
| predicted at 90% probability to have the wrong estimate. So
| we would expect the average person to see it at least once,
| and probably twice, in their lifetime.
| t-3 wrote:
| That's not how polls work though. A poll shows how a sample of
| people say they'll vote. An ideal poll would have the same
| proportions as the final popular vote count.
| Spivak wrote:
| Thank you! Lordy it's crazy that this thread isn't
| distinguishing polls which are a _measurement_ and the
| resulting _prediction_ based on those polls.
|
| If you polled 60%/40% yea/nay you wouldn't give the nays a
| 40% chance of winning. You need P(yeas > 50%) based on your
| observed measurement.
| James_K wrote:
| The whole question of using probability here is philosophically
| fraught. If you are saying "this has a probability of 50%" then
| you're saying "this will happen half of the time if you repeat
| the test". I don't think Harris would win 5 times if you ran that
| election 10 more times. From that regard, the 50% guess is quite
| inaccurate, and does just seem to be the pollsters "giving up" in
| the sense that they're pretty clueless and so ended up going with
| an even split. This is speculation on my part, but I think that
| election was decided in Trump's favor pretty decisively long
| before the publishing date of the last 50/50 poll.
|
| Edit: to elucidate, suppose it rains on 50% of days. One
| forecaster gives a 50% chance of rain every day. Another gives a
| 90% chance of rain/not rain and is "wrong" 10% of of time. Both
| stations are giving you accurate information from a probability
| perspective (when station A says a 50% chance, you know there's a
| 50% chance of rain tomorrow, when station B says 90%, you know
| there's a 90% chance of rain tomorrow) but the 50% chance station
| is less useful as the number is lower. They have effectively
| given up in the same way pollsters have given up; they're saying
| there is no information that could give them a higher
| probability. The reason a single event can have many different
| probabilities is because probability is about repeated events.
| Both stations are predictions accurately reflect the distribution
| of rain/not rain days.
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