Nate Silver

In about 15 minutes I will be sitting down with Leighton Smith collecting my winnings from our bet last year.

Readers will remember that Leighton Smith and I made a bet on the outcome of the US presidential election, months ahead polling day. He said that Mitt Romney would win easily, and I said that though i wanted Romney to win I believed that he wouldn’t be able to do it and that Barack Obama would win a second term.

I based my opinions on the mathematical and statistical approach of Nate Silver.

As you all know Obama romped home and I won the bet.

The vagaries of holidays, overlapping commitments, timing and extraneous matters meant that this was the earliest we could do it.

Never let it be said that Leighton Smith doesn’t honour his bets.

I will post photos from the event later.

Nate Silver has predicted the San Francisco 49ers will the Superbowl…so far the silence is deafening from Karl Rove on what his guess may be:

Nate Silver, the famous poll expert for the New York Times who correctly called the U.S. presidential election for Barack Obama, has really gone out on a limb today, prognosticating that the San Francisco will win 49ers will likely win the Super Bowl.

“The reasons that exceptional defenses fare so much better in the Super Bowl are still somewhat murky, but this factor bodes well for this year’s 49ers, whose defense belongs in the elite group, according to S.R.S. (it ranks 17th among Super Bowl teams),” wrote Silver, in part.

The football team is the favorite already, so it’s not that much of a limb to crawl out on — and it’s also unlikely to attract as much controversy as Silver’s election calls that sent Republicans into a tizzy.  Read more »

In the recent US election many notable pundits kept their partisan blinkers firmly affixed to their faces. As a consequence they called things wrong.

Pundits are almost never held to account for the calls…it certainly would be interesting if someone did.

One person though has made a study of pundits in all sorts of areas, from economics to politics, and the results are interesting.

The shocking and little-acknowledged truth is that most expert forecasts are wrong. Not only wrong, but more wrong than if they had been generated at random.

Two decades ago psychologist Philip Tetlock, of the University of California, Berkeley, began testing the forecasts of 284 famous Americans who made their living pontificating about politics and economics.

As he says in his book Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? it wasn’t easy to pin them down. When stripped of rhetoric their predictions were surprisingly slippery.

Read more »

Nate Silver has rated the various polling companies, many of which are included in his algorithms. When you look at their results you can see why Romney conservatives were so far off, they were relying on Gallup and Rasmussen and they were so dreadfully wonky it is lucky they have any credibility at all.

There were roughly two dozen polling firms that issued at least five surveys in the final three weeks of the campaign, counting both state and national polls. (Multiple instances of a tracking poll are counted as separate surveys in my analysis, and only likely voter polls are used.)

For each of these polling firms, I have calculated the average error and the average statistical bias in the margin it reported between President Obama and Mitt Romney, as compared against the actual results nationally or in one state.

For instance, a polling firm that had Mr. Obama ahead by two points in Colorado — a state that Mr. Obama actually won by about five points — would have had a three-point error for that state. It also would have had a three-point statistical bias toward Republicans there.

The bias calculation measures in which direction, Republican or Democratic, a firm’s polls tended to miss. If a firm’s polls overestimated Mr. Obama’s performance in some states, and Mr. Romney’s in others, it could have little overall statistical bias, since the misses came in different directions. In contrast, the estimate of the average error in the firm’s polls measures how far off the firm’s polls were in either direction, on average.

I have been told that I should listen more to Dick Morris, rather than Nate Silver and Andrew Sullivan…

Here is why that won’t be happening anytime soon. The man is a fool and a partisan hack who gets things dreadfully wrong.

His spin on getting his arse handed to him in the election is also ridiculous:

I’ve got egg on my face. I predicted a Romney landslide and, instead, we ended up with an Obama squeaker. The key reason for my bum prediction is that I mistakenly believed that the 2008 surge in black, Latino, and young voter turnout would recede in 2012 to “normal” levels. Didn’t happen. These high levels of minority and young voter participation are here to stay. And, with them, a permanent reshaping of our nation’s politics.

Snigger…an Obama squeaker…what shit. He is a shameless hack, when he predicted a Romney 325-213 win it was a “landslide,” but a 332-206 Obama win is a “squeaker.” I mean WTF?

Some one who is paid to analyse polls and comment as though he is wise and all knowing who gets things so wrong and then shamelessly spins even more crap should be sacked…and ignored.

Nate Silver was a legend before the US elections, now he a super legend and so people are re-writing the Chuck Norris meme. Nate Silver was also prepared to back himself with a bet against a journalist from the NY Times.

Adored or despised during the campaign, depending on how you felt about his robust certainty that President Obama would serve a second term; fingered as an Obama-loving ideologue who fudged the data by stacking the algorithmic scales; and then derided by MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough as a joke for failing to call the election a toss-up when it was—clearly! —a toss-up, Silver ended up kicking sand in the eyes of all the political jocks rooting against a political future where bloodless number crunching would replace bloody partisan opining.

And while his very public $2,000 bet on Twitter with Scarborough that math would beat intuition struck the Times as indecorous (and viewed by some in the media as reckless), it may well be the easiest money Silver ever made. You always bet on the math, especially when you know the other guy doesn’t really know math the way you know math.

Nate Silver’s approach has been vindicated and he is a one man traffic machine for the New York Times, watch this video as he explains the polls:

Obama has won the US Presidential election. The results are pretty much in line with what Nate Silver predicted (chart below). In the end it was not neck and neck and people really need to understand that it is the Electoral College that matters not Rasmussen polls.

Leighton Smith graciously rang to concede for our bet just after 6pm. We have agreed on the location for the lunch which we will both enjoy. We are yet to agree on a date dur to overlapping commitments but it will be in the next two weeks.

For those rabid frothing wierdos who dissed me for my assessment of the election, you can use the comments to eat humble pie.

In the meantime I have found a video of the 100 best maniacal laughs to entertain you.

Will Leighton Smith be paying for Lunch on Friday or will I?

Use this post to discuss the US election today.

Nate Silver’s prediction, but bear in mind this is the chance of winning not the result. There is still a chance Mitt Romney can pull a Reagan, but Nate Silver thinks that chance is only 9.1%

RealClearPolitics have a live and interactive election results site.

Not according to Nate Silver, and here is the math behind that:

There were 22 polls of swing states published Friday. Of these, Mr. Obama led in 19 polls, and two showed a tie. Mitt Romney led in just one of the surveys, a Mason-Dixon poll of Florida.

Although the fact that Mr. Obama held the lead in so many polls is partly coincidental — there weren’t any polls of North Carolina on Friday, for instance, which is Mr. Romney’s strongest battleground state — they nevertheless represent powerful evidence against the idea that the race is a “tossup.” A tossup race isn’t likely to produce 19 leads for one candidate and one for the other — any more than a fair coin is likely to come up heads 19 times and tails just once in 20 tosses. (The probability of a fair coin doing so is about 1 chance in 50,000.)

Instead, Mr. Romney will have to hope that the coin isn’t fair, and instead has been weighted to Mr. Obama’s advantage. In other words, he’ll have to hope that the polls have been biased in Mr. Obama’s favor.

1 in 50,000 is not good odds. Nate then discusses possibilities of errors in polling caused by statistical sampling errors and time factors involving snapshot polls. He explains how his model and other polling companies account for those errors. Then he discusses the biggest allegation about polling, that of bias:

This introduces the possibility that most of the pollsters could err on one or another side — whether in Mr. Obama’s direction, or Mr. Romney’s. In a statistical sense, we would call this bias: that the polls are not taking an accurate sample of the voter population. If there is such a bias, furthermore, it is likely to be correlated across different states, especially if they are demographically similar. If either of the candidates beats his polls in Wisconsin, he is also likely to do so in Minnesota.

The FiveThirtyEight forecast accounts for this possibility. Its estimates of the uncertainty in the race are based on how accurate the polls have been under real-world conditions since 1968, and not the idealized assumption that random sampling error alone accounts for entire reason for doubt.

To be exceptionally clear: I do not mean to imply that the polls are biased in Mr. Obama’s favor. But there is the chance that they could be biased in either direction. If they are biased in Mr. Obama’s favor, then Mr. Romney could still win; the race is close enough. If they are biased in Mr. Romney’s favor, then Mr. Obama will win by a wider-than-expected margin, but since Mr. Obama is the favorite anyway, this will not change who sleeps in the White House on Jan. 20.

My argument, rather, is this: we’ve about reached the point where if Mr. Romney wins, it can only be because the polls have been biased against him. Almost all of the chance that Mr. Romney has in the FiveThirtyEight forecast, about 16 percent to win the Electoral College, reflects this possibility.

Yes, of course: most of the arguments that the polls are necessarily biased against Mr. Romney reflect little more than wishful thinking.

So what about the claim that it is a toss-up:

Nevertheless, these arguments are potentially more intellectually coherent than the ones that propose that the race is “too close to call.” It isn’t. If the state polls are right, then Mr. Obama will win the Electoral College. If you can’t acknowledge that after a day when Mr. Obama leads 19 out of 20 swing-state polls, then you should abandon the pretense that your goal is to inform rather than entertain the public.

But the state polls may not be right. They could be biased. Based on the historical reliability of polls, we put the chance that they will be biased enough to elect Mr. Romney at 16 percent.