His methodology is pretty crazy; he's used historical data from all the pollsters from the tail end of the last few election cycles to rate them, and uses that to weight poll results; he has a regression model for each of the battleground states that he uses to reconcile polling results with on-the-ground reality; he uses monte carlo simulations to give percentage odds on who's going to win in each state. It's pornographic.
Sean Quinn's state-by-state tour of the ground operations of the two campaigns is also fascinating. Obama apparently has 2-1 and 3-1 field office advantages in the battleground states, and his offices are open 7 days a week; McCain's are a ghost town.
Nate Silver was recently on Colbert, also worth watching:
"Reading the polls, most pundits predicted she’d win Indiana by five points and noted she’d narrowed the gap with Obama in North Carolina to just eight.
Silver, who was writing anonymously as “Poblano” and receiving about 800 visits a day, disagreed with this consensus. He’d broken the numbers down demographically and come up with a much less encouraging outcome for Clinton: a two-point squeaker in Indiana, and a seventeen-point drubbing in North Carolina. On the night of the primaries, Clinton took Indiana by one and lost North Carolina by fifteen. The national pundits were doubly shocked: one, because the results were so divergent from the polls, and two, because some guy named after a chili pepper had predicted the outcome better than anyone else."
It will be great to see how his model stacks up against reality on election night.
He just started last year, but over time I bet he's going to discover things about politics that have been overlooked (in the same way Billy Bean found out OBP was overlooked).
As an independent, I would be extremely bummed if I was never allowed to travel or live in any of the blue states (on the site page). Can't say the same for the red states.
It's probably a lot of things. Some of it was that McCain (as with Obama before him) had gotten a short bump from his convention. So he was a little higher than he should be for a brief point there, as all politicians usually are after their party's convention.
Palin energized the base at first during the convention, and certainly got a flood of media attention, but then she scared off moderates, especially the women she was hoped to bring in. They've overwhelmingly decided she's not fit to be President (the numbers are so big that even a very significant % of people who will vote for them think that).
Then there's the economy. It's pretty easy for the Democrats to point out that the Clinton years were very good. Taxes on the wealthy were higher than they were now, we had a budget surplus and national debt was under 5 trillion. Now we have a huge budget deficit and the debt has more than doubled.
In fairness, that's probably an oversimplification, as it's not all Bush's fault. But we Americans pretty much blame or credit the President, and, by extension, his Party, for everything good or bad.
So Obama's same message of McCain = Bush grew in effect. Then there were the debates (2 Presidential, 1 VP), where public opinion polls all concluded that Democrats won. Plus McCain's erratic behavior in choosing Palin, suspending his campaign, and introducing a new and not very conservative or detailed plan to buy up mortgages at a debate. He's giving off one signal after another that he's the inferior candidate.
So it's been more or less a symphony of destruction. Just one mistake after another on his part, combined with the economy.
It was the changing of the campaign narrative from being about all sorts of things to being solely about the economy in wake of the financial crisis. Barack Obama is widely viewed as being more sound on economic issues.
I think Palin is a big part of that dynamic, especially after the Paris Hilton line of attack. Say McCain had picked Romney, they could have been hammering away at the experience card on both foreign and economic policy. By picking Palin, McCain basically killed the experience campaign, especially when she started blathering in uncontrolled settings, and they've gyrated around ever since trying to find a compelling narrative without sufficient knowledge or experience to address the economic realities. As evidence, independents now break in a big way for Obama where they weren't prior to Palin.
EDIT: Just to be clear - Palin got the ball rolling downhill, after an initial and short bounce. The economy kicked it that much further.
Actually, no, the elbow in the curve is a little before the bailout crisis. It corresponds roughly with the first debate and with Palin's more or less disastrous interviews with Gibson and Couric. What seems to have happened since is a feedback reaction.
What I'm hearing is that the economic crisis is the cause. When polled for "keywords", people vote the economy at 55% and the rest of the issues are in single digits. The economy went up as a major issue as McCain's numbers went down.
In general, McCain should be at double-digits according to most of the fundamentals. I'm amazed that it is as close as it is.
Sorry. I meant the fundamentals indicate McCain should be way down in the weeds. Specifically:
- One party president for last 8 years
- Republican dealing with major economic crisis
- Low approval ratings on everybody in Washington. McCain is not Change Candidate
- Dems are outspending McCain by a factor of something like 3-to-1. (probably a debatable ratio, depending on how you count. No argument that Obama has his own satellite station playing campaign commercials, his own 1/2 hour special on all major channels, did not take fed money, etc)
You're forgetting RNC spending which draws the money comp much closer. Also, 538 is really good at reviewing the respective ground games. Obama built a powerful organization during the primaries (he had to) and they've kept on building. I wouldn't be surprised to see Obama ahead of his polls by three or four points in the final counts.
On the "should be" line, let's just reflect for a minute that America, after 8 years of a ranch farmhand, is about to elect a black technocrat with a Muslim name as POTUS. There's no "should be" for that scenario. It's utterly amazing.
"On the "should be" line, let's just reflect for a minute that America, after 8 years of a ranch farmhand, is about to elect a black technocrat with a Muslim name as POTUS. There's no "should be" for that scenario. It's utterly amazing."
I'm a little more cynical than that. I think once you realize the president is just some idiot that we use for a single-point-of-decision-making and scape goat for stuff, and that just about any idiot can and has done it, the particulars of the idiot in question are not that interesting.
But my opinion is post-partisan. I can completely understand folks getting excited about their guy and angry about the other guy -- that's the way the system is supposed to work.
It's not a popular thing to say, but I imagine we're going to see a lot of reverse-racism in this election: folks voting for the black guy because it makes them feel good. Sort of to help settle the civil rights score. I don't say that in any way to disparage Obama, simply to profile the voters. It will be interesting, if he wins, to see how he does once he has been president for four years and is no longer unique or can run as an outsider.
the president is just some idiot that we use for a single-point-of-decision-making and scape goat
Call me naive, but I like to think that this is the degenerate state of the office in question. It can be so much more, and not in the "opaque unitary executive" sense for which it has been abused lately.
Look at it this way -- the founders set the system up assuming everybody would try to game it. The system is built on the fact that the president will overreach, the congress will be fractious, etc. It is built assuming checks and balances are needed, not that only great people will serve.
Perhaps putting it that way is a little better for you? In my mind, the president is first and foremost an average citizen who is called upon to do some work for the country for a few years. I think if we forget the "average" part of that equation, we start expecting more and more of the office and crossing the line into hero worship. If the president becomes a hero or in any way messianic, we've lost the true meaning of the office. The point is that we're all qualified. It's a democracy.
Can we have presidents that we think did great jobs? Sure. But that immediately gets into opinion, which is politics by any other name. My great president is the night watchman, making sure the nation is safe but staying aloof. Perhaps yours is the architect, designing our society of tomorrow, etc. (Substitute various opinions of "good" and "bad" here) I'm not going to accept your position, nor your mine. So we vote on those poor schmucks that are big-headed enough to think they can do the job better than the rest of us.
If you think about it, it's a great system. It allows lots of conflict without violence, it allows one person to stand for all the ills of the nation, it promotes competitiveness among the parties to solve problems. It even gives those who require it heroes to worship.
Having to accumulate over 80-100 million votes waters down the candidates and their policies. But the closest alternative would be a prime minister and right now that slot would get filled by Pelosi or Reid. That's far worse, especially since before that would have been DeLay or Hastert.
The masses seem to do a pretty decent job in that light.
Despite Obama's clear understanding of technology, I'm not sure a lawyer/career politician can qualify as a technocrat. Hu Jintao is a technocrat. Barack Obama just has good technology policy. But yeah, it's pretty amazing. It might be enough to restore the rest of the world's faith in America.
I know I wouldn't be surprised to see Hughes running the "Google for Government" initiative. That proposal is a huge step forward in transparency and accountability that any technocrat could love. The proposed technology czar is also really cool. How about Woz as a cabinet member?
It's a probability estimate. There is no reality to which it corresponds - that's the popular vote and electoral college projections. And there I expect the model will do exceedingly well, as it did during the primaries.
How is it easier? FiveThirtyEight has all that electoral-vote does and a lot more. You can just go and check the map, but you can also see a lot more data.
You know what really caused the change in polling numbers, in my opinion? People just got used to seeing barack. It's like you meet a paralysed guy for the very first time. The first few times you are very consious of him being paralyed, and are all gingerly and careful with him. But after a while, you stop noticing it and you just speak to him normally and have fun with him.
I think that Barack is no longer the 'black guy running for president', people have stopped paying attention to his blackness and have started noticing the other stuff.
He's the cosby show of politics - after season 1, it was not really important anymore what color they were.
538 is pretty awesome, and Nate was doing great work even when people thought he was named after a pepper (he went by "Poblano" for a short period of time to maintain anonymity).
However, seeing this posted by pg makes me think that this is the post that people will point to as an excuse for posting politics on YC.
>However, seeing this posted by pg makes me think that this is the post that people will point to as an excuse for posting politics on YC.
This is election silly season... things will calm down after Obama wins next month. At least until there is more info about his proposal to eliminate the capital gains tax for startups.
Well, I can appreciate that this is "election silly season"... I'm very politically active for one of the candidates; I just think that politics is a very touchy subject. It can cause deep divisions amongst people who would otherwise get along just fine.
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/03/frequently-asked-ques...
His methodology is pretty crazy; he's used historical data from all the pollsters from the tail end of the last few election cycles to rate them, and uses that to weight poll results; he has a regression model for each of the battleground states that he uses to reconcile polling results with on-the-ground reality; he uses monte carlo simulations to give percentage odds on who's going to win in each state. It's pornographic.
Sean Quinn's state-by-state tour of the ground operations of the two campaigns is also fascinating. Obama apparently has 2-1 and 3-1 field office advantages in the battleground states, and his offices are open 7 days a week; McCain's are a ghost town.
Nate Silver was recently on Colbert, also worth watching:
http://blog.indecision2008.com/2008/10/08/the-colbert-report...