
FiveThirtyEight.com: Electoral Projections Done Right - pg
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/
======
tptacek
You want to start at the FAQ:

[http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/03/frequently-asked-
ques...](http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/03/frequently-asked-questions-
last-revised.html)

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...](http://blog.indecision2008.com/2008/10/08/the-colbert-report-nate-
silver-predicts-barack-obama-to-win-the-election/)

~~~
jedc
Perhaps more important is the reputation he already built through predictions
on the primaries.

From a recent New York Magazine article here:
<http://nymag.com/news/features/51170/> on the Clinton/Obama primaries...

"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.

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fnazeeri
Nate Silver (the guy behind 538) is a pretty famous baseball statistician who
has applied his trade to politics and polling. It's politics for geeks.

I wrote more at <http://www.altgate.com/blog/2008/10/nate-silver---t.html>

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).

~~~
cosmo7
Funny, five minutes ago I was reading fivethirtyeight while watching the
Dodgers game and thinking that the two were somehow entwined.

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fallentimes
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.

~~~
rms
Austin is supposed to be pretty good.

~~~
fallentimes
It is. It feels like you're on another planet (relative to Texas).

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trapper
For non-americans, what happened a month ago (see supertracker) that caused
what looks like the start of a landslide for obama. Was it palin?

~~~
rms
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.

~~~
robg
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.

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antiismist
I'm still going to use electoral-vote.com to track the election, because it is
so much easier to see who is going to win and to check out the map.

The stats are of course interesting, but isn't it insane to have a "win
percentage" down to the tenth of a percent?

~~~
robg
Not when the WPCT is based on 10,000 state-by-state _daily_ simulations with
every new stream of polls included.

~~~
antiismist
I agree that the numbers reflect the model. But there is no way that the model
can fit reality that well. So it is a misleading number.

~~~
robg
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.

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maxklein
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.

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rms
<http://nymag.com/news/features/51170/> (print link at the bottom)

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icey
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.

~~~
rms
>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.

~~~
icey
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.

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ryanwaggoner
I'm addicted to this site.

