Remember it’s also not just about whether or not Biden wins, his margin of victory could well make a real difference in whether or not we get a peaceful transition of power. Fewer people will question the legitimacy of his election if he wins by a lot than if he wins by a little.
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Um, why would that be the case?
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If there’s a big win or a small win, I can only imagine a period of headache and strife working through/despite conservative narratives of fraud or “they were signing up felons to vote” or such, with a sympathetic supreme court standing by.
I hope you can find some calm. Self care is important.
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I can easily imagine people who don’t understand how polling and statistics work responding to a Trump victory by saying “Aha! This proves Nate Silver doesn’t know what he’s talking about!”
For people who actually do care about polling and statistics work, I don’t most of them abandoning Nate Silver unless the actual models he used to arrive at his forecast are shown to be fundamentally flawed.
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I’d vote again, but I think that may cause some problems.
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The odds of drawing an inside straight in poker is around 9% - about the same odds Trump had in 2016 and again this year.
While no sane person would ever stake their life savings on drawing an inside straight to win, drawing one twice in a row is even more far fetched. However, knowing how statistics work gives me no solace as the odds don’t actually change in between hands so it’s still 9% no matter what.
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Because it will be TWO major elections in which he was mathematically descriptive, and yet dead wrong on the outcome, and so math will no longer matter. Not because I believe this - I am a statistician, myself - but because that’s what will happen. Everything will be upside down. Nate, as much as I love what he does, will become irrelevant because US politics defies reason.
HE BETTER BE RIGHT DAMMIT. I’m sick of this bullshit. Math needs to matter. I’m sick of scoundrels getting away with their evil plans.
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There won’t be a peaceful transition.
Unless Trump wins, he’ll contest the election, hold rallies, invite violence. He’ll burn the country to the ground all the way to Jan 20 and the only thing that will stop him is if the military stops listening to him on that date.
The military will stop listening to him if you vote to have them stop listening to him. So vote.
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I meant it in the sense that if something is frightening, you should be afraid of it (and hopefully brave enough to cope), rather than just ignoring it and hoping it will go away.
It’s easy to fall into thinking of elections as a reset button – whatever horrible reality the last election revealed, it will all be fine if the next one goes my way. But of course, a 51% Turmp victory is no different to a 49% Turmp defeat in what it says about the country. A true win would be if someone like Turmp couldn’t get more than 10% of votes, and that’s not even on the ballot yet.
Obviously at election time the priority is to vote so hard you poop yourself. And winning does matter. But it doesn’t matter as much as what goes on the rest of the time, at the personal scale. There’s all kinds of small gradual ways you can influence those in your neighborhood who threaten to vote Republican at you.
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At what point in 2016? On the eve of the election Fivethirtyeight gave him a 29% chance of winning. As we’ve all been saying he’s obviously still got a chance of winning again this year, but I haven’t seen any modeling that suggests that his odds are the same as they were the last time around.
Also, it seems that I jinxed it when I took the screen shot of his 9% chance and now he’s up to 10% again. I’ll just go ahead and go back to full panic mode for at least the next 48 hours or so.
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Definitely. There are many ways we can act. Attending protests, organizing, creating political art…
It’s important to make fascism socially unacceptable at all levels.
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“I’m Here To Remind You That Trump Can Still Win”
I’m here to remind Nate Silver that saying this two days before the election isn’t going to save him any grief if Trump does win.
He knew what the game was when he started playing!
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The problem is the basis for these scientific-looking percentages are polls. I see nothing in the methodology of those polls that gives me confidence they are truly representative of the population.
Are Trump supporters are more or less likely to reject calls they don’t recognize on caller ID? Cell phone numbers have to be manually dialed by law, if I am not mistaken, not bot-dialed, so does that skew the numbers into more responses from people who don’t use cell phones?. Are Trump supporters more or less apt to patiently sit through polling activities? They certainly seem to lean more toward the paranoid. Who knows?
The numbers give a false sense of certainty when the data that underlies them relies completely on human behavior and psychology, i.e. the patently unpredictable.
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Maybe I missed you linking to it Rob…but Silver also posted this in the article titles, “Trump can still win, but the polls would have to be way off…”
I agree…it’s possible Nostradumbass can still win. Fivethoryeight puts the odds at 90% in Biden’s favor and 10% in the toddler-in-chief’s favor. There is a chance. But a bunch of things would need to be off…the polls would have to be WAY off even after they corrected/fixed issues from 2016 polling. Additionally, the numbers for early voting have clearly favored Biden as while the voters aren’t counted yet, the majority of early voters were registered Democrat voters.
Possible is not the same as not likely. And this by no means predicts how close or distant the final tally will be.
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I think there’s value in trying to quantify some of the received wisdom about voters & elections, BUT I think there will never be a data set large enough to actually test the validity of their predictive models. In sports there are hundreds, if not thousands of games every year to build models, all playing (roughly) the same game. There is not and will not be anything like that data set when it comes to national politics, and I think anyone who pretends otherwise is fooling themselves or selling snake oil.
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This strikes me as more
“This time I’m NOT letting you guys get away with all this ‘Nate Silver was wrong about 2016’ bullshit from last time, aight, Twitter, you dipshits?!? I know you won’t read my well-reasoned defenses after, so I’m frontloading here”
– N. Silver
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I came from Bay Ridge uNtil 8 y/o. Grew up after that iN South Tampa, theN moved to BostoN. I doN’t associate with Europe, but people look at me aNd thiNk “white male” aNd make a buNch of assumptioNs, regardless of my efforts to help otherwise.
ANd my keyboard is workiNg just fiNe.
