I’ve been watching ABC’s live stream on youtube - I don’t expect them to make any premature calls, but I haven’t heard them even mention the error bars or any proper projections.
Of course the science can only be so exact, but that’s what we have error bars for :-).
As for re-crunching the numbers, why not?
The timeline I’m used to from Austria is…
Sunday, 5 PM, last polling stations close
5 PM and three seconds: wildly inaccurate estimates based on exit polls shown on TV (it’s illegal to publish them earlier)
5:15: First estimates based on just the polling stations that closed early and already started counting.
From then on, they’d re-crunch the numbers every fifteen minutes. And they report on the error bars. Why shouldn’t they?
Population-wise, Austria falls between New Jersey and Michigan, so it’s not a problem of scale.
The actual percentages from the partial counts are only mentioned in the small print. And of course, the error bars start out huge and only shrink as time goes on.
Unlikely sure…but desperate people do desperate things. It’s not out of the realm of possibility for Mango Mousseolini to try a hail mary pass and meddle with electors directly.
The biggest problem with making predictions specifically at a county-by-county level is that a) there’s tons of the things, especially on the eastern side of the country, b) they inter-correlate in weird ways that makes them difficult to model in isolation, and c) the results at the county level are swingy enough from presidential election to presidential election that there’s really no sense in bothering to try to make such granular predictions because the error bars are going to be so big, especially since the overall result in the state at large is what’s actually important. And even there, polling and predictions based on past precedent will only get you so far. Presidential elections just don’t happen often enough, and have so many influencing factors whenever they do, that it’s really really tough to even build a reliable model that works at the state level. Really the best folks can do is say “well, this is an historically Democratic stronghold, so we’ll have to see how participation shapes up and who managed to get more of their voters to turn out”.
Just for an example from this election: Miami-Dade County in Florida is seen as a Democratic stronghold, but Biden’s sharp under-performance with the Cuban-American-heavy Latinx population there couldn’t have been captured at the network level by any extant polling or past-predictive mechanism, and the already-unreliable exit polling data that does feed into network prediction mechanisms is even more likely to be off the mark this year given the huge amount of mail-in and early voting that took place. If someone had tried to make a prediction for who would win that county and by how much, it would almost certainly have been wildly inaccurate.
Anyway, when networks can’t make their predictions with the necessary degree of certainty, they fall back on “too close/early to call” as their default, and just talk about who’s leading and where the vote count isn’t complete. With so many factors affecting the outcome from inaccurate estimation of totals to inaccurate polling to active voter suppression impacting certain demographics in unpredictable ways, it’s basically all they can do.
American presidential terms are two-thirds as long as Austrian presidential terms, and Austria is comparable in population to a many American states. So I know of no reason why projections should be particularly difficult in America. And anyway, no matter how hard it is to get a good statistical projection, it will always tell you at least as much as the raw numbers + guesses made by journalists. Science actually works.
And that confuses me. Why do they go straight from “we know nothing at all but keep talking anyway” to “we are now predicting with confidence that this state will go to X”? Can’t they sell the drama of the “most likely result” switching back and forth as the error bars get smaller?
Anyway, going to bed now. Still wishing all Americans good luck.
Normally that’s exactly how things go, but you’ve got two compounding issues; a) a radically higher number of mail-in ballots that take longer to process and in some states can’t be processed ahead of Election Day and b) the trauma of 2016. No one wants to get this wrong which is why Arizona is still not called by certain organizations even though it would take an act of god to change things there. One other compounding issue is that there isn’t enough precedent to predict mail-in ballots even though they are leaning heavily Democrat. The only frame of reference for prediction is what’s trickled in over the past couple of weeks.
I mean, yeah it’s a big disappointment in the sense that it will make life difficult for a progressive agenda, but what I meant is that 6+ months ago no one thought flipping the senate was even a possibility. The flood of incredible Dem candidates, extraordinary cash hauls and the collapse of the trump admin’s response to COVID and the economic impact gave everyone a rosier picture of what was realistic.
do you live in Florida? do you know the Latinx demographic in this state? are you aware of, or intimate with, the multi-layered, non-monolithic voting blocs that are represented by Mexican, Dominican, Colombian, Venezuelan, Puerto Rican (among many other) and the (yes, very conservative) Cuban populations that make up the vastly diverse Latinx people of Florida?
that the (mostly) Cuban Rs went strongly for trump was ignorance. ignorance of any of the Dems actual policy proposals, instead trying to tie Biden (and Democratic candidates all down the ballot) to some cartoonish “socialist Castro commie anarchy” and it should be risible at best, but carried the day. the campaign ads here have been shallow buzz-word shite, just like anywhere, but the heavy hits in the Cubano areas appealed to a certain ignorance.
am I saying Cubans are ignorant? absolutely not!
did they vote for trump out of ignorance or hatred of other Latinx groups? I’d prefer to think the former, yet my own lived experience gives both answers equal weight.
As soon as they have vacated the White House, the Republicans will resume their obsession with the national debt and go back to “shutting down the government” again
They have a regular playbook, whether they’re in power or out
Covid won’t go away with 45; the increasing sickness & dying, & the detrimental impacts thereof will not make it possible to “just go back to business as usual.” Not that they won’t still try, mind you.
From what I read that you and others write, it seems that Florida Cubans are all wannabe caudillos, all invested in some idea that they are the Caribbean master race who should rightfully be ruling on that island. I hope it’s just appearances, because it does seem like a toxic culture.
Granted, the more garish attract more cameras, even European news reports tend to show them more because it makes for a more flashy narrative, but I am saddened to see that it wasn’t as much cherry-picking as I had hoped, that a huge part of America was so ignorant. It really is a weakness that the Republicans (and the current administration) have exacerbated, letting low-information people to remain low-information.
I think of these things during a rainy day here in Munich, where all over the city the scars left behind by the Nazi regime. Reminders of how people can all too easily be led astray, of how even to this day I have neighbours who state that not everything Hitler did was bad.
We humans just aren’t good at dealing with parasites like Trump.
Bunbain, don’t forget coming in to watch the big sport or to get cancer treatment. It isn’t easy cramming half a million people into an area you can walk across in a day. Takes a lot of tolerance and respect and cooperation to make it work, and it’s by no measure perfect. Can you imagine if the hoard of trump supporters didn’t have their big yards to buffer them from themselves? It’d be the kind of shit show you read about in the bible all over again.
