I am beginning to become scared that Romney/Ryan will win. Can smart people please post here and say reassuring things to convince me that he won't?

I was waiting for the Red Cross punchline in that NBC report, but it never came. Beyond being journalistically irresponsible, it also tacitly encouraged people to make donations to the Red Cross that the Red Cross neither needs nor wants.

xp

maybe he can deliver the unwanted food to them on the unwanted ships he builds for the navy

Haven't kept up today--did Romney get hammered on his FEMA statements from the debate?

Nate Silver still has Obama up with ~77% to take the electoral college, the only thing that actually matters.

Late game polling that shows dead heats is, IMO, mostly a way for cable news to drum up ratings.

Also their probably not polling people who have cast early ballots, which I'd imagine takes out a big chunk of Obama supporters who have already voted for Obama...

*they're... the ineffable THEM!

this is a lot of bad polls for Romney in a hurry it seems like

early voting has been split pretty evenly i think

conservatives flipping out at silver/poll aggregation are of course losing it hard, but let me put it in perspective anyway

if i gave you only 70-75% chance of keeping your job past next week, would you not say you were in significant danger of getting canned? i mean, shit. romney's course is uphill but his chances aren't bad at all.

A couple weeks ago I saw a stat that said ~80 of early voters were young voters, women, african-americans, latinos or a combination of those demographics... But I guess those were the real early-bird early voters. Still accounted for like 3 million votes.

really interested to see what Silver does to the percentage after these polls though

if i gave you only 70-75% chance of keeping your job past next week, would you not say you were in significant danger of getting canned?

yes because i understand basic statistics and probability

hahaha was just gonna say

i was having trouble forming a response to that

'job security' for elected officials and everyone else is apples and oranges, h8 when people throw around those analogies as if they're meaningful

well right, i was just trying to give that % chance something other than "it must be a huge lie"

his chances of winning are pretty bad though

What are you talking about, Romney has a better chance of winning this than 99.9% of all people ever!

I started thinking about Silver's 70-30 split in terms of baseball. Or even 75-25; if a lifetime .250 hitter gets a hit, you're not shocked or anything. So low probability, yes (if Silver's right, and I'm sure he is), but Romney winning would be like Curtis Granderson getting a hit, or flipping two consecutive heads.

Doping might account for recent Romney gains.

Taking Sides: Mitt Romney or Curtis Granderson

If Silver moves to 80/20, then we're into Mario Mendoza/Adam Dunn territory, and yes, it's a shock when those guys get a hit.

oh good – baseball talk!

Yeah except even great hitters only get a hit 30-35% of the time so really that's not a good comparison.

Flawed, agreed. Let's not agitate Alfred any further.

I like thinkign about romney's VORP

baseball averages aren't exactly the same thing as probabilities either

They vary from year to year--.280 one year, .310 the next--so they're different that way, but as a snapshot, aren't they the same? If a .250 hitter steps to the plate after a large enough sample of at-bats, doesn't he have a 1 in 4 chance of getting a hit?

2 possible ways to visualize/make intuitive a 70% chance of winning

-> if there were an election every day for ten days, w/ the result every day independent of that of the previous day obama would win 7 days, and romney 3
-> on election day, God rolls a 10-sided die (7 sides obama, 3 sides romney)

Same thing. If Romney wins 3 out of every 10 days, a win on any one day wouldn't be shocking.

i love that this has taken a baseball turn now.

no, a .250 average doesn't mean that a player has a 1 in 4 chance of getting a hit, because walks don't count toward it, sacrifice flies don't, etc

I like to think of it as 10 parallel scifi universes, stuff happens that makes romney win 3 of them

i prefer to think of it as Romney has a 70% chance of losing

that's not a bad way of putting it (xpost)

we will figure out which one of those scifi universes we live in soon, but there are currently some unknowns like things that will happen over the week, the gotv, base motivation, maybe there were some polling biases - if we already knew all those things right now we would know which scifi universe we live in, but if you consider what we do know it's more likely that we live in one of those 7 than one of the other 3

Obama is like The Artist, and Romney is Hugo.

Okay--1 in 4 on a ball that's either a hit or out. Less if you count all possible outcomes. Anyway, my main point is that if it's a 75% chance of Obama winning, a Romney win would be somewhat surprising but not even close to shocking.

ftr i understand statistics but a romney win would shock me to the core

i'm fuzzy on this but iirc all models hope to approximate true randomness (the die thing), that's the only time where statistics work, and its still a ratio in aggregate, how close baseball averages or nate silver get to true randomness is a question for statistics. xposts

actually silvers model is prob based on simulations (the 10 days thing)

-> on election day, God rolls a 10-sided die (7 sides obama, 3 sides romney)
― flopson

If we're gonna go the AD&D route, we have to consider modifiers. Does God have to roll a Sandy response check and add a +1 incumbent mod?

yeah silver runs like 100,000 simulations for his numbers

http://www.nydailynews.com/polopoly_fs/1.1178383!/img/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_370/image.jpg

ftr i understand statistics but a romney win would shock me to the core

Probably because you've seen Mitt Romney speaking, and thinking, and laughing, and doing other Mitt Romney things. The numbers can never adequately contain his Mitt Romneyness.

xp LOL at Obama being drawn w/ classic evil cartoon eyes.

tbh i think sandy is going to give obes even more of a poll boost in key states before tuesday.

OBES

http://www.zillow.com/blog/files/2011/12/Lagasse_Photo.jpg

http://cdn.dealbreaker.com/uploads/2011/05/drudge-siren.gifBREAKINGhttp://cdn.dealbreaker.com/uploads/2011/05/drudge-siren.gif

http://cdn.dealbreaker.com/uploads/2011/05/drudge-siren.gifNATE SILVER CHERRY-PICKING DATA, SAYS, "YES, I AM DELIBERATELY CHERRY-PICKING"http://cdn.dealbreaker.com/uploads/2011/05/drudge-siren.gif

http://cdn.dealbreaker.com/uploads/2011/05/drudge-siren.gifhttp://cdn.dealbreaker.com/uploads/2011/05/drudge-siren.gifhttp://cdn.dealbreaker.com/uploads/2011/05/drudge-siren.gif

8th paragraph down

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/31/oct-30-what-state-polls-suggest-about-the-national-popular-vote/?hp

of course i'm totally being a facetious smartass but still he might not want to use those words when the barbarians are at the gate