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?

-> 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

Do I cherry-pick myself?
Very well; I cherry-pick myself

is it really that hard to understand what "70% chance of winning" means? do we as adults really need (flawed) baseball and d&d comparisons to make this more intuitive?

it's actually not intuitive at all! people don't naturally think in probabilities

BREAKING

NATE SILVER SAYS IT CERTAINLY COULD TURN OUT TO BE THE CASE THAT THE STATE POLLS ARE SYSTEMATICALLY BIASED AGAINST ROMNEY

http://cdn.dealbreaker.com/uploads/2011/05/drudge-siren.gifWOO WOOO WOO WOO WOO WOO - WOOOooooooOOOooooooOOOOoooo - WOOWOOWOOWOOOWOOWOOhttp://cdn.dealbreaker.com/uploads/2011/05/drudge-siren.gif

But perhaps national polls tell the right story of the race instead — meaning that the state polls systematically overrate Mr. Obama’s standing?

It’s certainly possible. (It keeps me up late at night.)

NATE SILVER'S BAMBOOZLING OF DATA KEEPS HIM UP LATE AT NIGHT FILM AT 11

I hope Shakey will join me in dancing on Drudge's grave when the inevitable aneurism finally claims him

NATE SILVER'S VOICE IS HIGH AND HIS ARMS ARE SKINNY

WOOWOOWOOOWOOOWOO-WoooooOOOOOOOooooooOOOOOoWOOWOOWOOWOOOWOO

i'm assuming you all make the same sound effect when you see the drudge sirens

can we really trust a gay man's statistics in a straight man's world?

at this point the only drama nate can generate is drama over the validity of his figures. it's in the interest of his page views to say things like "i cherry pick data come at me mouth breathers"

do we as adults really need (flawed) ... d&d comparisons

fyi my dice comparison was not flawed maybe *you* need to brush up on your probabilities

he's talking about cherry-picking the examples for that one blog post, not the data for his model

"(flawed)" was only intended to modify the baseball part of the sentence, it was poorly phrased and i apologize

This should be renamed to the Nate Silver thread.

he casts a shadow like pitchfork on ilm threads

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/15/a-bayesian-take-on-julian-assange/ seems legit

haha someone linked to that the other day. wtf nate.

OBAMANIA: THE GATHERING

i.e. man this thread got weird

only on the internet: "to make this more understandable to the common man, imagine rolling a d10..."

On intuition vs probability, my favorite illustration is the Monty Hall Problem. You can make people do the math themselves, and they still won't believe it.

Obama hasn't tapped enough mana to be able to bring out his Wall of Dem GOTV, and his Biden artifact hasn't done much to stop Romney's endless supply of Rethuglican Imps. He should have used a different deck, IMO...

No surprise that Obama is using a rainbow deck, nor Romney sticking to a straight red one. His Rovian Dragon was surprisingly ineffective though...

Now, if we want to examine this from a GURPS lens....

ok I'll stop now.

GURPS ironically well suited to simulating political fights.

I'm not especially math-geeky, but Silver's probabilities make great sense to me in that he's not really stating the probability of a win or a loss for each candidate so much as he is evaluating the probability that the state-by-state polls are exactly correct, or if the actual voting outcome will fall to one side or the other of the polls' margins of error, then he is synthesizing all these probabilities in terms of electoral college outcomes, and finally correlating these electoral college outcomes with the win for either candidate.

So long as the polling margins of error allow a way for Romney to amass 270+ electoral college votes, there is a non-zero chance for Romney to win. At this time, that non-zero chance is roughly 22.6%, according to Silver's models. iow, that would be the quantum state of the election, if the election were Schrodinger's Cat.

did the numbers move apart dramatically in '08 (or '10 I guess)? I would assume that the percentages snowball as you get closer without any movement towards the underdog.

Obama basically never lost a 4+ (at least) point lead after September.

I mean in nate's model did it go from like 80 to 95% in the last week or so?

As I understand it, because the announced margins of error of the polls do not change as the election nears, if the polls theoretically kept producing unchanged results week after week, Nate's "win percentages" probably would stay static, too.

fwiw both votamatic and the princeton guy have obama at 90%+ to win, kinda curious where nates 25% is coming from, theres def not that much chance the polls will move to romney win in the next week, a lot of it has to be mistrusting the polls or some other mysterious thing

he hides behind flowers

nate's model includes non-poll economic measurements that 'predict the future' but that is slowly removed from the model as the election approaches. so even if the polls stay the same his numbers would be changing.

xp

but that is = but that are

ya but theres a week to go so that stuff shouldnt factor anymore

I mean the economy is not going to shift between now and the election

is that last job report supposed to come out friday? will nate silver have time to cook those numbers too?

just put the numbers in a pot nate

btw we are on a first name basis w this guy now

Nate Silver ‏@fivethirtyeight
7 polls released in Ohio in past 48 hours: Obama +2, Obama +3, Obama +3, Obama +3, Obama +5, Obama +5, Obama +5. #notthatcomplicated