Your next 2020 Democratic presidential primary thread: Now we're serious

You must feel a lot of relief that no one is going to force you to vote for Warren in the primary.

I think the dnc will have neutralized Bernie by then

It's possible, but I think it's just as likely that Bernie will win this thing.

neutralize him with millions of votes for other candidates.

The DNC has been a lot more succesful neutralizing Warren. If I was in Iowa, I would vote for Bernie.

OUR PRIMARY MODEL IS LIVE! https://t.co/JDz2dZ8bqR

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) January 9, 2020

science has determined the winner, all speculation is over

The DNC has been a lot more succesful neutralizing Warren

pretty sure Warren self-neutralized

looks like a brokered convention, cool

what could possibly go wrong

an outcome that all will enjoy

The DNC has been a lot more succesful neutralizing Warren.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say her break-up-big-tech plank is what put her in the crosshairs more than any of the stuff she overlaps with Bernie on

I think the wealth tax was a deal breaker? That seemed to be what a lot of donors focused on.

science has determined the winner, all speculation is over

it specifically doesn’t declare a winner....

:D i was trying to be funny

i'm in that "post-funny" stage of my career where i'm just making the jokes for myself

the whole "If we ran this model 100 times, X would win 70 times and lose 30 times" thing makes sense if you're talking about a football game, but sounds kind of nonsensical if you're talking about an election.

What kinds of things does the DNC do to neutralize candidates?

x-post: Eh, no it does not, not in any way. There's no difference?

he's talking about american football, fred

Oh, okay. Sorry.

the whole "If we ran this model 100 times, X would win 70 times and lose 30 times" thing makes sense if you're talking about a football game, but sounds kind of nonsensical if you're talking about an election.

― Muswell Hillbilly Elegy (President Keyes), Thursday, January 9, 2020 11:49 AM (ten minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

hm, not sure I follow. prediction of any future event is by nature probabilistic. what’s the alternative?

Hm, is it that sports teams play against each other multiple times during a season so it seems both easier and more useful to calculate a probability score vs an election where these people only compete against each other once? (The structure of primaries does turn it into 50 contests, though.)

If you had two teams play a game in 100 alternate universes there would be different outcomes based on decisions made during the game/luck etc., whereas if you ran the 2016 election in 100 universes I really don't see it coming out with a Hillary victory 30 times out of 70--you have the same set of voters.

also the outcome of a sports game does not matter

like if Trump sprained an ankle on election day it wouldn't change anything

I don't feel like Warren running behind requires any hypothesis of DNC intervention. Warren is the one my gut most responds to, and I don't feel like I'm a particularly representative Democratic voter, quite the opposite in fact, so why would the person I like best be winning?

I'm referring to how Nate Silver talks about his model--he has said that if we ran the 2016 election 100 times Hillary would have won 70% of the time

That is a bit weird, since Nate Silver is prominently a Bayesian probabilist, where it has more to do with certainty and knowledge than it has to do with frequency.

If you had two teams play a game in 100 alternate universes there would be different outcomes based on decisions made during the game/luck etc., whereas if you ran the 2016 election in 100 universes I really don't see it coming out with a Hillary victory 30 times out of 70--you have the same set of voters.

― Muswell Hillbilly Elegy (President Keyes), Thursday, January 9, 2020 12:10 PM (ten minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I think the point you’re trying to make is that predicting elections, particularly this far in advance, is more difficult that predicting a game, but the same principles of probability apply. there are lots of unknowns — it can’t be said that the same result will occur if the election were held today vs november

I can really recommend his book, The Signal and the Noise. He writes a lot about exactly this question.

seems like primary predictions are inherently more volatile than GE predictions because of a) the relative scarcity and volatility of primary polls, and b) lower turnout for primaries

she only lost her three closest states in 2016 by a combined 85,00 votes. If 85,000 hillary voters sprained their ankles that morning (or decided not to vote due to another chance event) that would have determined the result of the election.

*boots up time machine*

so she would have 85,000 fewer votes?

the makeup of an electorate on any given day is affected by many random factors

then why even make predictions?
maybe a bunch of Biden voters will eat bad fish

why even make predictions?

new "i hate politics" board description

has anyone checked to see if there are any NCIS marathons running on key primary/caucus dates

inshallah

why even make predictions?

new "i hate politics" board description

Contrary to vast amounts of observable banter in most political discussions, politics is not about predicting election results, but about governance, especially how tax revenues are generated and distributed. But governance, especially how tax revenues are generated and distributed, is an opaque topic, subjected to the influence of thousands of highly varied interests and opinions, making it extremely messy and uncertain to discuss or predict. Election horse-race banter is more direct and emotionally satisfying.

so its less like predicting sports and more like predicting the weather

Hey they said it would rain this afternoon and it didn't weather forecasters are clueless amirite

when my elbow hurts I know there a Biden vote squall coming

"solidarity with the hotties for bernie movement" tweets just floated into my timeline and 1) why, and 2) where are the hotties, all I've seen so far is a parade of dudes solidly in the 4 - 6 range

Worst parade ever.

Sounds more like a pub crawl?

sounds like my Saturday night

I'd rather that we didn't memory-hole the fact that Nate Silver's "30% chance for Trump to win" was significantly higher than every other estimate (that I know of, and I was paying a lot of attention). And some of it was because he was factoring in the unprecedentedly large number of people who were still answering "Don't know" up to the last minute.

I mean, I suspect they were largely "Do know, don't like the answer", but if you assumed that they'd actually toss a coin or whatever on the day, that's a reasonable basis for Nate Silver's statement.

marianne out