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Electoral College Decision Tree

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Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#121

Post by pwinnski »

protomyth wrote: post #40
weakfish wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought 538 was one of the few outlets to give Trump a decent chance? Granted, I was 16 but I seem to remember that being the case.

They gave Trump 28.6 which was beyond problematic. You can give baseball analogies but they were wrong. All that bad polling lead into people believing some really dumb things about the election. They've published several articles since then on why the polling is better now. Heck, even their article on being more bullish was tepid. The pre-election article they wrote[1] should have made them actually examine what the…

> They gave Trump 28.6 which was beyond problematic

How was that problematic?

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#122

Post by lastofthemojito »

MeinBlutIstBlau wrote: post #113
s_gangopadhyay wrote: post #45

I travel to "flyover" cities pretty much every other week, and I think the polls got it wrong again. Because of my transient nature and the fact that I'm neither black nor white, my coworkers and clients tend to speak more freely with me regarding politics. My conclusion is that the BLM/rioters have really screwed over Biden, and that not only will Trump win, he'll win by a landslide victory. This is all assuming the…

They predict my state will vote biden which...baffles me. My state has only voted blue for obama the first time he ran. Other than that, since bush, it has been red. I'm assuming they are either polling white liberals in the major cities, or they just ignored the electoral college voting records. I really think they have a bias that a democrat governor got elected somehow means people don't like trump here. No they j…

I don't pretend to know whether Trump will win Wisconsin or not. I did recently read the NYT piece entitled The Relentless Shrinking of Trump’s Base [0], which at least seems somewhat data driven. Obviously, the characterization of "White voters without college degrees" as the Trump base is certainly a very rough approximation, but using their demographic groupings, they estimate that the Trump coalition shrunk by 48,000 since 2016, and the "Biden coalition" grew by 140,000. This in a state that Trump won by less than 23,000 votes.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/10/22/us/politics/t...

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#123

Post by dillondoyle »

dragontamer wrote: post #81
DennisP wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's going to be a fun toy on election night, as state results come in.

> election night, as state results come in. Not this year. With mail-in ballots, the ballots won't necessarily be finalized until a week or more after the election. Its necessary due to COVID19. But it will be until multiple days after the election before we know the true winner. A large number of states will certainly be called on election night (because many states, such as California, are far from competitive). Bu…

If we smash Florida and have enough data in Penn it will be called quick.

Despite Florida being one of the worst most disgusting states in terms of suppressing the vote - DeSantis allowed county supervisors to start counting mail ballots basically immediately.

Over 3.3 million have already returned ballots and 1.3 have already voted in person.

Pennsylvania on the other hand... I don't think they can count ballots until after polls close.

But maybe we get lucky and there are enough in person votes, the margin is big, and polling shows no drastic changes in VBM then it will get called.

Even without Pennsylvania if Trump loses Florida and then loses the midwest, doesn't flip Nevada etc it will be called quick.

Basically I'm looking at Florida asap and very very worried about it...

I would have bet Trump was ahead 8 weeks ago. Now I think maybe Biden by a point or two max.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#124

Post by dillondoyle »

dragontamer wrote: post #55
greenpizza13 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so terrifying. If you start giving Trump states which are tossups, like FL, the others which were tossups begin to lean red. Choose red for those and you're done. At that point you're in 2016 territory. We have an extremely broken election system.

You're not thinking like a pollster. Florida is currently projected to be Biden's win. So what happens if Trump wins Florida? It means the polls were wrong. Which means, you'd have to reconsider the state-polls in all the other states with that new information: that the country is slightly redder than polls today suggest. If Trump wins Florida, then there's a "hidden vote", so to speak, that's pushing Trump's victory…

The polls aren't wrong and the state polls in 2016 weren't on the whole wrong either - one problem is there were too few.

Right now there are a tons of Florida polls and they are basically all within the margin right now.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#125

Post by wtallis »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #115
wtallis wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But it's inherently impossible to know how prevalent that phenomenon is. There was a lot of analysis after the 2016 election cycle about the "shy Trump voter" hypothesis, and it really didn't hold up, and continues to not hold up with under the data available from this election cycle. It is completely unreasonable to postulate that the effect would be drastically bigger this year, after four years of Trump actually…

First: There are lots of "shy" voters. I'm one. I do not have time in my life for every opinion poll that calls me to take 5 or 10 or 20 minutes of my time. Even more so when some of them are push polls. No. Just go away. You'll find out what I think when I vote. Now, do people like me lean one way? "Get out of my face and leave me alone" people might plausibly lean toward Trump, but I wouldn't be dogmatic about it.…

> Now, do people like me lean one way? "Get out of my face and leave me alone" people might plausibly lean toward Trump, but I wouldn't be dogmatic about it. Even more, I wouldn't claim that it's statistically significant.

The "shy Trump voter" hypothesis is not that there are lots of people who won't answer polls, but that there's a bias in the response rate and truthfulness of the responses received, and that pollsters are not able to accurately correct for that bias. So whether or not you answer polls doesn't speak to the validity or plausibility of that hypothesis. What is relevant is only the bit you say "might plausibly lean toward Trump"; clearly, your a priori opinion of that hypothesis is also fairly low.

> We've had four years of the media relentlessly telling us how stupid, evil, and wrong Trump is, and how stupid and racist all his supporters are. We've seen the media twist the facts to support this narrative.

You're talking specifically about the media that Trump supporters largely avoid watching and do not give any credence to. There's plenty of other evidence that Trump voters aren't ashamed of publicly expressing their support, and not much reason to believe that they would be much more shy about it when answering polls than when going about their daily lives.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#126

Post by Simulacra »

dragontamer wrote: post #55
greenpizza13 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so terrifying. If you start giving Trump states which are tossups, like FL, the others which were tossups begin to lean red. Choose red for those and you're done. At that point you're in 2016 territory. We have an extremely broken election system.

You're not thinking like a pollster. Florida is currently projected to be Biden's win. So what happens if Trump wins Florida? It means the polls were wrong. Which means, you'd have to reconsider the state-polls in all the other states with that new information: that the country is slightly redder than polls today suggest. If Trump wins Florida, then there's a "hidden vote", so to speak, that's pushing Trump's victory…

What will be more interesting is when the polls are wrong again on election day,

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#128

Post by Simulacra »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #115
wtallis wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But it's inherently impossible to know how prevalent that phenomenon is. There was a lot of analysis after the 2016 election cycle about the "shy Trump voter" hypothesis, and it really didn't hold up, and continues to not hold up with under the data available from this election cycle. It is completely unreasonable to postulate that the effect would be drastically bigger this year, after four years of Trump actually…

First: There are lots of "shy" voters. I'm one. I do not have time in my life for every opinion poll that calls me to take 5 or 10 or 20 minutes of my time. Even more so when some of them are push polls. No. Just go away. You'll find out what I think when I vote. Now, do people like me lean one way? "Get out of my face and leave me alone" people might plausibly lean toward Trump, but I wouldn't be dogmatic about it.…

I would not dream of telling a pollster anything about my vote. I’m voting for Trump, but I don’t talk about it because I don’t wanna be canceled and my life destroyed by the mob.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#129

Post by Simulacra »

jedberg wrote: post #110
SllX wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only way I’m on board with DC representation is if we give it to Maryland. Maryland would in effect gain a House seat during the next redistricting after. Easier solution? Kill the cap on the House seats. Doesn’t require a constitutional amendment, doesn’t make a State out of DC (although I’m still onboard with returning it to Maryland, there is precedent for this as DC used to have part of Virginia), and it evens ou…

If you combine DC and Maryland, it makes Maryland go from the 19th largest state to the 10th. DC is bigger than 19 states, why not let it have its own representation? Edit: I mixed up DC and Puerto Rico. Forget what I said.

I think you don’t understand how large the district of Columbia is. You can drive across it in about 15 minutes. The district of Columbia is tiny, there are not 19 states that are smaller, and I challenge you to list them

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#130

Post by wtallis »

donarb wrote: post #93
atonse wrote: post #2

Nerd Me: This is a really nice use of this visualization. Human Me: I saw all this stuff in 2016 and Trump still beat the overwhelming odds. (Yes 16% chance of winning is still a chance, I get it... there's just so much deja vu with all these visualizations and articles about his campaign imploding).

But this visualization has nothing to do with projections or modeling. It's straight numbers, plotting out various pathways for either side to win.

It is based on projections. You can tell because the tree isn't 50 layers deep. They're treating a lot of state outcomes as a foregone conclusion. The description specifically calls out Michigan, Minnesota and Texas as states that aren't really certain, but are treated as such by this visualization.
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