Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Electoral College Decision Tree

observablehq.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 373 posts

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#131

Post by MeinBlutIstBlau »

lastofthemojito wrote: post #122
MeinBlutIstBlau wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I live in this state. I know these people better than the schmuck reporters. Just because the official numbers shrank doesn't mean the actual constituency did.

Do you also only think that crimes happen only if it gets reported? Meaning if 50 burglaries happen to 100 people but only 2 people reported it, does that mean the burglary rate is 2% or 50%? This is why I don't bother with these worthless metrics as I'll explain in the next paragraph regarding trump.

Did you ever wonder why a lot of people don't publicly come out as trump supporters? They have very liberal friends that they don't want to lose because they said they'd vote for trump. That sentiment still lingers here. Most leftist people who argue against trump vehemently do so in a way that these regular folk that end up voting for trump keep it under wraps because they're too scared to publicly say anything.

Just because the "numbers" shrank, doesn't me the actual voters did. There is a lot of societal pressure involving politics and only on the left is it worthy of breaking a friendship over. This is why many white liberals who voted trump keep their mouths shut.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#132

Post by greenburger »

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.

You’re mixing up Puerto Rico and DC. DC population is only larger than Vermont and Wyoming.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#133

Post by lastofthemojito »

MeinBlutIstBlau wrote: post #131
lastofthemojito wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I live in this state. I know these people better than the schmuck reporters. Just because the official numbers shrank doesn't mean the actual constituency did. Do you also only think that crimes happen only if it gets reported? Meaning if 50 burglaries happen to 100 people but only 2 people reported it, does that mean the burglary rate is 2% or 50%? This is why I don't bother with these worthless metrics as I'll expl…

I think I visited Wisconsin once on a day trip when I had some family in neighboring Illinois back in the 90's. I definitely don't know a ton about the state. Again, I certainly don't know which way Wisconsin will end up voting.

But I guess my point here is that it seems like the NYT feature was based on an honest analysis of data from something called IPUMS, which Wikipedia tells me is "the world's largest individual-level population database", not a just "schmuck reporter" with a baseless hunch or something.

It'll be interesting to revisit pieces like this on November 3 (or whenever all the votes are tallied) to see if any of them turned out to be good predictors or not.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#134

Post by gen220 »

alistairSH wrote: post #85
rubidium wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The electoral college is designed (from the start) to prevent the larger, more populous states from dominating the country. Seems to be working as designed. And doing a good job as a system. Politics is extremely broken, yes. But I don’t think the electoral college is the fault.

Not quite. The EC (along with the 3/5 compromise) was designed to protect the interests of slave-holding states, while also avoiding direct election of the president (ie, the people were too stupid to elect directly). And now, instead of tyranny of the majority, we have tyranny of the minority. Due to capping the number of members of the House, those small-population states have disparate impact on federal issues.

Post-Civil War, it also incentivized voter suppression.

The southern states benefited from emancipation, insofar as they gained seats in the house and electoral college (they got a 5/3 multiple on their prior proportions, which had only narrowly elected Lincoln pewar).

This redistribution of postwar power led to the disaster of 1877 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compromise_of_1877, something we're still grappling with to this day.

One motivation for Jim Crow laws was to keep the southern voting-sampled portion of the south white and segregationist (in spite of the true distribution of local sentiment), while simultaneously benefiting from the larger population in magnifying their representation in national politics.

...

If I were dictator for a day, I'd make the number of house and electoral college seats directly proportional to the last-n-election-cycle-average of number of participating voters (not population!).

This change would flip the voter suppression script, which I think has been one of the more troubling developments in the last 100 years of our republic. It would also rightfully suppress the influence of the regions in this country that wish it was still the 1830s, but give them a path to return to influence that's contingent on uniting their polities.

We'd see states competing to make voting more accessible in a nonpartisan manner, because every state wants to have more representation in the electoral college and the congress, regardless of which party is in power.

This would force parties to actually represent their neighbors, whom they can safely ignore and suppress today.

With this change as an example, I think the Electoral College could actually be leveraged to steer our system in more inclusive direction. I'd love to simulate this version of history.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#135

Post by WorldMaker »

jstanley wrote: post #20
vanattab wrote: post #12

Really cool use of data visualization! Nice work! What ever happens I just pray we don't hit one of the paths ending in a unfilled circle.

Unless I'm misunderstanding something, it seems obviously dumb that the electoral college has an even number of members? Wouldn't making it an odd number prevent this possibility?

It seems even more dumb that in the event of a tie the House of Representatives is supposed to vote one vote per state as if it were a dumber Senate. The compromises that led to that setup are weird mistakes. I guess it is good that it is a rare event when the Electoral College ties.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#136

Post by function_seven »

rayiner wrote: post #71
bryanlarsen wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAICT the polls had a systemic error AND the 538 models included the possibility of a systemic error. It's really the only way that they could have given Trump a 28% chance in the first place. Of course, the polls themselves also acknowledge the chance of a systemic error. They're reported similar to +/- 2% 19 times out of 20. They make no claim that the 19/20 of multiple polls are not correlated.

The +/- in a given poll is measurement error derived from the sample size. They don’t account for systemic error.

Right, but 538 did account for such an error in coming up with their ~75/25% outcome chances. Had polling errors just been random, the overall prediction would have been more like 95/5%.

But their key insight is that polling errors are often correlated, and not just statistical sampling errors that can randomly offset in either direction.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#137

Post by jfengel »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #111
bryanlarsen wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another solution with potentially a clearer path: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta... What's really annoying is how close we came to abolishing the electoral college, that 3 segregationists were able to halt almost univeral consensus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_abolition_am...

The biggest problem with the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is that in order to get a majority of the electoral college delegates into it, you would need states to sign on who benefit from the existing arrangement. You can't get the swing states because the existing system makes them the focus of national politics and you can't get always-red states because the party that controls them benefits from the ext…

It's not impossible that some swing state would get a blue-leaning legislature to pass the NPVIC. That would cost the state some attention for the benefit of a better chance in close elections at the top.

Twice in the past two decades, the Electoral College has gone red when the popular vote would have gone blue, by a nontrivial margin. That leaves an avenue open whereby some state's legislators fall on their swords to fix that problem.

Whether it would stick is an open question -- they'd almost certainly face an angry campaign against them, and the swing back could undo it. So it's unlikely. But there is a route by which it could happen, since the state's benefit from the EC is mitigated by the distortion it causes.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#138

Post by dragontamer »

dillondoyle wrote: post #124
dragontamer wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/latest_polls/

There are plenty of polls.

The 2016 issue was that those polls were __correlated__. They were NOT independent polls, but somehow all the polls made the same mistake across the board.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/election-update-why-our...

> Assumption No. 4: State outcomes are highly correlated with one another, so polling errors in one state are likely to be replicated in other, similar states.

> Basically, this means that you shouldn’t count on states to behave independently of one another, especially if they’re demographically similar. If Clinton loses Pennsylvania despite having a big lead in the polls there, for instance, she might also have problems in Michigan, North Carolina and other swing states. What seems like an impregnable firewall in the Electoral College may begin to collapse.

--------

Note that this post was written well before the results of 2016 were known. This was Nate Silver challenging the poll's assumptions back then. It was clear that "correlation" needs to be accounted for in people's models. That's the #1 issue regards to modern polls.

Lo and behold: Pennsylvania swung right towards Trump, and all the polls that were predicting a Pennsylvania win for Clinton were wrong. But not only that, it proved a bunch of other polls wrong in other states.

Such is the nature of Bayesian statistics: P(A, B) = P(A given B) * P(B).

P(A given B) should equal P(A) in an ideal world. But we live in a messy world with correlations: understanding B will change our understanding of other probabilities.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#139

Post by sova »

standardUser wrote: post #4
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).

He "beat the odds" because most models were incorrect. They have been corrected. Are the models wrong again? Maybe, but it would need to be in a totally different way, and by a much larger margin than in 2016.

How are we certain the models have "been corrected?" ... did someone go back and redo the models to show that Trump won? If not, it stands to reason that they are still incorrect.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#140

Post by jedberg »

greenburger wrote: post #132
jedberg wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You’re mixing up Puerto Rico and DC. DC population is only larger than Vermont and Wyoming.

Yeah you're right, I did. My bad.
Post reply on HN