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Electoral College Decision Tree

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Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#141

Post by jedberg »

dragonwriter wrote: post #117
jedberg wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or adopt D.C. statehood That would only add two, unless you also had a reapportionment act. Same with adding Puerto Rico as a state. Edit: As pointed out below, this is wrong. Since DC already has 3, it would actually lower the number by one, so this would in fact give an odd number. > The House can and does have ties, even with an odd number of members; members abstaining or missing votes in the House are more com…

> > Or adopt D.C. statehood > That would only add two, unless you also had a reapportionment act. Absent a change to the fixed number of seats of full House members, it would subtract one; D.C. currently has zero Senators out of 100, zero members of the House included in the apportionment of the fixed 435 seats (it has a delegate, which is separate), and 3 electoral votes. Absent a change to the legislated size of th…

This is an excellent point. It would in fact reduce it by one, making an odd number.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#142

Post by jgwil2 »

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…

What on Earth are you talking about? Wisconsin voted for the Democratic presidential candidate in every election from 1988 to 2012.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#143

Post by alistairSH »

chromaton wrote: post #26
alistairSH wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but that would require adding a Congressperson (#EC = #HofR + #Senate + 3 for DC).

Then the House of Representatives would have an even number.

Yes, but that may not be as impactful as a tied EC.

In the case of the House, it's rare that all seats are filled anyways, so it can and has functioned with the equivalent of an even split between parties.

And for the most part, a delay on any given piece of legislation probably isn't as big a deal as a massively contested presidential election.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#144

Post by bobthepanda »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #107
bobthepanda wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is broken is not the number of electoral votes per state but the winner takes all allocation system of the EC. As it stands today winner takes all makes big states like California and small states like Wyoming equally uncompetitive since there’s a snowball’s chance in hell they will ever flip majority the other direction. Proportionally allocating a state’s electoral votes would level the state by state playing…

> you’d need either every state to agree or an amendment. Neither of those is actually necessary because the states decide on their own how their electoral college votes are allocated. In principle Texas or California could allocate their delegates proportional to the popular vote of the people in that state. Which might be in the interests of the people in that state, because then candidates would actually bother to…

Well no state would actually do that of its own free will because it would disadvantage what parties they actually voted for.

If two states with 10 electoral votes each are both currently winner takes all, but one votes green and one votes purple; and if only the green state changes to proportional allocation, you move from a scenario where both parties got 10 votes each to a scenario where the green state went 6/4 for green and the purple state is still all 10 votes purple, basically kneecapping the green party.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#145

Post by bloody-crow »

The mere existence of this tool highlights the complexity and opaqueness of the electoral college system compared to the popular vote. You can't expect a layperson to have a somewhat accurate mental model of this probability breakdown and I believe it totally erodes their motivation to vote in the first place.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#146

Post by vulcan01 »

freeone3000 wrote: post #32
chromaton wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then the House of Representatives would have an even number.

We could add a senator. Give it to DC.

What if we had a senator that represented all of the territories? It would be a better situation than we have right now...

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#147

Post by wtallis »

MeinBlutIstBlau wrote: post #108
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).

The funny thing is they have Wisconsin (my state) showing biden favored to win. Just look at the electoral college electors record. It's been a red majority since Bush. They even had a swing blue state turned red 2016 that helped cement the state vote. And these were affluent white liberals outside of Milwaukee. This is just going to be 2016 all over again where somehow polling = "the correct prediction" when none it…

> The funny thing is they have Wisconsin (my state) showing biden favored to win. Just look at the electoral college electors record. It's been a red majority since Bush.

Can you clarify what you mean? Wisconsin never went for a Bush, and other than Trump's win in 2016 it's been voting for Democrats in presidential elections since Reagan. What electoral college record and red majority are you referring to?

And even if you reject all polling evidence, why is that one Trump win indicative of a solidifying shift toward Republicans, as opposed to expecting a reversion to the mean and Wisconsin going back to being a generally blue state?

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#148

Post by chance_state »

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…

> 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.

Based on this middle school level of understanding of polling and crime statistics, I'll skip the rest of the comment, but thanks.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#149

Post by dragonwriter »

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.

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

Sure, but even the worst poll-based prediction outfit isn't just aggregating poll results and using the uncertainty based on sample size to determine the probabilities of different outcomes.

Pretty much all of them are using some model derived from the past relationships of polls to election results, which will, to a greater or lesser extent, capture systemic polling error that is not unique to the current cycle in the model.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#150

Post by elicash »

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…

All but 8 states can start processing ballots before election day. Unfortunately, 3 of those 8 are MI, WI, PA. So it may take longer for those.

Florida will likely be an early sign, since those mail ballots get processed and counted early. IF (and this is a big if) Biden carries Florida on election night, then it's actually possible we know who wins that night.

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