Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not how gambling works. You don't "bet the farm" on a single 87% chance event to win 1.5 farms.
That is how betting works when you hedge.
How are you planning to hedge this?
Electoral College Decision Tree
271–280 of 373 posts
Re: Electoral College Decision Tree
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You would have bet the farm on the undervalued bet on the prediction markets. This is what's frustrating about sites like 538. They have Biden as an 87% chance to win. A betting site I frequent has Biden's winning odds as -180 (1.556 for Europeans). If they really believe the accuracy of their models, they should literally be betting the farm on a Biden win.
That's not how gambling works. You don't "bet the farm" on a single 87% chance event to win 1.5 farms.
The Kelly criterion says you bet 61% of the farm in this situation.
Re: Electoral College Decision Tree
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting that the tool above makes it appear that Trump has a much longer journey to win, and this tool shows that if he wins FL and PA, he's 92% likely to win the election. Guess, as always, the lens you're using affects your interpretation of the data.
Winning both FL and PA when the polls show you down by 3 and 5.7 points respectively is pretty much the definition of a "long journey" statistically.
Part of the problem with the polls are their error bars. 538 hopes they’re eliminating those error bars through a number of different tactics - like averaging the polls. That should do something like increasing the N and decreasing the error. But that’s assuming the methods used to generate the surveys are themselves fully unbiased and representative of the underlying population. On the other hand, seasoned pros are saying if the polls are wrong this year then it’s time to hang up the towel on the polling profession entirely-some of the gaps are wide enough to be significant even with large error bars.
Re: Electoral College Decision Tree
#274Earlier 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…
There are numerous anecdotal reports of Trump supporters refusing to answer polls or giving intentionally misleading answers. But it's inherently impossible to know how prevalent that phenomenon is. Pollsters can't force voters to respond or give truthful answers.
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Re: Electoral College Decision Tree
#275Earlier 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…
Apparently Florida should be ready for pandemic adjustments to polling and still report nearly all of their results on election night. They’ve switched to mostly mail in ballots years ago and I think even count them as they come in or something - so they can be reported election night. Granted, it’s Florida. So sanity need not apply and we could get their election results from the SCOTUS.
Personally, I hope the early, in person voting decides the election on election night.
Re: Electoral College Decision Tree
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m 40 and trying to imagine what my signature looked like twenty years ago. Probably rather different. It would suck to have my vote thrown away because some overworked election worker looks at it for a second and decides the letter P is bent the wrong way compared to the 1999 version.
Agree strongly, also, nobody ever told me my signature was significant. I’ve never had a “signature” and nobody has ever told me I needed to. The scrawl on the back of credit cards used to be checked in 2000-2010 but not since, and even then I just scribbled. Learning that votes are thrown out based on this just shows how “special” the US system is. I assume historically they just decided “hard to read” names got thr…
It’s not hard to imagine that many of those hard to read names historically just happened to belong to minorities. American states have a sordid history of using ambiguous laws for vote suppression.
Re: Electoral College Decision Tree
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
This arguement honestly sounds like “we need to change the system so my side isn’t denied power”. No doubt if the situation was reversed you’d be arguing for them.
The United States was founded on rejecting a system that vested lawful power with the British government and denied power to the colonists. Were the founding fathers wrong to declare independence to ensure that their 'side' was not denied power? The entire principle of popular sovereignty, as exercised through representative democracy, is that leaders are selected according to the wishes of the the majority of the pe…
leaders are selected according to the wishes of the the majority of the people
That's clearly not the case as many systems (not just the US) seek to avoid "tyranny of the majority" and to protect the interests of minorities. Canada's senate does not use proportional representation either - that avoids the country being run by Ontario and Quebec at the expense of the other 8 provinces and 3 territories.
The designs you argue against were specifically implemented to provide a system of checks and balances to avoid a simply majority from unchecked rule. And this is doubly true in the US, where it's a "union of states", not just one massive country. A lot of those rules were put into place in order to get the states to join the US because otherwise they would have had zero say in the affairs of the country.
Those checks you want to remove are not a bug but a feature.
Re: Electoral College Decision Tree
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 polls…
There is some evidence from 2016 that shows you can determine a person’s values/beliefs, which is a better indicator of who they will vote for versus directly asking them certain questions.
The LA Times poll was one of few polls that predicted a Trump victory in 2016, the link has some details on the methodology:
https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-trump-polls-20161...
Basically, if you ask someone what they think about police brutality you might get ‘of course it’s wrong’, but veiling that question a bit into ‘how important are safe neighborhoods, strong law enforcement?’ will take you closer to the truth.
Not everyone is happy with the riots in America at all, they view it as crime and certainly don’t want that stuff anywhere near their neighborhoods. Or further, they might not want certain types in their neighborhoods. You see where I’m going? If you start to probe in this way, you’ll find your hidden Trump voter versus asking ‘Did Trump handle coronavirus well?’, which everyone well answer no to, but if the person doesn’t want black people in their neighborhoods as a hidden belief, your polls are going to be fucked (since that’s a closet Trump voter).
No one will ever say ‘social welfare is unfair because minorities leech off of it’, only your most shameless republicans will say it. But guess what, people believe this deep down. How can pollsters surface that belief without arousing suspicion?
Way too many states in the rust belt went red to act like some negligible dynamic was in play in 2016.
Just to note, I am a liberal, in case anyone thinks I harbor those beliefs. But how would you know? :p
Re: Electoral College Decision Tree
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most modelling puts Florida as about 52/48 Biden's way but Texas 60/40 Trump's way. It would be a mild surprise if Biden won Texas. It would be astonishing is Biden won Texas without also winning Florida.
One of the best democratic candidates ever, Barack Obama, couldn’t win Texas. He won Florida twice. Biden doesn’t have Obama’s charisma, so he basically has to bet on Trump frustration to carry Florida. This election is a total question of Trump exhaustion. If people are exhausted from him then we’ll see the toss ups turn blue. If people are more frustrated with lockdowns, riots, protests, race coming to the surface…
Retirees in Florida seem to prefer Biden to Obama, which is interesting.
Demographics in Texas have changed a lot since 2012 when Obama last ran. Democrats didn't really compete in Texas then.
> aggressiveness, then why would anything have changed in 2020
Take a look at the polls. Even if you don't believe the numbers themselves.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/10/20/texas-hous... is a decent summary. It's most likely that Republican will win Texas, but Democrats have roughly the chance of winning Texas as Trump did of winning the election in 2016.
Re: Electoral College Decision Tree
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
Winning both FL and PA when the polls show you down by 3 and 5.7 points respectively is pretty much the definition of a "long journey" statistically.
Part of the problem with the polls are their error bars. 538 hopes they’re eliminating those error bars through a number of different tactics - like averaging the polls. That should do something like increasing the N and decreasing the error. But that’s assuming the methods used to generate the surveys are themselves fully unbiased and representative of the underlying population. On the other hand, seasoned pros are…
> On the other hand, seasoned pros are saying if the polls are wrong this year then it’s time to hang up the towel on the polling profession entirely-
I haven't heard anyone say that. Polls are always wrong, it's how wrong that is important.