I'm not sure why Nebraska's second congressional district isn't included. According to FiveThirtyEight, Obama's chance (14%) of winning one vote from Nebraska is higher than Romney's chance (11%) of winning Nevada. As a matter of fact, the last FiveThirtyEight visualization I saw linked here (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4657826) didn't include the one electoral vote Obama won in 2008 from Nebraska either.
512 Paths to the White House
21–30 of 175 posts
Re: 512 Paths to the White House
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Trust me you do not want. Watching TV or the radio is impossible without being inundated. It's time to switch to popular vote and end this gaming of the system.
A purely popular vote system has its own flaws. In particular, national elections would be reduced to politicians catering to voters in a few high-density regions rather than attempting to appeal to a geographically dispersed electorate.
Most of the country doesn't live in high-density areas. If you only catered to urban voters, you'd lose in a huge landslide.
Re: 512 Paths to the White House
#23A couple hidden features: 1. You can option-click on any of the buttons to see the transition in super slo-mo. (This was mainly for debugging, but it's fun to see how the transitions work in more detail.) 2. You can double-click on any part of the tree, and it will zoom in by one level. Also, we did a variation that used state-level probabilities to weight the tree. This gave a sense not just of the logical possibili…
That is cool. And thanks Mike, for your incredible d3.js library.
Re: 512 Paths to the White House
#24A couple hidden features: 1. You can option-click on any of the buttons to see the transition in super slo-mo. (This was mainly for debugging, but it's fun to see how the transitions work in more detail.) 2. You can double-click on any part of the tree, and it will zoom in by one level. Also, we did a variation that used state-level probabilities to weight the tree. This gave a sense not just of the logical possibili…
However, the FiveThirtyEight state-level probabilities are not fully independent
This is interesting, are they linked in some manner to national polls, or is their something more nuanced?
Re: 512 Paths to the White House
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
A purely popular vote system has its own flaws. In particular, national elections would be reduced to politicians catering to voters in a few high-density regions rather than attempting to appeal to a geographically dispersed electorate.
So what? Why should some peoples vote matter more than others?
It's all about what kinds of questions get discussed and addressed during campaigns.
The point of the campaigning process is chiefly to elect new representation, but secondarily (and closely so) to debate and test competing theories on the primary problems of the time.
In the electoral college model, the concerns of the swing states get the most attention, for reasons which are far too numerous and obvious to go in to. This is unfair to people that don't live in the swing states.
In the popular model, it's a bit subtle. At first, you think "well everyone's vote counts equally so everyone's concerns get counted according to the proportion of the constituents with those concerns." But this is not correct when you get down to the details.
If you're a candidate, you have to spend your resources in the most efficient way possible. Politicians do this (spend resources) by paying for messaging, spending their time campaigning in person and with volunteers/staffers, and by adopting policy positions (this is a resource in the political landscape).
In the electoral college model, the best return on your time, money, and issue consideration is found in the swing states, because everywhere else you have basically zero probability of success, which cannot be balanced out by any weight that electoral votes afford.
In the popular model, the best return is to target the largest population possible. People get divvied up into geographical regions no matter what---be it by local news network, regional speaking venue, or major political issue---and it's to these regions that our votes then become divided. In the popular model, the only places worth considering are those places with the largest populations, that still stand a chance of being easy to target with a single message, TV ad, or speaking appearance. If you're in a rural town, a candidate coming to speak to you only gets to speak to you, not to the nearest million voters. But in a city, the candidate that comes to you does get an audience of a million or more. So in the popular model, candidates will only bother to work for the concerns of those who live in population centers.
You get skewed either way. Personally, I think skewing toward regions with lots of people, even if they may not be the overall majority, is the best thing to do, but that's just my opinion, I don't have an optimal solution.
The problem is that "optimal" means that everyone's concerns get addressed in an equal manner, not necessarily that everyone gets an equivalent vote. The game theory involved is subtle and the emotions on all sides even more so.
Re: 512 Paths to the White House
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Trust me you do not want. Watching TV or the radio is impossible without being inundated. It's time to switch to popular vote and end this gaming of the system.
A purely popular vote system has its own flaws. In particular, national elections would be reduced to politicians catering to voters in a few high-density regions rather than attempting to appeal to a geographically dispersed electorate.
So you're saying that even the election system artificially subsidizes sprawl in this country?
Re: 512 Paths to the White House
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
A purely popular vote system has its own flaws. In particular, national elections would be reduced to politicians catering to voters in a few high-density regions rather than attempting to appeal to a geographically dispersed electorate.
Most of the country doesn't live in high-density areas. If you only catered to urban voters, you'd lose in a huge landslide.
More than half the population lives in an urbanized area of > 200,000. This includes suburbs of larger cities but not rural areas or small cities.
Re: 512 Paths to the White House
#28Damn, I wish I lived in one of the states that gets to choose our president.
It may actually happen in our lifetime. The small states would never allow such a change to the constitution. (A presidential voter in Wyoming has almost 4 times the vote of a Californian.) But the big states may have found a work around: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstat... In short, the states that agree to the compact agree to proportion all of their electoral votes to the winner of the…
So instead of your vote being lost in the mass of California or New York votes, it would just be lost in the much larger mass of national votes.
You'd still be in a winner-take-all situation with your vote, but on a national level rather than a state level.
I don't think this change would have the effect people imagine. At all.
Re: 512 Paths to the White House
#29Does anyone know if I should be as scared as I am that there are 5 paths to tie? Is that the norm in a presidential election? because it sounds crazy.
Dunno why that would be scary. Ties (or really, any allocation of electoral votes where no candidate gets to 270) are resolved in the House of Representatives, and this was common practice in the early 19th century. If it were to happen now, there would be a lot of complaining, but overall it would be less of a constitutional crisis than the 2000 election. If anything, it might be a spark for true electoral reform.
> House of Representatives
Considering every time you hear a story about politicians trying something insane, it seems to be about the House of Representatives, I think that is exactly why a tie sounds scary.
Re: 512 Paths to the White House
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
It may actually happen in our lifetime. The small states would never allow such a change to the constitution. (A presidential voter in Wyoming has almost 4 times the vote of a Californian.) But the big states may have found a work around: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstat... In short, the states that agree to the compact agree to proportion all of their electoral votes to the winner of the…
So instead of your vote being lost in the mass of California or New York votes, it would just be lost in the much larger mass of national votes. You'd still be in a winner-take-all situation with your vote, but on a national level rather than a state level. I don't think this change would have the effect people imagine. At all.
It would not appear to, but in effect, it would make the entire election simply based on popular vote.
Therefore your vote is not lost, it simply becomes equal.
This is far better than your vote actually being lost in the mass of California votes, since you, living in California, would still have some impact on the national outcome. And candidates, looking for popular votes instead of electoral votes, would have much higher incentive to campaign to all people, not just those in states where votes carry "more weight."
In all ways, this is more equal and more fair. Every election is a winner-take-all situation—it might as well be a winner-take-all situation where your vote actually has an impact independent of your state.