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Electoral College Decision Tree

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Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#361

Post by throwawaygh »

sova wrote: post #335
standardUser wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't you skip the theatrics and state your point, if you have one.

Nobody's met a pollster but everyone has faith in the polls... Usually for Science people need evidence that is well-cited. It seems strange people forego this requirement when it comes to election "science"

> Nobody's met a pollster but everyone has faith in the polls...

I refuse to believe relativity until Einstein gives me a personal audience. Gravity, for that matter, is wholly unbelievable unless Galileo will sit with me under a tree. This is how the scientific method works: you must personally meet the scientist in order to believe anything they say. :)

But seriously, I have no idea what point you're trying to make here. I've met geneticists but have never met a virologist. Does that mean I should have more belief in the existence of DNA than in the germ theory?

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#362

Post by throwawaygh »

nick_gur wrote: post #65
standardUser wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The models are wrong again. Take it to the bank and take it to Helmut Norpoth aka the Primary Model (primarymodel.com). Hasnt been updated since March but the author (@primarymodel16) recently tweeted that the decision still stands: Trump is getting re-elected. Also, the last person ANYONE should be listening to is 538/Nate Silver. People need to remember that before he was in politics, he used to be in sports bettin…

> Helmut Norpoth aka the Primary Model (primarymodel.com).

That website's subtitle is "forecasting presidential elections since 1912". What does that even mean? Is Helmut 120+ years old? Or does he mean "fitting" instead of "forecasting"?

BTW: Helmut's model was jut wrong in 2016. Its prediction -- the actual statistical forecast the model actually made -- was that Trump had an 87%-chance of winning the popular vote. That was its forecast -- of the popular vote, not of the electoral college. Its electoral college forecast was then conditional on its popular vote forecast. The actual core quantitative prediction the model made was in fact wrong. Literally, the primary model got the right result by accident.

Of course, Helmut retroactively claims that because he got the EC right it doesn't matter. Which would be somewhat reasonable if:

a) that's how the model actually worked (it isn't -- the model's core prediction was about the popular vote and it was wrong), or

b) he didn't make exactly the OPPOSITE corrective about his model's performance whenever he talks about 2000, where he always stresses that it at least got the popular vote right even though it got the EC wrong.

Why does this matter?

First, Helmut's model isn't as good as he claims it is even on historical data. He moves the goalposts from year to year.

Second, Models that get the right answer for the wrong reason are usually over-fit to historical data. They should be taken with a grain of salt in years where their core feature set might behave differently that in previous years. (E.g., a year in which the model's main predictive feature -- primary results -- were cut short due to a 1-in-100-year pandemic).

Anyways, there are a lot of other contrarian/first-principles models that back-test well and predict a (D) win. Of course, no one cares about those this year. But they might next time around if the polling-based methodologies predict an (R) win.

FWIW, I tend to agree that the polling aggregation models are "meh" and should have way more uncertainty than they currently do. Mostly because a) I think turnout is much more correlated between swing states than those models typically assume and b) I don't think aggregating polls is actually all that useful.

Basically, everyone in election polling is making educated guesses and everyone in election polling over-sells their certainty.

Also, re: betting markets. Through a combination of bets on state-level results, you can construct positions that pay out if EITHER Democrats win the popular vote OR Republicans win the electoral college. The odds of Republicans winning the popular vote but losing the college are basically zero. I guess my point is just that there are lots of idiots betting on elections and you can trivially construct (small) sure-to-win positions.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#363

Post by WorldMaker »

naivedevops wrote: post #248
beerandt wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the constitution specifies that the several States (not the people) shall elect the president.

Just make the vote of each state proportional to the number of people who voted in that state. Or change the Constitution.

The electoral college is as much of a mess as it is in part because it already includes the proportional ratios of the House into consideration (and as pointed out in related threads, a large reason why it would ever tie in the first place, and isn't just some odd number derived from the number of states). Surely in the case of an EC tie, leaving the House to vote as the House, proportionately representative, is no less a representation of the votes of the states than the electoral college itself at that point?

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#364

Post by throwawaygh »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #355
dragonwriter wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm simply asking a question about whether the pollsters have corrected their methodologies. There was clearly something wrong in 2016 when they repeatedly failed to predict the GOP primaries Polls don't predict anything. Poll-based forecasts are different than polls, and done by different people. The major polls in 2016 conducted close to the election were well within the MoE of the actual results, so as far as po…

> Polls don't predict anything. Semantic nitpicking. Clearly, my comment was about how well the polls reflected reality. > Some of the poll-based forecasts made errors like.... You're making a different statement than the person I'm responding to, who said that the polls didn't align with reality because they did not weight for education. That is something that is easy to verify. I was simply asking if it was verifie…

> I was simply asking if it was verified by showing that weighting by education made the 2016 polls align with reality.

To try and answer your technical question: yes and no.

I know why you think this would be easy to do. But this is harder to do than you're thinking because the problem with education was both weighting and sampling.

So, yes, you can play with the weights and get a corrected result. (That's literally just tautological though -- of course in a parameterized model you can wiggle weights around to give the perfect result when you already know what the result should be...)

But, no, that doesn't tell you about what the effect of increasing the sample of these voters would be, and improving sampling is the only real way to get closer to ground truth.

So, some pollsters are sampling larger numbers of less educated people and also weighing those votes differently. But no, we can't know what the combined effect of those two things would've been in 2016. Why? because we can wiggle around the weights post hoc but can't go back in time and resample. And the question about correcting without resampling is kinda uninteresting because the fact that you can get the correct result by just wiggling around weights is literally just a mathematical tautology.

Hope that helps.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#365

Post by throwawaygh »

austincheney wrote: post #267
bloody-crow wrote: post #145

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.

If states’ winner takes all rules were eliminated the EC would serve as a far more accurate representation of voter interest than either the EC in its current form or the straight popular vote. I say that because it would allow a wider distribution of diversity in the vote while countering bias of density disparities.

That will only happen if a super gerrymandered state flips. E.g., Texas might go proportionate if their EC votes swing blue. Why? Because it's not impossible that Dems might win Texas's EC votes in the next 30 years but it is literally impossible for them to control the state government in that time-frame. However, in all the cases I can think of with that flavor, it's hard to imagine the electoral college remaining competitive even with gerrymandered states going proportionate.

So IMO, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is much more likely than the majority of states go proportional with their EC votes (and even that is highly unlikely).

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#366

Post by jki275 »

pedrosorio wrote: post #353
jki275 wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say "probability". It's not going to happen. The polls are bullshit.

You said “Biden has as much chance of winning Texas as Trump has of winning California.” What do you mean when you say “chance”, if not probability?

I mean neither event will happen.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#367

Post by rkuykendall-com »

ianai wrote: post #273
newacct583 wrote: post #251

Earlier 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…

538 hopes they’re _reducing_ those error bars. If they thought they were eliminating them, they wouldn't need to run simulations at all.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#368

Post by sova »

throwawaygh wrote: post #361
sova wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody's met a pollster but everyone has faith in the polls... Usually for Science people need evidence that is well-cited. It seems strange people forego this requirement when it comes to election "science"

> Nobody's met a pollster but everyone has faith in the polls... I refuse to believe relativity until Einstein gives me a personal audience. Gravity, for that matter, is wholly unbelievable unless Galileo will sit with me under a tree. This is how the scientific method works: you must personally meet the scientist in order to believe anything they say. :) But seriously, I have no idea what point you're trying to make…

My point was that you can get down to the bottom of where the data was collected, and you can repeat the experiments for yourself and hopefully get the same results. These days, people are putting a lot of faith into the polls, but the polls are not conducted by district but are conducted by "statewide random polling" which is about as useful in a country with an electoral system such as the US as the popular vote count. That is, not at all.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#369

Post by throwawaygh »

sova wrote: post #368
throwawaygh wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody's met a pollster but everyone has faith in the polls... I refuse to believe relativity until Einstein gives me a personal audience. Gravity, for that matter, is wholly unbelievable unless Galileo will sit with me under a tree. This is how the scientific method works: you must personally meet the scientist in order to believe anything they say. :) But seriously, I have no idea what point you're trying to make…

My point was that you can get down to the bottom of where the data was collected, and you can repeat the experiments for yourself and hopefully get the same results. These days, people are putting a lot of faith into the polls, but the polls are not conducted by district but are conducted by "statewide random polling" which is about as useful in a country with an electoral system such as the US as the popular vote co…

> My point was that you can get down to the bottom of where the data was collected, and you can repeat the experiments for yourself and hopefully get the same results.

Running the actual experiment requires a real election. Polls were more accurate in 2018 than in 2016, but we haven't yet had a presidential election with updated methodology. And presidential elections are different from midterms.

Again, of course you can construct a polling methodology that gives a pre-determined desired result (including the exact results of any particular election). This is called fitting a parameter.

And, again, the fact that you can tweak the weights on 2016 polling data so that the polls predict the right result is literally just a mathematical fact. And an uninteresting fact at that.

But you can't run a real experiment to test the the effectiveness of a new sampling method without actually holding an election.

I'm not even making any particular claim about the accuracy of polls this year.

I'm literally just saying that the fact that you can fit a model to give a historically correct answer on historical data that used one sampling method doesn't necessarily tell you the accuracy of a forecast that uses a different sampling method.

TBH, if we were talking about an advertising campaign, this wouldn't even need to be said out loud (or, if it did, the team member who didn't understand would be PIP'd ASAP).

> but the polls are not conducted by district but are conducted by "statewide random polling" which is about as useful in a country with an electoral system such as the US as the popular vote count. That is, not at all.

That's just false. Nearly every state allocates its electoral college votes based upon the state's popular vote. Hypothetical 100% accurate polling of the state's popular vote will absolutely tell you who gets the EC votes in at least 48 states. No?

Re: the distribution of the popular vote within each state, high-quality state polls DO weight for geography. But, again, you don't need to know

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#370

Post by sova »

throwawaygh wrote: post #369
sova wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point was that you can get down to the bottom of where the data was collected, and you can repeat the experiments for yourself and hopefully get the same results. These days, people are putting a lot of faith into the polls, but the polls are not conducted by district but are conducted by "statewide random polling" which is about as useful in a country with an electoral system such as the US as the popular vote co…

> My point was that you can get down to the bottom of where the data was collected, and you can repeat the experiments for yourself and hopefully get the same results. Running the actual experiment requires a real election. Polls were more accurate in 2018 than in 2016, but we haven't yet had a presidential election with updated methodology. And presidential elections are different from midterms. Again, of course you…

Aha, thanks, I was a little fuzzy on the "winner-take-all" bit of each individual state. I thought it was allocated some other way, but you are correct, it is just the states' popular vote. Based on how _off_ the numbers were last time 'round, I have a feeling a lot of people simply don't report their choices to polling, so there is a bias in who voices their vote and who does not, and it does not seem like there is a reasonable method to account for this discrepancy. In short, people who are vocal about their choice represent a small set of all people who are actually voting. Rather than being humble and saying there's a 70% margin of error, we have bombastic reports of landslides in either direction fairly consistently. Something about it just seems disingenuous.
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