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Electoral College Decision Tree

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Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#81

Post by dragontamer »

DennisP wrote: post #76
bryanlarsen wrote: post #24

Another similar tool, with very different visualization. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-biden-election-ma...

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).

But the battleground states may take some time.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#82

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#83

Post by bobthepanda »

rubidium wrote: post #77
greenpizza13 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so terrifying. If you start giving Trump states which are tossups, like FL, the others which were tossups begin to lean red. Choose red for those and you're done. At that point you're in 2016 territory. We have an extremely broken election system.

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.

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 field and align with popular vote, but you’d need either every state to agree or an amendment.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#84

Post by krapp »

rubidium wrote: post #77
greenpizza13 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so terrifying. If you start giving Trump states which are tossups, like FL, the others which were tossups begin to lean red. Choose red for those and you're done. At that point you're in 2016 territory. We have an extremely broken election system.

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.

>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.

Only if one prefers that the election always be decided by a margin of votes in a few rural swing states, rendering most voting irrelevant.

A system where all of the votes in all of the states mattered would be infinitely preferable.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#85

Post by alistairSH »

rubidium wrote: post #77
greenpizza13 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so terrifying. If you start giving Trump states which are tossups, like FL, the others which were tossups begin to lean red. Choose red for those and you're done. At that point you're in 2016 territory. We have an extremely broken election system.

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.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#86

Post by wtallis »

nradov wrote: post #73
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…

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.

> But it's inherently impossible to know how prevalent that phenomenon is.

There was a lot of analysis after the 2016 election cycle about the "shy Trump voter" hypothesis, and it really didn't hold up, and continues to not hold up with under the data available from this election cycle. It is completely unreasonable to postulate that the effect would be drastically bigger this year, after four years of Trump actually being in power and normalizing his status.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#87

Post by bryanlarsen »

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…

Not necessarily. There are several paths where a Biden win could be called early on election night. For example, Texas has a large fraction of early voting and a small fraction of mail ballots. So the chance that Texas can be called early is quite high. And if Texas gets called for Biden, then the networks will call the entire country for Biden.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#88

Post by dragonwriter »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #51
rayiner wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and no. 538 published an article after the election explaining that there were in fact systemic errors in the models; the result wasn't just random probability within models that were otherwise correct: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polls-missed-trump-... > While the errors were nationwide, they were spread unevenly. The more whites without college degrees were in a state, the more Trump outperformed h…

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.

> AFAICT the polls had a systemic error AND the 538 models included the possibility of a systemic error.

Well, 538 model took into account historical evidence that election differences from polling averages between states are strongly correlated rather than independent; arguably, that's an effect that exists in part because such deviations are in part due to systemic errors (though the particular systemic errors may differ from cycle to cycle) in the polling, rather than pure sampling error.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#89

Post by bryanlarsen »

bobthepanda wrote: post #83
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.

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…

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...

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#90

Post by dragontamer »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #87
dragontamer wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Not necessarily. There are several paths where a Biden win could be called early on election night. For example, Texas has a large fraction of early voting and a small fraction of mail ballots. So the chance that Texas can be called early is quite high. And if Texas gets called for Biden, then the networks will call the entire country for Biden.

You're right that if Texas goes blue, I think its safe to say that Biden won the election.

But I also think that Texas going for Biden is very small: Trump is still leading by 2% or so by official polls. Its important to push Texas a little bit since there's a chance for victory.

In the most likely event: Texas goes red (as it has gone for the past several decades), and we're left wondering about Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania as usual.

If Florida has an insurmountable lead on election night (like 5% or something), then Biden probably wins. But if its a 2% differential (too close to call by the media, and a serious counting effort starts to take place), like is currently projected in the polls, then Florida could very well drag out this election for a week or longer. Just like back in 2000.

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