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A few words about FiveThirtyEight

natesilver.net

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Re: A few words about FiveThirtyEight

#82
post #25

I already miss the approval charts over time. Where the best place to see those, now?

Pew Research.

Pew, Gallup, and other pollsters each have charts based on their own individual poll series; 538s were a wide ranging aggregate of pretty much all the public polls which reduced the impact of noise.

Re: A few words about FiveThirtyEight

#83
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's because elections these days are incredibly close. It's like being upset that the best statistical answer to "who will win a coin toss" is "well it's 50/50".

Are you sure about that? 89% of counties turned red. Looking at 1.5% total difference is missing the forest for the trees. Trump got all swing states. To quote: "this is absolutely a mandate." https://youtu.be/zG3n2IeaTPA edit: facts cannot be insolent. The youtube link is a guest on the view named Stephen something, from this week, saying the words that i typed into the comment box. Not clicking it is doing yourself…

I don't think someone can claim a "mandate" based on not even having won 50% of the vote. You need to at least be able to say that over half of the voters wanted you to win in order to use language like that.

That 1.5% is the only thing that mattered for "mandate" purposes. Trump won, but on a razor's edge, and that should give him some pause. (It won't.)

Re: A few words about FiveThirtyEight

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure about that? 89% of counties turned red. Looking at 1.5% total difference is missing the forest for the trees. Trump got all swing states. To quote: "this is absolutely a mandate." https://youtu.be/zG3n2IeaTPA edit: facts cannot be insolent. The youtube link is a guest on the view named Stephen something, from this week, saying the words that i typed into the comment box. Not clicking it is doing yourself…

Counties don't vote and Trump's popular vote "mandate" is smaller than Clinton's popular vote win in 2016. Here's a fun stat: literally 40 states have a population that is less than the population of Los Angeles county alone. Why doesn't Los Angeles itself have 80 senators? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidentia... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidentia... Setting aside 200…

> Here's a fun stat: literally 40 states have a population that is less than the population of Los Angeles county alone. Why doesn't Los Angeles itself have 80 senators?

Because in a federal system it is often considered important to provide the less populous states with some protection against the more populous states always getting their way. The US Constitution does this by balancing representation based on population (the House) with equal representation of each state (the Senate).

The US is not the only federal constitution to do this - the Australian constitution has the same design (indeed, copied off the American model), except having 6 states instead of 50, Australia went with 12 senators per a state instead of only 2 - hence Tasmania (population 571,200) gets 12 senators, and so does New South Wales (population 8.153 million).

Things don’t have to be this way - instead of a federation one could have a unitary system. But in the case of both countries, protecting the power of the smaller states was considered important at the time of the constitution’s drafting - and the smaller states likely would not have agreed to it otherwise

Where it is different, is Australia doesn’t have the same “red state” vs “blue state” dynamic the US does. In Australia, while some states lean more one way than the other, they essentially all are “swing states”

Re: A few words about FiveThirtyEight

#85

it must be a wild experience to have a megacorp buy out your brain child, burn it to ashes and throw it away, and chase after the next shiny thing to slap ads on...

Seems like just the natural samsara of the news world. Small outlets are acquired by larger ones, eventually dismantled, staff moving onto build new ones and starting the cycle anew.

Re: A few words about FiveThirtyEight

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counties don't vote and Trump's popular vote "mandate" is smaller than Clinton's popular vote win in 2016. Here's a fun stat: literally 40 states have a population that is less than the population of Los Angeles county alone. Why doesn't Los Angeles itself have 80 senators? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidentia... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidentia... Setting aside 200…

Out of curiosity, do you recall seeing a "county map" of the blue votes in the 2020 election?

If you include Alaska, which is a huge state (I hear bigger than Texas), land starts voting very blue due to Alaskan native influence. They don’t have counties though, just boroughs (Alaska still goes red even if it’s land goes blue due to population distribution).

Re: A few words about FiveThirtyEight

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> https://youtu.be/zG3n2IeaTPA >note: not clicking that because you disagree with me is really doing yourself a disservice. I won't click the link because I'm here for discussion with the users of this site, not some random video you thought was interesting/useful. Why do you find it interesting/useful? What arguments are made? How do those arguments comport with your beliefs? Let's have a discussion. So tell me what…

lol TIL "The View" is "some rando on youtube" And to answer your question, the video is a guest on the view who i don't know, saying the exact numbers i quoted. I was quoting the person on the view, which aired yesterday or something. what's interesting, is instead of discussing what i said prior to the link, you chose to instead try and make me feel bad for linking a video. Keep it classy, HN.

Anyone can say anything on YouTube. I think you’re confusing confirmation bias with “citing your sources”.

Re: A few words about FiveThirtyEight

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure about that? 89% of counties turned red. Looking at 1.5% total difference is missing the forest for the trees. Trump got all swing states. To quote: "this is absolutely a mandate." https://youtu.be/zG3n2IeaTPA edit: facts cannot be insolent. The youtube link is a guest on the view named Stephen something, from this week, saying the words that i typed into the comment box. Not clicking it is doing yourself…

Counties don't vote and Trump's popular vote "mandate" is smaller than Clinton's popular vote win in 2016. Here's a fun stat: literally 40 states have a population that is less than the population of Los Angeles county alone. Why doesn't Los Angeles itself have 80 senators? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidentia... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidentia... Setting aside 200…

> why doesn't Los Angeles itself have 80 senators?

The electoral college internally balances the power of a population against the difficulty of holding land. Look at New York State, where NYC mostly holds court. If it were a country you’d see rebellion. Because while the city outnumbers the country, it’s culturally more similar to itself than the country, and that in practice leaves lots of people disenfranchised.

(Personally, I think the President should be popularly elected. But the Senate should continue resembling our geography.)

Re: A few words about FiveThirtyEight

#90
post #24

As someone who was super interested in the 538-style of election coverage in 2008, I've kind of fallen "out of love" so to speak with election models and forecasting in general. I'm not really convinced about what it adds to the conversation around elections. We can all look at various polls and get an assessment of who is generally ahead. Weighted polling aggregators and forecasting models just collect all these pol…

Would note that Silver owned the election model 538 ran on. When he left, he took it with him. The recent election forecasts 538 put out were not Nate Silver’s. (In my opinion, his were more accurate. More importantly, his commentary was more informative on the model’s shortcomings and insights.)
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