ThenElection
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User ID: 622
ThenElection
19d ago
I get my injection of schadenfreude from reading /r/fivethirtyeight and /r/neoliberal. Although I voted for Harris, this is a pretty good silver lining.
ThenElection
19d ago
The NYT needle is predicting that Trump is the likely winner: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/11/05/us/elections/results-president-forecast-needle.html
ThenElection
19d ago
It's a bit more than an unlucky miss, though: she's going to be off by double digits, far outside the statistical MoE.
At the least, I should have taken the "throw it into the pile" approach, instead of privileging it as a gold standard poll.
ThenElection
19d ago
In retrospect, it seems like the obvious failure mode of his election night product. Plenty of information would exist about the state of the race in swing states long before any were actually called, but his election night model would ignore that information. If you wait on saying anything until news orgs have called PA, you'll be hours behind everyone else.
ThenElection
19d ago
At this point, it seems Selzer will be off by 15 points. Wow.
For what it's worth, I'm thinking through where I went wrong.
ThenElection
19d ago
Annoying: ABC is showing the number of votes from different counties with circles. But it seems like they're using the number of votes as the radius, instead of the area. So even when things are entirely tied up, you see a sea of blue.
Malice or incompetence?
ThenElection
19d ago
Well, I was pushing it as an important data point, with my motivation being that she has done well in the past, including publishing pro-Trump results against public sentiment. What did I get wrong? I'm not sure. My most generous interpretation is that her methodology has essentially been a RNG that got a pretty lucky streak.
ThenElection
19d ago
Nate's model is basically the simplest obvious way to project election results from polls. A motivated high schooler could have built it. At the time he started, however, people and pundits were basically idiots, and even now most people just want a commentator that says why their preferred candidate is going to win.
His only edge now is that he's pretty principled with his modeling choices and doesn't bow to angry Twitter people. Which is rather rare: if you want to build an audience, the easiest way is to just tell your audience what they want to hear.
ThenElection
19d ago
I want to see more of PA/WI/MI, but at the least it seems the Selzer poll was... wrong.
Getting ready for the riots! Been needing a new TV.
ThenElection
19d ago
He's big on poker and sports betting and apparently moderately successful there, but I don't believe he's made any public political bets.
ThenElection
19d ago
Keith Rabois is not a "Twitter random" but a well-known VC.
Keith never followed up on the bet IIRC, but yeah, it's looking like he'd have won. Losing a particular bet, though, doesn't mean it was a bad bet to make on Nate's part. You play the odds as you see them, and given enough bets, eventually you hope to come out ahead.
My best argument for Trump given this poll:
The poll itself is likely an outlier, and Trump is winning Iowa by low single digits. This might seem to bode badly for swing states. But Trump's power is motivating low propensity voters to come to the polls, and he's spent essentially no effort on doing so in Iowa. In WI, MI, and PA, on the other hand, he is effectively bringing out his broader base, making them much more competitive than you'd infer from this poll. And in other swing states, his path to victory relies on a different coalition, so you can't project IA's results to them. Additionally, Iowa had a six week state-level ban on abortion, which is a state-specific effect that doesn't carry over to other states.
I can buy this argument, but if I were Trump's campaign, I wouldn't be especially happy making it.
ThenElection
21d ago
What people state as their most important issue is as much a result of campaign strategies as a cause. People decide on a candidate; candidate says the campaign is about issue X; supporters of the campaign say that they support the candidate because of issue X.
Democrats probably believe abortion is an important issue to voters, but that's downstream of intra-coalition politics determining that abortion is the most important issue. It also is an issue that lends itself to sound bites and anecdotes, which is great for acting as a rallying point and ads.
ThenElection
22d ago
Even if the ground level truth is an exact tie in all the states, you would still expect more outliers than there are: there's always the luck of the draw, and it's irreducible. If someone has a process to massage the sample data enough so that these outliers never show up in the final published numbers, they're destroying information in the process.
ThenElection
22d ago
The Selzer poll was released on Nov 2, but in the field from Oct 28 to Oct 31. If it were leaked early, it probably would have exerted an effect on the market.
I first encountered Selzer during the Democratic primaries in 2008, when she predicted Obama winning the caucuses, against the conventional wisdom. It was a big deal then. Back in 2016, 538 called her the best pollster in politics: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/selzer/
This cycle, if you followed e.g. the 538 subreddit, you had people regularly speculating on what the Selzer results would be. So the current near orgasmic state and level of interest isn't merely focusing on a random poll because it shows a pro-Harris result.
Polling wording absolutely influences results, so although I don't see it as at confusing, I would not be at all surprised if some respondents did.
That said, Trump won IA by 8 points in 2020 and by 9 points in 2016. I have a hard time imagining the wording shifting the results by over 10 points. It's either a really bad poll with an unlucky non representative set of recipients; Selzer cooked the numbers, either intentionally or not; or Trump is in deep trouble among white Midwestern voters.
ThenElection
22d ago
A lurking issue with the vast bulk of the polls so far: they all show a tossup. Not "they follow a distribution that's consistent with a tossup," but "they follow a distribution that's tightly clustered around a 0-1% margin for one or another candidate, in all the swing states." It's statistically impossible for this to arise by chance. You never see significant outliers. You would with the sample sizes they're working with.
This isn't indicative of a tight race: it's indicative of pollsters being scared to publish results favoring a candidate one way or another. If it were the former, you'd see obviously wrong outliers in one direction or another, but you don't.
If there's a single pollster I trust, it's Selzer. She has a reputation, and it's an earned reputation: she's been willing to publish outliers before, and consistently those outliers have been more consistent with the actual results than the mainstream popular wisdom and other pollsters.
Iowa itself doesn't matter: if Harris wins it, she's already won (and if I had to guess, I'd still bet Trump wins Iowa). But even if the actual results are at the pro-Trump edge of her confidence interval, he's very likely cooked: there is no way Iowa doesn't vote substantially to the right of all the swing states, particularly PA, MI, and WI.
ThenElection
22d ago
Most people who have blown their credibility against Trump have blown it the first or second or billionth time he's been on the brink of starting the Fourth Reich or whatever. Selzer hasn't: her results in both 2016 and 2020 were consistent with Trump's margins.
I guess she's nearing retirement, so maybe she wants to blow all her reputational capital in one go on orange man bad.
But I would not be happy if that were my only explanation for her results.
ThenElection
24d ago
I'd be curious to see how Californian treatment programs compare to PRC treatment programs in success rates. At least, they seem proud of it, and their statistics sound compelling: http://us.china-embassy.gov.cn/eng/zggs/202307/t20230706_11108971.htm
They have a clever way to encourage addicts into treatment. There are voluntary treatment programs, which you're encouraged to choose to do. If you don't, you fall through to the compulsory rehabilitation and isolation programs.
ThenElection
25d ago
Does this shift Trump supporters at all? They believe, with reasonable evidentiary support, that Democrats see them as garbage already. This is just another piece.
I think even going with "Biden is saying it to sabotage the Harris campaign out of bitterness/revenge" would probably shift more people, sheerly out of demoralization.
It would help for identifying the ballots as fraudulent, at least, unless someone only printed a few ballots per printer.
As far as hacking a printer, it's a question of how much of the steganography is implemented in software vs physical components. At least the printer identity could be done with just physical components.
You can also similarly encode the printer's identity (and all the metadata associated with the print job--time, originating user, document name, local network information) into the depth of grays on the printout, edge noise, kerning, and probably a thousand other things. No confirmation by manufacturers or the government that that's done, but the yellow dot trick has been around for decades, and I would be very surprised if there haven't been significant advances implemented since then.
I wouldn't trust any printer made in the last two decades for printing anything you don't want traced back to you.
ThenElection
27d ago
Left off "homeless guy setting the fire because he wants to get arrested." e.g. https://www.fox10phoenix.com/news/ballots-damaged-after-usps-mailbox-lit-fire-phoenix
ThenElection
27d ago
Probably not for an individual to publicize them. But isn't this the perennial question in security vulnerability reporting? An organization says they have perfectly secure systems; an investigator thinks of a dozen ways they're not secure and reports it; organization responds in a way that the reporter doesn't think is serious and so makes them public.
I blame the locomotives.
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