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naraburns  nihil supernum  1d ago (text post)   14432 thread views

U.S. Election (Day?) 2024 Megathread

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Did Nate Silver just get obliterated by some twitter random (Keith Rabois) for 100K? Back a month ago there was this exchange where Nate asked this dude for a binding promise to transfer 100K if Trump didn't win by 8 points in Florida. Nate seemed pretty confident and I assumed he knew what he was doing. The other guy seemed like an angry lower-caps twitter dude.

https://x.com/NateSilver538/status/1842211340720504895

Florida is 91% in and it's looking pretty bad for Nate: https://www.axios.com/visuals/presidential-election-results-2024-updates-harris-trump?selectedRaces=all

Trump 5,864,014 56.1% Harris 4,491,712 43.0

Am I fundamentally misunderstanding what's going on here? It seems very bad for Mr Forecaster if he bets so confidently and gets nuked.

Edit: According to Rabois Nate Silver later withdrew his offer of a bet: https://x.com/rabois/status/1853971462744359299

It's not like he has millions to throw around. Nate is smart enough to know that accepting the bet would be Kelly suboptimal

Nate should've kept his mouth shut then, he was the one that offered to bet in the first place. I probably should've copied out the full exchange in OP.

Nate links to a post 'should Kamala gamble on a Blue Florida' where he argues that Florida could plausibly fall to Harris

you are a buffoon. Minimum Trump win in FL is 8 points and more likely 10-14.

Dude you've gotta stop huffing the Twitter vibes. How much money are you willing to bet on a Trump +8 point spread in Florida?

$100k

Have your lawyer draw up a quick contract and it's a deal. NATE DOT SILVER DOT MEDIA AT GMAIL DOT COM. No contract, no bet, because you've been nutty lately and are a payment risk.

bet u missed Ron’s margin in election too??

Keith, we don't need to trash talk since now we've discovered a more honorable way to settle our little disagreement. Just send the contract over.

I thought Nate was the bigger man, offering a substantive bet and speaking in full capitalized sentences. But clearly he was all talk, no substance.

I thought Nate was the bigger man, offering a substantive bet and speaking in full capitalized sentences. But clearly he was all talk, no substance.

So, basically this meme, but Red is in the right?

The continued glazing of Nate Silver, and the absurd belief in the validity of modern polling, betrays that the Rationalist/Rat-adjascent community is pathologically obsessed with appearing to be "scientific," at the expense of actually being right.

As I have pointed out ad nauseum, the shift to landline surveys has destroyed polling. No, Nate was not "less wrong" when he shifted his probabilities in 2016 to give Trump around 30%; there wasn't a single poll at the time that justified his change, but you lot still want to believe his model has any validity, and we'll be playing this same song and dance 4 years from now, and likely, until the end of the republic.

I'm not a Nate fanboy, I read Scott's most recent post (TLDR: Polymarket bad, Metaculus good, Nate good) with disapproval back when it was written. I am a Polymarket true believer. But I wasn't brave enough to post my thoughts beforehand since I thought Nate might have some idea about what he was doing...

Proposing a bet and then refusing to sign it (and then being proved wrong later) is very poor sportsmanship though. It shows his true beliefs are not aligned with what he says.

Seems like the polls were way off in Florida. Nate Silver had Republicans up by 5 - 6%, and it looks like they're going to win it by 13 points.

As a Floridian, I could have warned him.

Its not just that the Dems are outnumbered now, they're UTTERLY DEMORALIZED so even if they show up in polls, they might not bother voting.

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.

Has Nate made any other bets?

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.

Is that not showing +13%? seems like +13 > +8?

By my math she would need to win ~72.5% of the remaining votes to lose by 8. I don't know how plausible that is.

Yeah, especially since a decent fraction of votes remaining are in the central time pan handle, not remote votes like in other states. I interpreted the comment as implying Nate Silver took the margin greater than 8 points side. But then the comment also implied he was wrong?

I think 56-43 gives a +13 spread. Was OP interpreting it as +13/2 or +6.5?

Nate silver wins the bet if trump doesn't win by 8 points, is what I read.

Nate Silver was betting Trump's margin wouldn't exceed 8 points, so it's (arguably) looking like Nate will be down $100,000 if the contract was indeed signed.

Sorry to not answer your question, but what's up with Florida?

Florida was THE swing state until quite recently. Obama won in 2012. And now Trump is going to win by 12 points !?

Is it just that conservatives are fleeing the corruption and taxes of Illinois and New York for the sunnier shores of Florida? Or is it DeSantis coattails?

More sinister explanation: Retirees are living in Florida for tax residency, but then voting (D) in their original home states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin now that Florida is no longer in play.

A) A lot of people moving here/retirees from Blue states that increase the Republican voteshare.

B) Desantis is a terrifyingly competent governor, from day 1. Even Dems notice that he keeps the state in tiptop shape.

C) As part of B), Desantis cleaned up the problem counties when it came to voting, which probably eliminated whatever fraud there was.

I explain here.

A couple guesses / theories.

For one, Florida was the Covid refugee state for a lot of the New York / North East lockdown dissidents, when covid-driven migrations largely trailed the election. New York saw a lot of out-migration during the lockdowns as part of a broader emegration trend, and despite the stereotypes / theories that people go back to voting for what they just left, there's a separate dynamic in that the discontents are the first to go and the most to go. A flip side to this, in turn, was emigration of Florida democrats to other places. LGBT-aligned Democratics reportedly (though I've never found strong numbers) left the state in significant numbers during various culture war fights for friendlier ideological neighbors. Culture war national media fights like the 'Don't Say Gay' fights had their own impacts to local voter pools.

Second, the Cuba lobby has stopped being competitive and strongly dislikes the Biden Administration's policies and became straight up [R]. The linked article from Responsible Statecraft casts that as a failure of the lobby rather than of the democratic party, but the issue is that the 'Cuba Lobby' isn't really just Cubans anymore- it also has substantial crossover with the Venezuela block, where most Venezuelans who've fled over the last two decades have ended up (other than Texas) in Flordia. Now, obviously the illegal migrants themselves aren't the voting block, but rather the legal resident / citizen families, and communities. There is a substantial and under-appreciated (or unheard) hispanic anti-socialist block, where anything that comes across as pro-latin-american-left is looked at with suspicion.

You can see here from Florida voting data that third-generation migrants in particular are considerably more likely to vote for Republican than Democrat, even though Democrats have slight leads on first and second generation migrants. That reads to me in Florida as Cuban and Cuban-adjacent migrants in particular, incorporated into the cuban political machine.

A third point is that since 2012 DeSantis broke the back of the local Florida Democratic Party while building a much stronger voter registration base. One of the things the Florida Republicans have done is functionally limit the role of out-of-state registration/mobilization groups, which limits the ability of the Democratic national party aparatus and various activist groups to substitute for Florida Democratic Party shortfalls.

In short, a FDP doom-loop where a loss of Democratic organizers led to fewer voters led to less ability to organize leading to worse results leading to dispirited partisans leading to more emigration leading to less mobilization ability, even as the Republicans had a win-loop of increasing Cuban-support, sympathetic immigration, and organizational advantages that built upon each other.

Less sinister explanation: retirees move to Florida, vote red there and not in their home states, making Florida redder and NY/NJ bluer.

But that's not different than it was in 2000. It's not a cumulative effect since the retirees die.

The split by age wasn't as large, and Florida has gotten older over time.

I looked it up (thanks Perplexity!).

It looks like Florida was 3.4 years older than the US average in 2000 and 4.5 years older in 2020.

So you are right. But no way this swings the electorate by 12 points !

I called him Nate Bronze back in 2016: I'm calling him Nate Bronze now.

I wonder how much of Nate's success was simply applying some relatively decent methods to what was formerly a pretty midwit domain. Perhaps a similar comp would be the rise of sports analytics. It's not exactly rocket science, yet prior to the last couple decades, there was far too much credence given to human intuition over hard data.

Silver made some big improvements in the meta, but now the world has caught up. So he's not quite the oracle he once was.

Early-mover advantage of using big data and other quantitative methods to forecasting, tons of positive media coverage, darling of the left by predicting Obama wins and Democratic sweeps of House elections from 2008-2012. He was smart enough to pivot when the left became to extreme.

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.

Since Elon's takeover, building an audience seems to be as simple as being anti-left

Very saturated now though. Becoming a fresh right wing Twitter personality puts you up against some very stiff competition. Sadly even the constant struggle to stay on top has burned out a lot of good men: 0HPLovecraft is about to hit -10

Nate silver literally made this exact point 11 years ago

People often have a glowup after high school, Nate Silver had to wait until midlife crisis! He looks so much better with a beard and losing the dorky nerd style!

Nice find on the video timestamp. How in the world did you dig that up so quickly?

Yeah, it makes sense that Nate would understand that. And I have nothing but respect for him.

So I remembered nate silver's "water level" comment from a powerpoint presentation.

From there I typed "nate silver" got terrible results then typed "nate silver talk" got bad results then typed "nate silver presentation"

I found a few links worth exporing (time> 20 minutes and clearly a powerpoint presentation)

I then watched the video at 2x speed mashing forward key until one of the videos had this waterline graph that I remembered then I pressed back until the start of that slide

note that the actual quote was at 29:30 where He said "I look for fields where that water level is low"

True nerd power right there. We approve.

Nate Age Pervert.

Silver Age Mindset?

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