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naraburns  nihil supernum  16d ago (text post)   26875 thread views

U.S. Election (Day?) 2024 Megathread

With apologies to our many friends and posters outside the United States... it's time for another one of these! Culture war thread rules apply, and you are permitted to openly advocate for or against an issue or candidate on the ballot (if you clearly identify which ballot, and can do so without knocking down any strawmen along the way). "Small-scale" questions and answers are also permitted if you refrain from shitposting or being otherwise insulting to others here. Please keep the spirit of the law--this is a discussion forum!--carefully in mind.

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Just wanted to point out the big losers of last night were:

  1. Harris
  2. DEI (with Harris being the epitome of the DEI candidate)
  3. Selzer
  4. Silver
  5. RDS (clearly the party will be JD’s after this term though I could obviously see RDS as a running mate)

The big winners:

  1. Vance (his star is ascending massively)
  2. Trump
  3. Betting markets (crushed the poll prognosticators)
  4. Elon

Loser: Lichtman

Winner: The Keys

RDS (clearly the party will be JD’s after this term though I could obviously see RDS as a running mate)

how so? DeSantis has thoroughly flipped the ur-swing state crimson, and has no rivals as the most efficient and effective governor in the country both on ordinary, non-partisan QoL issues (disaster response, infrastructure condition, etc.) and highly-partisan culture war issues (fighting higher education, voting reform, etc.) JD Vance is no-doubt a major winner here; he's done a fantastic job on campaign. But I would be shocked and saddened if DeSantis was marginalized in the GOP moving forward. Competence like he's displayed has got to have a seat at the table because it's not enough to have good optics; you have to deliver.

Silver did have a fun exchange with Alan Lichtman who predicted a Harris win due to his "Keys of the Presidency" heuristic. Lichtman one of those "correctly predicted the results of last X elections" guys. Silver pointed out that by his own Keys, it predicted a Trump win - and Alan responded something hilariously memeable like "Nate Silver doesn't know how to turn the keys"

So i dunno. I thought it was funny at least

Lichtman actually screwed the pooch as early as 2016, the year he got famous.. Before 2016, his model was supposed to predict the winner of popular vote (and the books had been carefully been written to indicate this); in 2016 he had predicted a Trump victory, and during that year Trump did indeed win, but he didn't win the popular vote, which Lichtman's model (according to his own words he had stuck by for several elections) was supposed to predict. However, he was only too happy to accept the fame for this "correct" incorrect prediction and make himself into an election guru. Wikipedia confirms it:

The system correctly predicted the popular vote winner in every election from 1984 to 2012. [23] Lichtman garnered attention for his call of a Donald Trump victory in 2016; some critics say the prediction was wrong because Trump lost the popular vote, but Lichtman said he had switched to predicting who would become president and was correct.[7] In the media he was widely credited with a correct 2016 prediction.

Selzer is obviously ruined. Her whole thing is she predicts 1 state and she produced one of the worst polls of all time.

Silver is similarly ruined, however. His whole grift is predicting elections and he said “idk.” He will refuse to ever admit industry polling bias, so the best he can do is make his model say 50/50 unless it’s already obvious to everyone and their grandma who will win.

I'm more more forgiving of Silver than of Selzer. Sometimes the data just indicates that it's just too close and the correct thing to say is that you don't know. And in reality, I think everyone understands that you don't really know. Selzer being not only wrong, but nearly the opposite of correct when she's supposed to be the foremost expert is quite damning in my eyes.

There is always going to be some error with polls. Most pollsters fake their results near the end by averaging them with those of other pollswhich does work to make their polls more accurate, but at the cost of making the aggregate of the polls less accurate. Didn't Selzer just not do this? Why should she be ruined for that?

(crushed the poll prognosticators)

This is silly. You can't extrapolate from a single election, you'd have to compare their performance over hundreds of different elections until you can see how well the percentages hold up.

hundreds of different elections

I saw this paper recently. Thought it was interesting.

Is this sarcasm?

No, and it shouldn't be infeasible. When I say 'hundreds of elections' I don't mean hundreds of American cycles, it could be individual local races, worldwide electoral predictions etc. The data to do that sort of comparison should already exist.

But the same pollsters aren’t polling worldwide elections or generally local races.

If a weather forecast says there is a 50% chance of rain tomorrow, and it does not rain, was the forecast wrong? If a betting market says there's only a 40% of rain, and it doesn't rain, did the betting market crush the weather forecast?

This is an evergreen response “my percentages were correct but sometimes things happen.” But I can buy it with the weather man (you make 365 predictions pa). But elections practically happen once every two years.

And yet, don't evergreen responses sometimes hold tree for as long as the evergreen does? Sometimes the exceptions need to be shocking to break the rule (such as a forest fire causing the evergreen to lose it's green), but the consistency across contexts doesn't disprove the evergreen.

Well the point I am making is that the poll guys basically are non falsifiable since the samples are too small so I don’t give credence to their “I was right but sometimes you hit red on roulette” schtick

Silver

Him removing his model so early proved no one should give this gambling addict any credibility. Stick to sports, Nate.

What is the criticism of Silver? A few weeks/month ago when he said Trump was leading the liberals on X accused him of being a Thiel shill. But somehow the right also dislikes him?

What I got from reading the occasional tweet by him was complaining about "herding" and the polls showing the election as really close, but this is suspicious and probably means the polls are garbage.

Edit: Oh I see a bit of pushback which is discussed downthread.

Assuming RDS is DeSantis, I think he still comes off as a winner tonight.

Look at the flawless way that Florida ran its election, as opposed to the clown shows in MI, PA, WI, GA, and AZ. And look at the results, with a 13 point Republican victory. DeSantis has proven that executive competence matters, and that voters will respond.

I see what he's done for Florida and I want that for the United States.

Yes. Don’t get me wrong. I love Ron DeSantis. But a trump loss meant RDS had a chance at the 2028 nomination. Now it seems like it is Vance’s for sure.

You can expect republicans to have an actual primary starting in late 2027, and a lot of things can happen by then.

I’d point to Youngkin, Abbott, and Hawley as clear major candidates in addition to those two anyways, although I expect whoever gets Trumps complete and total endorsement to drive the other four out.

I really hope it's one of those two and not some Trump spawn.

But while either RDS or Vance would be a dream President, I do worry about electability. Trump is sui generis.

Agreed, I'm not a fan of political dynasty.

I really like Vance. His interview with Rogan showed that we think incredibly similarly on many cultural issues, almost to the word. Honestly, I think he will be an even stronger contender in 2028 than Trump was, especially if he gets down in the mud and actually does things as VP.

I really like Vance. His interview with Rogan showed that we think incredibly similarly on many cultural issues, almost to the word.

Vance cites Scott and shares the worldview and politics of the average user of this forum (and, even if he isn’t here, I really wouldn’t be surprised if he’d been sent a motte link or two in his time); he is closer to The Mottizen than at least 99% of the rest of the American population.

It's weird that the Modal outcome happening means Silver lost.

(no seriously his forecast was that trumps most likely path to victory was sweeping all 6 swing states happening 20% of the time)

His other 3 forecasts for most likely trump victory being

Winning everything but Michigan and wisconsin, winning everything but wisconsin, and winning everything but nevada.

When you read deeper into his forecast as to how each candidate would win you see that it's basically "win by a narrow margin in every single major contest causing a blowout in the score"

His whole “job” is predicting elections. He literally said “idk.” in terms of doing his job that is actually worse than being wrong. What a failure.

But...sometimes things really are 50/50. If I tell you an unweighted coin is equally likely to come up heads or tails, I'm not somehow at fault for not being able to give you more insight than that.

But that's the thing. What if the coin is weighted, but you refuse to admit your scale is broken? Or whatever tool you'd use to detect a weighted coin.

You hear a lot about how the results of this election were in the margin of error of a lot of the polls. Not the chances of winning, but what they estimated turnout to be. In some states, especially the better polled states, that might be true. In others, the polls were dashed to pieces. I think Texas, Florida, New York and Virginia had huge polling misses, despite turning out as predicted. I saw Sagaar Enjeti last night downright gleeful that the left's project for a Purple Texas seemed utterly destroyed with how hard Latino's realigned with Trump, and how hard Ted Cruz won them in his district versus prior Cruz victories.

A single flip of the coin doesn't tell you that it's weighted though.

This is the exact misunderstanding of statistics that kills Silver, is confusing aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty.

Aleatoric uncertainty comes from the irreducible randomness of a process. Epistemic uncertainty comes from a lack of knowledge.

The election was not 50/50 going into Tuesday. In terms of aleatoric uncertainty it was nearly 100/0. People’s votes were essentially predetermined at that point. If you reset the timeline to Tuesday morning, you would get the same result every time.

Silver’s epidemic uncertainty was high. That’s not because the election was impossible to predict (I made a lot of money off of it), it’s because he’s an idiot and refuses to update based on past results.

If there is no way of acquiring that knowledge, then those two types of uncertainty are, for all intents and purposes, the same.

The commodity silver is down significantly from yesterday. Not sure if that's what @zeke5123a referred to...

Silver got feisty about Florida, trying to make a 100k bet that Trump would win by less than 8.

Trump won by 13.

It was an unnecessary own goal.

Betting markets > Silver

In a roundabout way, that is a win for Silver since he's been promoting prediction markets for years (even when they were much less popular; he used to get scoffed at routinely by his 538 podcast co-hosts when he brought up prediction markets), he's an advisor to Polymarket, he acts as a spokesman for Polymarket in some capacities, his new podcast focuses heavily on prediction markets, etc.

Well it feels similar to 2016 for Silver. He comes across as simultaneously wrong and cowardly in that he ultimately did say Harris winning was more likely while pushing the odds as close to a coin flip as possible. I think it leaves people asking themselves: why listen to a guy that will ultimately just tell you "I don't know, anything could happen, it's a coin flip"? For a guy that wrote a book about how he liked to live on the "river" (or was it the village?) as a high-stakes risk-taker he seems to do a lot of bet-hedging and saying "I don't know". You don't have to subscribe to The Silver Bulletin to get a shrug and an idk.

That's the whole point of being a good high-stakes risk-taker. If I challenge you to a game where you bet $6 and win $10 if you correctly guess whether I roll even on a d6, the correct high-stakes risk-taker answer is "lmao, no bet".

Some things just are pretty close, odds-wise.

Wait, I'm confused. Multiply that out for me? If you demonstrate a fair die and I bet evens every time, why isn't that +EV? Transaction costs? Or are you leaving unstated that it's one round, few rounds, or rare rounds (enough time between rounds to invalidate assumptions)?

You pay $6 dollars to enter the bet, so you start at -$6. 50% chance of $10 is $5. -$6+$5=-$1. The bet is negative EV.

Derp, thanks.

Saw somebody comment that the Pelosis and Schumers of the party who pushed Biden out will now have to lose power. I wonder if that's how it will go.

Remember how it felt in July, that this was basically a guaranteed lost election cycle for the democrats, and the main question was who would step up and take it? (to save the downballot races from utter landslide territory if they left Biden in) Everyone at that time was looking past Kamala, as an obvious bad choice, and speculating about Newsom or other up-and-coming talent. But then there was the specter that looking past her would be a perpetual thorn in their side, where Kamala could always be on the outside saying 'told you so', 'my turn', or playing identity cards, fracturing support with stepped-on toes and 'what if' cases.

So it seemed that for the Obamas & party leadership, letting Kamala take this (likely) loss served to clear out Biden, Kamala, and Trump, all in one fell swoop, from the next 2028 cycle. I don't think it was quite at the level of the 'Harris as Jobber' argument -- they would still try to push her to victory. But her loss isn't necessarily theirs, and helps their future prospects in some ways.

Oh the popcorn will be delicious when the tell alls start to leak from the Biden camp

I'm pretty sure Pelosi will be running the party from the grave at this point.

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