Predict the Election

[Soxbadger]

The first presidential election I voted in (Gore v. Bush), I had to wait almost 2 hours to vote. But that was in Wisconsin, which might as well be Canada.

[kjshoe04]

I had to wait about two hours to vote in 2004.

[Jake]

Silver as of this evening: 91.6% chance of Obama re-election

[kev211]

The GOP better hope that Nate Silver is the blubbering idiot they've tried to make him out to be.

[mr_genius]

The GOP better hope that Nate Silver is the blubbering idiot they've tried to make him out to be.

 

it's one of the very few things i'll be happy about if Romney wins.

[mr_genius]

 

haha. yes

[kev211]

it's one of the very few things i'll be happy about if Romney wins.

The thing I am going to miss most about this election is your hilarious post. Once I realized that you were not 100% serious and just trolling a bit I started to see the humor in them.

Edited November 6, 2012 by kev211

[Jake]

The GOP better hope that Nate Silver is the blubbering idiot they've tried to make him out to be.

 

You know how sometimes you make a shot from half-court? That doesn't make it a good shot to take because you saw it go in once. If Romney wins, he made a half-court shot. Nate Silver and every political scientist that likes things like numbers says what they say because the polls make it almost an undeniable Obama win. The only chance is if the average polling number is strongly biased towards Obama, to an extent that is completely unprecedented. No one can think of a particularly good reason that in an era that these things should be getting MORE accurate, they would suddenly find a bias. The newer challenges faced by pollsters have been found to produce pro-Republican bias, in most cases.

 

Read this Professor's discussion of the potential for bias: http://votamatic.org/can-we-trust-the-polls/ He has some other very awesome, pretty nerdy analyses of the data. The most convincing to me is that the aggregate of small polling firms (only do 1 or a few polls) err from the total average in the same way that PPP and that ilk do. It seems unlikely that the aggregate of a bunch of independent pollsters would ALL be biased one way, far more likely that the Rasmussens of the world are systematically biased the wrong direction.

 

All will be answered tomorrow though. The political science world (one that I am proud to be a part of ) will be shaken if so many pollsters miss by so much tomorrow. It won't be the fault of every political scientist that aggregates polls if they miss, it'll be a systematic problem with poll tabulation by the individual polling firms. I find that unlikely to be the case, but you never know. These things are always super unlikely until they happen.

[knightni]

[LittleHurt05]

I predict that Obama will have a big early lead tomorrow, until the Republicans get off work.

[HuskyCaucasian]

[NorthSideSox72]

I"m going to close this puppy up, and we will use the Election Day thread. We can look back at people's predictions here.