{"id":31485,"date":"2012-10-30T08:11:20","date_gmt":"2012-10-30T13:11:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=31485"},"modified":"2012-10-30T08:11:20","modified_gmt":"2012-10-30T13:11:20","slug":"its-entirely-possible","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=31485","title":{"rendered":"It’s Entirely Possible…"},"content":{"rendered":"

…that Barack Obama wins this election (more at noon).<\/p>\n

But as the situation among reputable polls shifts ever more to Romney, and as more and more hitherto “likely Obama” states flip to “Leans Obama” and “Toss-up” and even “Lean Romney”, it’s interesting to watch Nate Silver doubling and tripling down on his prediction<\/a>; he’s still giving The Light Worker a 75% chance of winning.<\/p>\n

I’m not a statistician – but I can read and reason, and I’ve been dinging on Silver’s polling<\/a>, methodology and predictions<\/a> for a couple of years now. \u00a0My beef – and I’d suspect the beef of any rational person who isn’t one of the incurious low-information voters at which Silver’s polling is aimed – is that he calculates his results based on weighting existing polls based on some proprietary secret sauce known only to him.<\/p>\n

Is the “sauce” valid? \u00a0I don’t know – nobody does, really – but as I showed in the 2010 Minnesota Governor’s race, it involved giving exaggerated weight<\/a> to polls like the absurd “Minnesota Poll”, the so-bad-it’s-out-of-business Humphrey Institute poll and the frankly left-leaning PPP poll, while systematically shorting polls like Survey USA and Rasmussen.<\/p>\n

Is Silver right? \u00a0Even if I could check his math, I probably couldn’t check his math, if you catch my drift. \u00a0Maybe Obama still\u00a0is\u00a0<\/em>a near-sure thing, even after this past three weeks; maybe the Dems and Silver know something we don’t (like how many dead people will be voting). \u00a0We won’t really know until next week.<\/p>\n

But while there will be many things about a Romney win that I’ll applaud, one of the big ones for me, personally, will be dancing – rhetorically, of course – on Nate Silver’s professional grave.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

…that Barack Obama wins this election (more at noon). But as the situation among reputable polls shifts ever more to Romney, and as more and more hitherto “likely Obama” states flip to “Leans Obama” and “Toss-up” and even “Lean Romney”, it’s interesting to watch Nate Silver doubling and tripling down on his prediction; he’s still […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[125],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31485","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-great-poll-scam"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31485","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31485"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31485\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31487,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31485\/revisions\/31487"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}