Zohar posted:

because of a garbage political science theory that they and most other American pundits attached themselves to before this election.

Zohar posted:

yeah I'm sure it's just a magical and inexplicable event and not indicative of a serious flaw in the theory because after all the theory can't fail it can only be failed

Zohar posted:

Yeah no that's a handwave. If invisible primaries theory's description of how elections happen (or at least the form in which it's passed into received wisdom) were true, then Trump wouldn't be where he is. The fact that he is means that the theory's description of reality is not sound.

Concerned Citizen posted:

"just fine" other than the fact that bernie sanders has come very close for a candidate who has essentially no backing by the party.

"party decides" is garbage. its existence owes more to the fact that there are very few elections to sample from. endorsements only correlate with the winner because, not surprisingly, people endorse expected winners. but that's not predictive because endorsements don't actually win votes unless you happen to be an unpledged delegate. look at the vote in NH. hillary won *every* major endorsement in NH and she lost by 20+ points.

G-Hawk posted:

Nate Silver originally focused on averaging polls and factoring in some fundamentals in a way that was fairly advanced as far as election analysis goes at the time, and that was good and innovative if not spectacularly difficult. These days 538 just churns out poo poo tons of content some of which is good but others are really speciously reasoned and basically the same kind of leap to conclusion punditry he originally cut through.

Laphroaig posted:

Also he's just tweeting incomprehensible gibberish now:

https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/702683681132040192

Yasser Arafatwa posted:

what completely meaningless statements

TROIKA CURES GREEK posted:

Correlation is not causation.

MaxxBot posted:

It's not just Trump, the Republican base hates the GOP establishment right now, people like Jeb! who had no grassroots support and were propped up by elites didn't stand a chance this cycle.

Skyl3lazer posted:

Also it's not doing 'just fine' with dem primary, silver has been wrong at multiple junctions so far and keeps moving his goalposts.

Concerned Citizen posted:

Nate Silver and other data journalists were basically running on the theory that candidates would boom-and-bust like Herman Cain and other candidates in the 2012 race. They just sort of applied 2012 as a universal model for no particular reason, and ignored the reasons why 2012 happened the way it did in the first place (because the right disliked Romney). When the bust never happened, I guess they just sort of assumed that the crash would be all the more epic later on.

Pinterest Mom posted:

Bernice Anders posted:

Yeah no poo poo. Harry Enten wrote today that if Trump doesn't win Ohio he is FINISHED.

Vox Nihili posted:

That's delegate majority, not popular vote majority. He'll make it.

Maxwells Demon posted:

Do the 8 states have to be from the actual 50 states or does Rubio winning Puerto Rico and DC help him?

bawfuls posted:

On the other hand Trump makes things up all the time without penalty.

Bernice Anders posted:

They made a retarded completely arbitrary graph and then put one of their made up data points outside of it. They're morons and the graph is dumb.

Bip Roberts posted:

I really hope they didn't chose the most flattering keyframe to display because JFC.

Edit: On the 5-turdy-8 theme it looks like Nate is giving birth to the black baby jesus in that photo.

More edit: I watched the video. Nate is def sitting on a warm turd. Also the key frame might actually have been the best single frame in the vid.

Dead Cosmonaut posted:

look at the top of his head

Sebadoh Gigante posted:

They talked about this concept with Rubio, but I think it will apply to Johnson in the general: he doesn't have a base of support. Not many people dislike him, but no one would claim him as their first choice.

Chokes McGee posted:

"Who could have seen me being happy, clearly the problem is that this is a once in a lifetime event and not my complete ignorance of everything that made me famous"

Dead Cosmonaut posted:

look at the top of his head

eviltastic posted:

Yeah, it was pretty pitiful. He seemed caught completely off guard by a boilerplate "I'm offended you're even bringing up race" line. Like, what, did you expect Frank Luntz of all people to be ready to speak plainly about that? Maybe in addition to showing up to an interview with a sorta-relevant poll, you have stuff the guy himself previously said to the Atlantic or Fox News or speaking at colleges or what have you on the subject you're interviewing him about? The guy's own work provides all you'd need for a followup, if you're too polite to bring up the fact that the party kinda nominated a guy who keeps doing a racism.

Despera posted:

And a 50/50 outcome makes no prediction.

Concerned Citizen posted:

Yes, they're right. If you say there's a 50% chance of something occurring with only two possible outcomes, it means your model doesn't know what is going to happen. It's the model equivalent of throwing your hands up in the air and saying "who knows?" The theoretical perfect model would only assess either a 0% or 100% chance to any outcome, and it would be correct every time.