Five Thirty Eight Election Eve Update: Clinton Gains

I will take nothing for granted until I see the election called for Hillary Clinton tonight.  That said, Nate Silver's Five Thirty Eight blog's - which has suffered criticism - last update late yesterday had some positive news for Clinton Supporters.  Here are the highlights:

First things first: Hillary Clinton has a 70 percent chance of winning the election, according to both the FiveThirtyEight polls-only and polls-plusmodels. That’s up from a 65 percent chance on Sunday night, so Clinton has had a good run in the polls in the final days of the campaign. Clinton’s projected margin of victory in the popular vote has increased to 3.5 percent from 2.9 percent.
 We’ll continue to collect polls through early Tuesday morning, at which point we’ll update the model for the last time . . .

As a lot of you noticed, Nevada, North Carolina and Florida flipped from red to blue over the course of Monday. We don’t think that’s a particularly meaningful metric, because the forecasts are probabilistic — Clinton’s chances of winning Florida increased to 54 percent from 48 percent, for instance, which is nontrivial but not an especially large change. Still, we know it’s something a lot of readers follow. It’s unlikely that any further states will flip to Clinton in our final forecast, as she’s too far behind in Ohio, the next-closest state.¹ It’s possible that Florida and North Carolina could flip back to Trump by tomorrow morning, though probably not Nevada, where Clinton’s lead is a bit larger.

Still, the polls clearly agree that Clinton is the favorite, and perhaps has a slight wind at her back for Election Day.

Nate Silver tells Democrats Not to Panic Just Yet

With election day a little over a month away in the 2014 mid-term elections, the pundit class is tamping up its predictions of whether or not the Republicans can win control of the U.S. Senate - a frightening prospect to anyone not driven by greed, religious extremism, and/or a white supremacy agenda - just as the political ads on television begin to dominate the air waves.  Some pundits are acting as if they are modern day Cassandra's for the Democrats while others huff and puff as GOP partisans.  Amongst all of this noise and hot air, Nate Silver, gay wonder kid (pictured above), says that the Democrats need not necessarily panic yet.  A piece in Salon looks at Silver's reasoning.  Here are excerpts:

Last week brought a spate of bad news for Democrats hoping to retain control of the U.S. Senate, with polls showing their candidates falling behind in Colorado, Alaska and Iowa. But statistics whiz Nate Silver says it’s too early for the party to panic just yet.

In his latest Senate forecast, the FiveThirtyEight founder writes that the GOP remains a slight favorite to win Senate control, pegging the party’s chances at 60 percent. According to FiveThirtyEight’s model, Democratic seats in Alaska, Arkansas, Louisiana, Montana, South Dakota and West Virginia are likely to flip Republican. With Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., forecast to lose to independent Greg Orman – whom Democrats hope caucuses with their party – that means Republicans need to pick up just one additional seat to take over the Senate. And given the extremely tight races in Iowa and Colorado, the party stands a decent chance of doing just that.

But don’t panic, Silver tells Democrats – at least not yet. The narrative that the GOP is now a lock to win the Senate, he cautions, “conceals too much of the uncertainty in the outlook.” There are still five weeks to go until Election Day – plenty of time for the conditions to change in key races.

[T]he next five weeks could witness states like Colorado and Alaska swinging back in the Democratic direction. Or, Silver warns, we could see the ground begin to shift underneath candidates like North Carolina Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan. Despite a barrage of Koch-backed attacks early in the 2014 cycle, Hagan has held a steady lead in recent polls. But given the narrowness of her lead – 3.5 points in RealClearPolitics’ average – it would take only a small shift to see things start to turn the other way.

In short, the GOP is much better positioned going into the home stretch – even Princeton neuroscientist and election prognosticator Sam Wang, once among the most bullish analysts on Democrats’ prospects, is starting to have his doubts – but there’s a lot we still don’t know, even this late in the midterm cycle.

For all the talk of a resurgent GOP establishment, we’re likely to see a new crop of inflammatory Tea Party types sworn in to the House in January. Today’s New York Times looks at how many House GOPers who are either retiring or seeking higher office are likely to be replaced by even more conservative Republicans – suggesting that Speaker John Boehner is unlikely to be any more successful reining in the more unruly factions of his party once the new Congress begins.

In other midterm news:

Alabama or Mississippi: Which is More Homophobic?

Leave it to the Daily Show to cause mischief but also focus attention on the batshit craziness that plagues the states of Alabama and Mississippi when it comes to spittle flecked homophobia.  Alabama today, in my view, is far more extreme that it was 30+ years ago when I lived there.  Towleroad describes the mission as follows:

After consulting with Nate Silver about which states will be the last to get gay marriage, The Daily Show's Al Madrigal brought a stunt gay couple to Alabama and Mississippi to see "which one of these backwoods, inbred, homophobic states will swim the longest against the tide of history."

Do yourself a favor and watch the video here.  Some might think the video mean spirited, but the truth is that all of us have the option of embracing ignorance and bigotry or rejecting it.  With today's Internet and easily accessed information, no one has the excuse to remain ignorant and bigoted.

Time to Emigrate? Nate Silver Predicts GOP Holding 50-51 Senate Seats After 2014 Election

It is stunning at times to see progressive causes and equality advancing in South America and in Europe - even in South Africa - yet America seems at times to be lurching backwards with racists, bigots and foul religious extremists either in ascendancy or not plummeting in a death spiral as they deserve.  In America a main representative of this regressive process is today's Republican Party with a party base that stinks of racism, worships ignorance, and holds anyone deemed as  "other"  - which is virtually anyone who isn't a conservative white conservative Christian - with open contempt.  And despite this, gay statistics nerd Nate Silver predicts that the GOP may make major gains in the U. S. Senate in 2014.  Currently, the Senate is the only obstacle to passage of extremist legislation passed by the gerrymandered GOP controlled House of Representatives.  If the GOP were to take control of the Senate, other than a presidential veto, there would be no stopping GOP insanity and bigotry.    Hence my question, is it time to bail and emigrate?  Talking Points Memo looks at Silver's current predictions:

Following former Gov. Brian Schweitzer's decision not to run for Montana’s open U.S. Senate seat this weekend, New York Times polling guru Nate Silver predicted Monday that Republicans will hold 50 to 51 seats in the upper chamber after all ballots are counted in the 2014 Congressional mid-term elections.

Silver hedges in his prediction by reminding his readers that the outcome will be affected by several factors, namely local variables, the quality of candidates yet chosen by both Democrats and Republicans, economic indicators and President Barack Obama's approval rating.

It is equally important to look for early indications of whether G.O.P. primary voters will be more tolerant of moderate and “main street” Republicans than they were in 2010 and 2012. A strong set of Republican nominees could give the party as many as a dozen credible opportunities to pick up the seats they need – whereas a weaker series of candidates could require them to win almost all of the races that remained competitive after the primaries.

Read Silver's full state-by-state analysis here.

Silver hedges in his prediction by reminding his readers that the outcome will be affected by several factors, namely local variables, the quality of candidates yet chosen by both Democrats and Republicans, economic indicators and President Barack Obama's approval rating.

Read Silver's full state-by-state analysis here.

 Silver does have these caveats:

It is therefore important to watch macro-level indicators – especially Mr. Obama’s approval ratings, the generic Congressional ballot and major economic measures – in addition to following the recruitment and polling in individual states.

It is equally important to look for early indications of whether G.O.P. primary voters will be more tolerant of moderate and “main street” Republicans than they were in 2010 and 2012. A strong set of Republican nominees could give the party as many as a dozen credible opportunities to pick up the seats they need – whereas a weaker series of candidates could require them to win almost all of the races that remained competitive after the primaries.

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The GOP’s Demographic Time-Bomb

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Some would depict Nate Silver as a geeky nerd, but on the 2012presidential  election, his analysis proved to be dead on.  Now, Silver has been using his analytical skills and data to explore what the future may hold for the Republican Party if it doesn't change more than its "messaging" as demographic change continues across the country and the number of angry, typically elderly, conservative/religious extremist whites declines as a percentage of the overall population.  If Silver's analysis is correct, the GOP ought to be scared as Hell that it will be a permanent minority party.  So far, reality does not seem to be sinking in with most members of the GOP who continue to focus on angry whites and Christofascists as their sole audience.  Silver's piece in the New York Times is interesting reading.  Here are some excerpts:

A bill to allow unauthorized immigrants to gain citizenship carries electoral risks and rewards for the Republican Party. On the one hand, if the bill were passed, some of those immigrants would eventually vote. Roughly 80 percent of illegal immigrants are Hispanic, and about 10 percent are Asian — groups that voted heavily Democratic in the last two elections.

On the other hand, such legislation could plausibly improve the Republican Party’s brand image among Hispanics and Asian-Americans, perhaps allowing the party to fare better among these voters in future elections. Which of these effects would outweigh the other?

I’ve designed a tool, in the form of an interactive graphic, that allows you to make different sets of assumptions about immigration reform, population growth and racial voting patterns. Although the graphic contains a number of simplifications, we hope it will be useful to experiment with.

The graphic begins with 2012 voting results as a baseline. In each state, and the District of Columbia, I’ve estimated the vote for Barack Obama and Mitt Romney in the five racial categories (white, black, Hispanic, Asian and “other”) that are tracked in exit polls.

Because the exit poll data is incomplete — 19 states did not have exit polls last year, and the polls often did not break down the results where a racial population was small (for instance, Asian-Americans in Montana) — I had to rely on various forms of extrapolation and interpolation to fill in the missing data points.

The interactive graphic then allows you to make three sets of assumptions to consider how the vote might change going forward.

Step 1: Population Growth
Immigration reform is being contested against a background of an increasingly nonwhite electorate. Seventy-two percent of voters were white in 2012, down from 74 percent in 2008 and 81 percent in 2000.

The graphic allows you to consider the effects of further population changes by entering growth rates for the five major racial groups. As a default, it assumes that the number of white voters will grow by 0.5 percent a year, the number of black voters by 1 percent a year, the number of Hispanic and “other” voters by 3 percent a year and the number of Asian voters by 3.5 percent a year. These figures represent a rough consensus of various population growth estimates.

Step 2: Unauthorized Immigrants
The graphic also allows you to consider the effects of legislation that would introduce new citizens to the electorate. These changes are assumed to have a one-time effect: that is, they would affect the status of the roughly 11 million unauthorized immigrants who are already in the United States, but not future groups of immigrants. The calculation assumes that this impact is separate from the long-term changes in the voter population evaluated in the previous step.

Step 3: Changes to Racial Voting Patterns
Finally, the graphic allows you to evaluate the effects of changes in the share of votes going to each party from each racial group. The changes are assumed to be uniform across states. So, for example, if your assumption is that the G.O.P. does five percentage points better with Hispanics nationally than it did in 2012, the Republican share of the Hispanic vote is assumed to grow to 44 percent from 39 percent in Florida, to 23 percent from 18 percent in Illinois, and so forth.

The most interesting application, however, is in seeing how the various positive and negative effects for Republicans might play out against one another.

Suppose, for example, that the voter population grows in accordance with the defaults assumed in the model. This would produce a net of 6.3 million new votes for Democrats by 2028.

And suppose that 25 percent of the immigrants currently here illegally gain citizenship and vote by 2028. The model calculates that this would provide another 1.2 million votes for Democrats.

But suppose also that, as a result of immigration reform, the Republicans go from winning about 28 percent of the Hispanic vote and 24 percent of the Asian vote (as they did in 2012) to 35 percent of each group by 2028. That would shift about 4.8 million votes back to the G.O.P. — about four times more than it lost from the immigrants becoming citizens and voting predominantly Democratic. However, it wouldn’t be enough to outweigh the Democratic gains from long-term population growth.

I remain dumbfounded that the GOP still does take demographic change seriously  - or not seriously enough.  Racism, bigotry and embracing white supremacists may continue to allow some successes in the short term, but in the long run, the GOP seems bent on suicide.

Joe Scarborough Is Part Of The GOP's Problem

While he has on occasion refused to drink the Christianist/Tea Party Kool-Aid (as has Kathleen Parker at times) that is so widely consumed among today's Republicans, Joe Scarborough nonetheless continues to be part of the conservative pundit class problem that is continuing to allow the GOP to slide to ever increased insanity.  Partisanship should never trump the best interests of the nation and the vast majority of Americans.  Likewise, partisanship should never trump logic and objective reality - especially in the case of those who hold themselves out as "expert political observers.  Yet that is what has happened to to many pundits who mindlessly cheer lead for the Republican Party.  And it's just not Scarborough who has thrown away common sense - former compatriots from my old GOP days seem to have consumed Kool-Aid by the gallon.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at this frightening phenomenon.  Here are highlights:

If you recall, Scarborough's original, slanderous words against Nate Silver were the following:

Anybody that thinks that this race is anything but a tossup right now is such an ideologue, they should be kept away from typewriters, computers, laptops and microphones for the next 10 days, because they’re jokes.

Scarborough called Nate Silver an ideologue and a joke. Instead of copping to his slander and his foolishness, he now writes a Politico column that is so brimming with, well Politico-style Village media horse-shit you need a medical mask to keep breathing to the end. First off, he starts with mockery of Upper West Side limousine hippie liberals and all the usual, lazy, exhausted boomer tropes that make Scarborough and all his flunkies as irrelevant as they are desperate for attention:

Just as the Beatles had the Maharishi to guide them through the tough times after the death of their manager Brian Epstein, progressives had Silver’s New York Times blog to comfort them after the first presidential debate.

Even if that analogy isn't itself stupid and lazy ... so fucking what? Mr Scarborough, you were wrong because you have no understanding of statistics, and you slandered someone who was sincere and transparent and smart. So where's the apology? Not there yet. Instead we get this:

The Obama-Romney race proved to be the least fluid in a generation. As Mr. Silver noted this morning, public opinion surveys remained consistent from June through Election Day.

 Notice the old MSM I-Never-Screwed-Up crap. Notice the "I'm not really apologizing" - but I'll add in a generic mea culpa to insure myself. Notice also that Scarborough is still too stupid to understand that Silver's model included Gallup and Rasmussen and all those "Dr Nick" pollsters, showed considerable fluctuation in the race, and yet also correctly predicted the demographic mix and state polling consensus in ways that revealed the structural advantage Obama had throughout.

I didn't call Nate a fool who should be banished from the Internet. I saw him as a fantastic breath of fresh air in a tired, discredited and fathomlessly self-important commentariat. Of which Scarborough is an almost text-book case.

It is time for those in the pundit class to start calling a spade a spade and condemning GOP insanity on a regular consistent basis.

Nate Silver: Late Polls Show Gains for Obama

I looked at Nate Silver's analysis of where things stand in the presidential race yesterday and based on late polls, Nate has bumped up Barack Obama's chance of winning up to 91.6%  Needless to say, I hope Nate nails it on this one.  Not only do I want Romney/Ryan to lose, I also want to see a vicious civil war triggered in the Republican Party where just maybe reason will prevail and the Christofascists will be kicked to the political curb.  It is largely the Christofascists who have driven sanity, decency, and yes, morality, from the GOP and made it where honest, decent candidates have left the field because of the utter batshitery that now drives the GOP base. I truly believe that the GOP has become an immoral party given the hate and reverse Robin Hood policies that the far right has ushered in.  Repeated electoral defeats is the only thing that may ultimately save the GOP.  Here are highlights from Nate's latest analysis:

Mitt Romney has always had difficulty drawing a winning Electoral College hand. Even during his best period of polling, in the week or two after the first presidential debate in Denver, he never quite pulled ahead in the polling averages in Ohio and other states that would allow him to secure 270 electoral votes.

But the most recent set of polls suggest another problem for Mr. Romney, whose momentum in the polls stalled out in mid-October. Instead, it is President Obama who is making gains.

Among 12 national polls published on Monday, Mr. Obama led by an average of 1.6 percentage points. Perhaps more important is the trend in the surveys. On average, Mr. Obama gained 1.5 percentage points from the prior edition of the same polls, improving his standing in nine of the surveys while losing ground in just one.
 
Because these surveys had large sample sizes, the trend is both statistically and practically meaningful. Whether because of Hurricane Sandy, the relatively good economic news of late, or other factors, Mr. Obama appears to have gained ground in the closing days of the race.


Mr. Romney’s chances are less, however, of winning the Electoral College. The large majority of polls in battleground states over the past three days have shown leads for Mr. Obama. On Monday, for example, 19 battleground state polls found leads for Mr. Obama, as compared with just three for Mr. Romney.

Ohio remains the largest problem for Mr. Romney, where he has been behind in most polls all year. Mr. Romney might ordinarily take some solace in the fact that Ohio is slightly Republican-leaning, but the auto bailout may have changed its character this year, as there is evidence that Mr. Obama is performing more strongly with working-class voters in Ohio than he is elsewhere in the country.

Moreover, Mr. Obama has a number of backup options were he to lose one or more of these states [i.e., Ohio and Pennsylvania]. In Iowa, Mr. Obama leads by about three percentage points in the average of polls, and by a similar margin in New Hampshire. Recent polls also suggest movement toward Mr. Obama in Colorado and Virginia, and he now appears to be favored in each one.

Read the rest of Nate's piece.  I do hope he is right and that Obama carries Virginia.  We need as many blows landed against the increasingly foul Republican Party of Virginia as possible.

Nate Silver's Last Odds Calculation

While Obama seems to be stabilizing and it's too soon to know whether or not last night's debate will give Obama a boost, Nate Silver still seems to see Obama winning on November 6th.  For me, the race is too close and I will be a nervous wreck until the outcome is certain.  Here are highlights from Nate's piece in the New York Times:

Our method uses both state polls and national polls to calibrate its estimate of the national popular vote; the state polls, in our view, have suggested a slightly stronger outcome for Mr. Obama all year than that implied by the national polls alone.

We do show just a tiny bit of improvement for Mr. Obama, however. In our “now-cast” — our estimate of what would happen in an election held today — Mr. Obama’s advantage in the popular vote is now taken to be 1.2 percentage points, up from a low of 0.3 point on Oct. 12.

Mr. Obama also seems to be holding onto thin leads in the polling averages in the states that are most essential to his path forward in the Electoral College.

Were he to lose Ohio, Mr. Romney would have a number of undesirable, although not impossible, options.

The most favorable path, in the view of the model, would be for Mr. Romney to carry both Iowa and Nevada.

Of the two states, Iowa is the easier get. The polls there show a split between ties and leads for Mr. Obama, as opposed to Nevada, where they are mainly split between smaller leads for Mr. Obama and larger ones. In addition, in Nevada, Democrats have a significant voter-registration advantage and are building a large lead in early voting; the polls there have also tended to underestimate Democratic performance in recent years.

But Mr. Romney does not get to pick and choose if he loses Ohio; he would need to win both Iowa and Nevada under this plan. Furthermore, he would need to win New Hampshire to avert a 269-269 tie, where the polls have been inconsistent at best, but seem to show Mr. Obama slightly ahead, on average. On top of all that, he would need to win both Colorado and Virginia. The race is so close in both states that the model has fluctuated between showing them as blue states and red states with almost every new poll that comes in.

Nate Silver on the Statistical State of the Presidential Race

Nate Silver has a new piece in the New York Times that suggests that despite the blatantly untrue ads being put up by the Romney campaign and Karl Rove's sleazy American Crossroads PAC, Barack Obama is within the margin where past candidates with similar rankings have gone on to win the presidency.  I do NOT want anyone to get complacent, but it is encouraging to see that the Romney/Ryan ticket may be doomed.  Personally, I want the GOP to be defeated by the largest margin possible.  Only continued resounding defeats will force the GOP to reform itself and sent the Christianists and the Tea Party back to the political wilderness where they rightly belong.  Here are highlights from Nate's piece:  

With fewer than 45 days left in the presidential campaign, it’s no longer a cliché to say that every week counts. And there are a few polling-related themes we’ll be watching especially closely this week.

This is probably about the last week, for instance, in which Mitt Romney can reasonably hope that President Obama’s numbers will deteriorate organically because of a convention bounce. That is not to say that Mr. Obama’s standing could not decline later on in the race, for any number of reasons. But if they do, it will probably need to be forced by Mr. Romney’s campaign, or by developments in the news cycle, not the mere loss of post-convention momentum.

let’s consider a more basic question. What did the polling look like at this stage in past elections, and how did it compare against the actual results?

Our polling database contains surveys going back to 1936. The data is quite thin (essentially just the Gallup national poll and nothing else) through about 1968, but it’s nevertheless worth a look.

In the table below, [above] I’ve averaged the polls that were conducted 40 to 50 days before the election in each year — the time period that we find ourselves in now. (In years when there were no polls in this precise time window, I used the nearest available survey.)

The table considers the race from the standpoint of the incumbent party (designated with the color purple) and the challenging party (wearing the orange jerseys), without worrying about whether they were Democrats or Republicans. Mr. Obama’s position, for instance, is probably more analogous to that of the Republican incumbent George W. Bush in 2004 than it is to the candidate from his own party that year, John Kerry.

There has not been any tendency, at least at this stage of the race, for the contest to break toward the challenging candidate.

Instead, it’s actually the incumbent-party candidate who has gained ground on average since 1936. On average, the incumbent candidate added 4.6 percentage points between the late September polls and his actual Election Day result, whereas the challenger gained 2.5 percentage points.

To the extent there’s a useful rule of thumb about a candidate achieving 50 percent in the polls, it is this: a candidate who reaches 50 percent of the vote late in the race is almost certain to win. Below that threshold, there are fewer guarantees. But a candidate (incumbent or challenger) at 48 or 49 percent of the vote will normally be a clear favorite.

 Nate has a lot more, so read the entire article.