General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: This! This! This all day long. Without comment [View all]progree
(11,017 posts)/-------------- From Huxenstein's tweets ------------------------------------
I'm a Math teacher. Prob Trump would win all 5 swing states was .0016, 16 ten thousandths of 1%.
Take the probabilities from 538 and turn them into decimals, then multiply
Fl(44.9%=.449)
MI(21.1%=.211)
NC(44.5%=.445)
PA (23.0% =.230)
WI (16.5%=.165)
Multiply together to get .00159, which I rounded to .0016
--------------End From Huxenstein tweets ----------------------------------
I looked at the Florida, Michigan, and North Carolina pages at fivethirtyeight.com, and the probabilities match up to Huxenstein's tweet
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/florida/
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/michigan/
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/north-carolina/
Later: ditto the Pennsylvania and Wisconsin pages.
I didn't see any exit polls included.
I don't think the 2016 exit polls factored into it at all, given Nate's attitude about them:
Ten Reasons Why You Should Ignore Exit Polls, 538, 11/4/08
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/ten-reasons-why-you-should-ignore-exit/
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As for correlation, here is what Nate has to say:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/a-users-guide-to-fivethirtyeights-2016-general-election-forecast/
/----------- Begin excerpts-----------------------------------------------
The error from state to state is correlated. If Trump significantly beats his polls in Ohio, hell probably do so in Pennsylvania also. Figuring out how to account for these correlations is tricky, but you shouldnt put too much stock in models that dont attempt to do so. Theyll underestimate the chances for the trailing candidate if they assume that states are independent from one another.
... heres a correlation matrix drawn from recent simulations. You can see the high correlation between Wisconsin and Minnesota, for example.
------------- End excerpts --------------------------------------
There are a lot of high correlations. So the idea that the state probabilities are independent is, well, way out there. I'll take Nate Silver over any elementary math teacher who doesn't know how to convert a number to a percent.
And given that Nate has those probabilities for the 5 swing states shown in the Huxenstein tweet above (and similarly for most of the other swing states), how comes Nate had a 28.6% probability of Trump winning the presidency ( https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/?ex_cid=2016-forecast-analysis ). A couple of orders of magnitude higher probability than Huxenstein has?
As for polling being more accurate elsewhere than here, I haven't seen that one. How did the Brexit vote turn out?
I don't discount red-shift shenanigans. I just think the error-ridden silly OP (including Huxenstein's following tweets) is a horrible way to advance that argument.