For the Record: Election Handicapping

 

Photo via.

Following up on the previous, some thoughts I had with regard to a longstanding with Thornton/Henry, who's right on this problem with election forecasting (not polling, forecasting, claiming to know with a certain probability who's going to win):

It's interesting to me how we sneak up on this as we go from coin tosses to poker to baseball to elections. It's really the jump from poker to baseball where the fundamental error happens.

— Henry Porter (@HenryPorters) November 22, 2022

For the Record: The Lab Leak Theory

 

Wait, Andromeda strain was a coronavirus? Why weren't we informed?!

Shorter Monsignor Douthat: The real reason it's important to find out if Covid leaked from a lab is I really want it to be true. https://t.co/artuHtCc5I

— Freewheeling Passion (@Yastreblyansky) May 30, 2021

That's really about the size of it:

Yes, if we never figure out the truth of Covid’s origins, the dangers of media groupthink will be the only lesson we can draw for absolutely certain. But if we could find out the truth, and it turned out that the Wuhan Institute of Virology really was the epicenter of a once-in-a-century pandemic, the revelation would itself be a major political and scientific event.

I feel your Bain

Everybody's piling on Marc Thiessen's piecelet in the Washington Post, but I just can't help myself:

Mitt Romney was not the cool candidate. He ran on competence. But having the data system your campaign is relying on to turn out the vote crash on Election Day is incompetent. Not testing that system before Election Day is inexcusable. And letting a community organizer run a more precise, data-driven, metrics-based campaign than a Bain Capital executive is incomprehensible.

No, as Booman says, incomprehensible is not exactly the word for it.  "Comprehensible" might be better, or "unsurprising", or, "exactly what you'd expect". Obama's work experience is just a lot more relevant than Romney's. There's a reason they call it community organizing: because it consists of organizing communities, which is exactly what a political campaign needs to do. Bain Capital executives may dazzle you with numbers, but they don't use them in that way.

Modern Mechanix, July 1929.

For instance, also from Booman,

There are still some votes to count but as of right now Mitt Romney has 58,777,012 votes. In 2008, John McCain received 59,934,814 votes. So, Rich Beeson is telling the National Review with a straight face that his team turned out the votes they needed to win according to their own models even though they turned out 1.2 million fewer voters than John McCain did four years ago. John McCain lost by 9.5 million votes, and Romney turned out 1.2 million less than that. Basically, John Beeson is saying that his model indicated that Romney could get approximately 11 million fewer votes than McCain needed to tie, despite population growth over the last four years, and that he would be in a perfect position to beat the president.

Rich Beeson's "model" isn't a campaign handicapper's model of how a candidate wins. It's "we did something right two years ago, so let's assume we're still doing it." I don't think they have a clue what works, except, ironically, that they recognize the value of "throwing money at the problem". Rove's famous math is just the same this year as it was when his candidates won. Terrorist irredentist Belgian imperialist Newt Gingrich still thinks he won the 1994 midterms with his "contract for America" even though hardly any voters had heard of it. Except for the money part, which really does do something (just as it does in improving schools, countering poverty, and what not), the business is basically a fraud.

I was also interested to learn that Ph.D. candidate and soccer mom Paula Broadwell, deciding to write a book instead of her dissertation, got literary by hiring a ghost writer, Vernon Loeb. That is, what she wanted specifically was to be not just a biographer, but a society biographer. It's not that she didn't work damn hard, flying around the world and interviewing everybody she could, it's just that she didn't work in a small and silent room. There had to be a minimum-wage peon to transcribe the interviews, and a handsomely paid Loeb to stitch the paragraphs together.

What I wanted to say was, it's not so much the case I tend to imagine, that bosses really don't know what work is; that's too simple. But their model of it, the image of work that lives with the word in their minds, isn't of making or maintaining or fixing or understanding things—it's advertising and marketing—it's making things look more valuable than they actually are. That's what the numbers do in private equity.

So Romney hired pollsters that would make him look like a winner, not even realizing that he might want to know to what extent he really was a winner or not at any given point in time. It would be sad if it wasn't so funny.

Cleveland model and fashion photographer—yellow. By Pazza Photography.

Handicapping the handicappers

From Dynamical Bias in the Coin Toss, Persi Diaconis, Susan Holmes, and Richard Montgomery. Via Coding the Wheel.

Dylan Byers at Politico tries to bite a piece out of Nate Silver's trousers:

Prediction is the name of Silver's game, the basis for his celebrity. So should Mitt Romney win on Nov. 6, it's difficult to see how people can continue to put faith in the predictions of someone who has never given that candidate anything higher than a 41 percent chance of winning (way back on June 2) and — one week from the election — gives him a one-in-four chance, even as the polls have him almost neck-and-neck with the incumbent.

And "more than a few political pundits and reporters, including some of his own colleagues, believe Silver is highly overrated." The "some of his own colleagues" that he goes on to quote are David Brooks, famous mathematician, and the "reporters" are former congressperson Joe Scarborough, which adds up to somewhat less than "more than a few". All two of them are Republicans, too. I guess if he quoted more the column would have gone over length. Anyway, they are not very well informed about probability.

I think I know enough about how Brooks thinks: if the poll says the candidates are at 50% for A and 48% for B, that's pretty close, right? So A probably has a 50% chance of winning or thereabouts, because you have to do some magic with the number first, so it won't come out exactly the same—but it'll be pretty close in the same way. That's just common sense!*

The implication is that there's something like dark magic involved in Silver's calculations, or they wouldn't be giving him something so far off the common sense mark. Either he doesn't know what he's doing, or he's manipulating them in Obama's favor out of secret liberal bias, as an underhanded way of influencing the voters.

And is that why Danny Sheridan, football handicapper from Mobile, Alabama, gives the election to Obama 2:1? No, actually.

Obama, he said, was favored by 6:5 to win Colorado, by 9:5 to win New Hampshire, by 2:1 to win Iowa, by 3:1 to win Nevada, by 3:1 to win Ohio and by 7:5 to win Wisconsin.
Romney, he said, was favored by 2:1 to win Florida, 10:1 to win North Carolina and 7:5 to win Virginia.

"I may not vote for Obama, but I still think he's going to win the electoral college," Sheridan said. Sheridan said it was "even money" -- a toss-up -- as to which candidate wins the popular vote.

Romney's 10:1 odds in North Carolina don't mean he's going to get 90% of the vote there, either. It means that if you ran the election in eleven more or less identical universes the Romney would win in all but one of them, at around whatever shares of the vote are expected (Silver says the vote will be relatively close at 51.3:48:3, but his estimate of the odds is 82:18).

Danny Sheridan is entitled to disagree with Silver if he wants, because he knows what probability is. The self-denominated pandits should really make an effort to find out, and stop embarrassing themselves.

*Or an intuition, born out of math anxiety; the main thing is to minimize the number of numbers he has to contemplate.

From Image-Archeology.