Neuroscientist Sam Wang's Princeton blog on election forecasting, polling statistics and gerrymandering.
During election seasons commenters cite its win probabilities and call its model transparent and more accurate than 538's. They also reference its gerrymandering analysis.
Sam Wang called a Trump win practically impossible:
https://twitter.com/samwangphd/status/788544053059153924
http://edition.cnn.com/videos/tv/2016/11/05/poll-expert-i-will-eat-a-bug-if-trump-exceeds-240.cnn
http://election.princeton.edu/2016/10/10/some-secrets-are-not-all-that-dirty/
Specifically the last link exhibits the smugness this article is talking about. Here's a quote from it:
> This seems like a good time to reveal one of the Princeton Election Consortium’s own secrets. Thankfully, it does not involve an Access Hollywood video.
Here it is: poll-based Presidential prediction is not very hard.
I guess that is a pretty boring secret. Sorry.
Sam Wang was predicting a 95% chance of winning for Hillary. I guess we're in the 5%. I'd further like to point out that Hillary is right now winning the popular vote by 0.1%, and the NYTimes has adjusted their prediction down to 0.5% when all the votes are tallied.
Obama's win over Romney was slightly less than 4.0%, and he won 332-206 in the electoral college. Here's how Sam Wang describes it:
> President Obama’s re-election in 2012 carried even less suspense: he never lost the lead to Romney. The closest he came was right after the first debate, though even then he was slightly ahead.
The pressure to express a Trump sentiment is not high in a non-swing state; If you are in an entrenched blue state, people do not care about you(guaranteed democrat win anyway). If you are in an entrenched red state, then you have plenty…
https://i.ibb.co/qM5xgPZ6/fascism-five-stages.png
The NSF is an independent federal agency that funds roughly a quarter of all basic academic research in the US, laying the groundwork for technologies like the Internet backbone and MRIs. The NSB is its governing body, composed of top scientists who serve staggered six-year terms specifically so no single administration can wipe out the entire board at once. That continuity is designed to insulate scientific priority-setting from political pressure, ensuring American research funding is directed by objective merit rather than political patronage. Dismissing all members simultaneously removes the exact oversight mechanism built to prevent political offices from dictating scientific agendas.
From a political science perspective, this is an institutional move Robert Paxton described in his stages of fascist development. His framework identifies patterns where political actors weaken or bypass independent bodies designed to constrain executive power. In Paxton's fourth stage, the exercising of power, an executive consolidates control by actively dismantling these checks. Centralizing control over scientific governance by firing the board for opposing a budget cut is hollowing out an independent institution; it's a pathway Paxton documented whereby institutional checks are weakened in ways that accumulate over time.
https://election.princeton.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Paxton_Five-Stages-of-Fascism.pdf
> When the Democratic party wins they gerrymander as much as the Republicans.
Absolutely false. Democrats do it far less, in fewer places, and with much less effect on outcomes. Please don't "both sides" this issue.
In fact, Democrats changed laws to try to end gerrymandering in three states they won: Oregon, Virginia, and Colorado[1]. They did this against their own self-interest and likely ended up helping Republicans[2].
Multiple independent, transparent measures of extreme gerrymandering have found that Republicans do it more[3].
Republicans have also been found by courts to be using racial gerrymandering to dilute the votes of minorities over[4] and over[5].
That shouldn't be surprising, because we now know that racial gerrymandering was an explicit tactic that Republicans illegally pursued[6].
1. https://apnews.com/article/redistricting-579984fa53d997956749eb3d3820276b
2. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/10/democrats-redistricting-gerrymandering-majority-midterms/620403/
3. https://election.princeton.edu/2012/12/30/gerrymanders-part-1-busting-the-both-sides-do-it-myth/
4. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-court-gerrymandering/virginia-republicans-lose-in-u-s-supreme-court-racial-gerrymandering-case-idUSKCN1TI1TN
5. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/05/north-carolina-gerrymandering/527592/
6. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-secret-files-of-the-master-of-modern-republican-gerrymandering
I like Nate Silver. He broke new ground. But I've grown less enamored this most recent cycle because his predictions seem to be a lot more of the Nostradamus type--pre-analyze outcomes on three possible resolutions, then get credit for being right. Most of his wins come because polls have a tendency to tighten up to the actual numbers the closer they are to the election, as any latent bias gets washed out. He gets graded on more accurate information, not when uncertainty is high. (This isn't inherently a problem, but it does expose why he 100% missed the Trump primary phenomenon...he's trying to address it with "fundamentals" and other alternate models, but this is just more hedging so that at least one story makes sense.)
He's not deceptive about this--I will give him that. It's all in the open. But it seems to amplify a kind of narrative fallacy if these mistakes aren't revisited anew (rather than just saying "as predicted, since outcome C actually happened, it was due to voter bloc X doing it as we said."
But I can't complain about a pundit class not giving actionable data--that's not their job. Silver's job is to add data to the discussion, and to stimulate the discussion. And I give him a "B" for that.
That said, this cycle, I've rediscovered Sam Wang at http://election.princeton.edu/ and think he maybe gives a purer approach to analysis, one not so much driven by clicks. He doesn't seem to hedge as much as Silver.
“I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.” — Pauline Kael (this is what she actually said) http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/10/The-Fraudulent-Factoid-That-Refuses-to-Die
This is why Nate Silver, who after all mostly does his work by taking polls as a whole seriously, continues to surprise some people: They live in a bubble. They don't see who the majority is actually supporting. They are actually surprised by election results, even if the polls have largely been pointing one direction consistently for months on end.
(Silver ignores some polls and applies correction factors to others. This is due to those polls' demonstrable idiocy and/or bias, as empirically demonstrated by how far they are from reality when the real events happen.)
Wang does pretty well, too, and his models are simpler: http://election.princeton.edu/
My point is, polls work, statistics is real, and numbers remain the primary way to determine which of two things is larger. Enter echo chambers if you want to, but don't live in one.
Clinton doesn't need a conspiracy to win, it's as simple as that. She's polling at +8 nationally, if the election were held today she has at least a 75% chance of a landslide election (320+ EVs) if the election were held today, and there's zero indication that Trump's numbers have any upward mobility whatsoever at this point. In fact, the Republicans will be lucky to hold onto the House if things keep going the way they have the past couple weeks.
There's no reason to do a dumb attempt at stinging a has-been like Assange. Literally all it could do is hurt her (if it backfired and people took Assange seriously).
http://election.princeton.edu/todays-electoral-vote-histogram/
Hanlon's Razor says that if it looks like some dumb idiot ("small business owner") who thought he could hire Assange for his TV commercial and then got his jimmies rustled that Assange said no then it probably is that instead of an international conspiracy. But even if we're moving into conspiracy territory, Clinton doesn't have the motive here.