Election night predictions

In Nate Silver I trust:  Obama 307, Romney 231

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/

Obama 290, Romney 248

VA, NC , and FL to Romney.  All other swing states to Obama.

Yep

269/269

Tie baby!!! And then hilarity will ensue.

My wife told me a statistic that Electoral College Voters have gone against their state 11 times and that because it's not required for them to vote a particular way, the ramifications were only that they weren't selected the next time around.  Expect some of that if there's a tie.

Romney/Biden 2012...

Totally unfair.  Silver makes very clear predictions.  He clearly predicts an Obama victory and he estimates the number of electoral votes for Obama (307).  He then goes farther and puts a statistical probability to an Obama victory - 86.3%.

Your Silver quote was taken out of context.  He also predicts that Obama will win 50.6% of the popular vote.

Disagree with his conclusions or his methodology if you want, but Silver's analysis is about as far from "couching" as you can get. 

Yikes, i think that would be even worse than a drawn out recount in one state.

I predict that it does not matter who wins, the U.S will survive and go about it's daily business. 

Mountains, mole hills, split hairs, and all that.   I also predict that the sun will come up in the morning rising in the east.  

I miss Pat Paulsen.   *Sigh*

My daughter found this great video that describes the tie-breaker procedures.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHEDXzOfENI

It could be John Boehner, acting president.

If that happens, my prediction is that he cries.  He's quite an emotional guy...

Wow.  Silver writes 1,000 words a day and tweets all day long, and you reduce his work to one 140 character tweet

Having worked with PHD Statisticians, I see the problem here.  You're both right.

Silver is giving a statistical probability for his answer and giving the assumptions as part of his prediction. 

Scoob is saying "Why not just pick a number like 298/240 and stand by it."

Statisticians like Silver are effective in stuff like baseball where they have hundreds of opportunities for their models to play out.  162 games, 4 at bats per game and player X will hit .312 with a .800 OBPs.  In renewable energy, we use them to predict the output of a facility.  When they're off by 2-3%, they just say "it's an El Nino year" because they're predicting the outcome of 40 continuous years.

But in an election, you have one thing you're trying to predict, so your assumptions matter because those assumptions aren't as easy as baseball assumptions (indoors, daytime, player on 2nd, 2 outs, 4th inning, right handed pitcher, etc, etc). 

I think Karl Rove, Joe Trippi, et al who are making their specific numerical predictors are doing so on a pure gut feel like all of us are. 

But Nate Silver is explaining the assumptions that go into his model.  If the sun comes-up on Wednesday and we have a winner and it doesn't match his assumptions, he can say "Well, the electorate changed from my assumptions, but if we adjust the electorate, the scale shows that I was dead-on." 

Fact is it's all guessing on this election.  If anyone makes a prediction, it's not made based on data, it's made based on hunchism and biased by your own self conscious.  That's why I said it'll be a tie.  I'm really rooting for a tie...

Along the lines of what Scoob posted earlier regarding the election all coming down to turnout.  I'm subscribing to the notion that the polls are inaccurate because they're counting on a significant Democrat turnout similar to 2008 (D+5 or greater).

I just saw this article.  It's a partisan source, but quotes Rasmussen data predicting a R+6 turnout:

http://www.breitbart.com/InstaBlog/2012/11/05/Why-the-Polls-are-Wrong-Poll-Shows-Electorate-is-R-6

I predict that within a week, schools and banks will be shut down while soldiers are marching in our streets!

Here's my proof....

FWIW, Rasmussen has been one of the least accurate polling organizations over the last couple of election cycles. 

http://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2012/Info/rasmussen.html