Tag: politics

Nate Silver starts the spin

For someone whose vaunted statistical model was forecasting an 85 percent chance of an Obama victory next month, Nate Silver is really beginning to sound as if he’s attempting to retreat from his current predictions:

I feel as though it’s my duty to tell you when my subjective estimate of the odds differs by a material amount from the ones that our model produces. On Friday and Saturday, I wrote that I thought the model was underestimating Mr. Romney’s chances.

The model is designed to distinguish essentially random changes in the polls from more permanent reversals in the state of play. But it takes a one-size-fits-all approach to do this. Had there been no major developments in the news cycle over the past several days, there would be reason to be skeptical that the shift toward Mr. Romney had been quite as clear as the polls had seemed to imply. There have been other points in the election cycle when the polls appeared to show a shift in the race but without much news to drive it; the model has been fairly “smart” about avoiding being taken by these false alarms.

The trade-off, however, is that the model may be too conservative about accounting for a shift when there is real news behind it. The model is able to account for changes caused by some types of economic reports, since those are incorporated directly into the forecast; we also have special procedures to handle polling around the party conventions. Other types of news events, however — like the debates, major foreign-policy developments, or the vice presidential selections — may not be handled very adroitly by the model.

Those who like to get on my case about Obama defeating Hillary for the Democratic nomination tend to forget that I make a single prediction about the election long before the nominees are even known.  In 2008, I predicted that the Republicans would serve up a sacrificial lamb and the Democrats would win nearly 18 months before the election.  I was wrong about the specific individuals, but the general theme was correct.  In 2010, I predicted that the Republicans would win in a landslide.  In 2012, I predicted that the Republican candidate would win easily unless it was Mitt Romney, in which case I still expected him to win.

Meanwhile, the “professionals” like Silver are not only making new model-based predictions on a weekly or even daily basis, but are attempting to separate themselves from their predictions.  I leave it to you to determine which process is more useful, even if the success rate of those predictions made months in advance is lower than those “predictions” made in real time.

Yes, I was wrong about Clinton winning the nomination, about Pataki being the sacrificial lamb, and about Obama actually dropping out, but based on all the articles that have suddenly begun appearing about whether he is even interested in seriously contesting the election – and articles written by some of his most fervent supporters – it is clear that in the case of the latter, I was on the right track even though events did not turn out exactly as I thought they would.

It may be worth noting that despite what Silver and the mainstream polls say, I’m not the only one anticipating a Romney victory in November:

An update to an election forecasting model announced by two University of Colorado professors in August continues to project that Mitt Romney will win the 2012 presidential election.  According to their updated analysis, Romney is projected to receive 330 of the total 538 Electoral College votes. President Barack Obama is expected to receive 208 votes — down five votes from their initial prediction — and short of the 270 needed to win.

The first debate

He says it like it’s a good thing:

Obama has always relied on the big money men in private, while
disparaging them in public.  But what happens when he comes up against
one of them in the most public way possible?  Now we know the answer, and it ain’t pretty. The president appeared small and petulant and reactive.  Romney looked presidential and secure and proactive.

While Republicans are quite reasonably celebrating the fact that Romney demolished a hapless Obama sans teleprompter in the debate – disproving once again the notion that Obama is a supergenius master of rhetoric – they don’t seem to be thinking through the obvious implications of what they are witnessing.  Obama has never been more than a tool of those who have financially raped the nation.  Romney is one of the financial rapists.

How can anyone imagine Mitt Romney has any intention of fixing the very problems that he helped foster and from which he profited so massively?

You’d better sit down for this one

I’m certain we’re all just absolutely shocked by this revelation:

U.S. intelligence officials knew within 24 hours of the
assault on the U.S. Consulate in Libya that it was a terrorist attack
and suspected Al Qaeda-tied elements were involved, sources told Fox
News — though it took the administration a week to acknowledge it.  The
account sharply conflicts with claims on the Sunday after the attack by
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice that the
administration believed the strike was a “spontaneous” event triggered
by protests in Egypt over an anti-Islam film.

 It’s always so hard to see innocence shattered.  So much for the feared rage of Jihad Boy.  Sure, we all knew that Obama and his handlers were liars, but the remarkable thing is how bad at it they are.  Mitt Romney, now, there is a politician who can tell perfectly credible lies without blinking, insofar as he can resist contradicting himself.

WND column

Foreigners First

Paul had been filibustering the Senate for days, delaying action
by requiring the maximum amount of time be spent on each vote until he
got a vote on his own bill, which failed, 10-81.  Numerous Republican
senators stood up in opposition to Paul’s bill, calling it dangerous and
irresponsible, especially to Israel.
 

Keep in mind that this vote took place 11 days after the U.S.
ambassador to Libya, J. Christopher Stevens, was murdered along with
three other U.S. diplomats in Libya. The federal government is sending
money that it doesn’t have to declared and undeclared enemies alike, to
countries that Barack Obama has openly declared are not U.S. allies,
while simultaneously refusing to re-enact the Bush tax cuts because the
country supposedly cannot afford them.

Trends and the media polls

Gallup Election Polls

09/5-11/2012
Obama 50%
Romney 43%

09/14-20/2012
Obama 47%
Romney 47%

I’m still trying to figure out how folks like Karl Denninger are interpreting a 7-point swing towards Romney as proof that Obama has the election all but sewn up. Especially when Rasmussen shows a similar 46%-46% result.
I understand the Electoral College and why some prefer the state-by-state analyses. But the fact remains that Rasmussen nailed the 2008 popular vote while Nate Silver asserted “Obama’s Convention Bounce May Not Be Receding” on the very day that Gallup reported this seven-point move away from him.
Either way, it is useful to recall that in polls as in stocks, past performance does not guarantee future results.

A classic gaffe

Mitt Romney commits a classic gaffe by inadvertently stating the obvious:

US Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney questioned the feasibility of the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, according to video footage published Tuesday by US magazine Mother Jones.

“I’m torn by two perspectives in this regard,” Romney said at a $50,000-per-plate fundraising dinner on May 17. “One is the one which I’ve had for some time, which is that the Palestinians have no interest whatsoever in establishing peace, and that the pathway to peace is almost unthinkable to accomplish.”

Considering that the Begin-Sadat accord was nearly 40 years ago and there is still no peace in sight, I think that’s a safe conclusion. Of course, why should the Palestinians be interested in peace until they get their land back? Israel has a right to the land by right of conquest, but that very right means that they will likely have to fight to hold it.

Absolving Obama

Maureen Dowd is far from the only one to somehow attempt to blame both Bush and Romney for the recent unrest in the Arab world, while refraining from placing any blame on the current occupant of the Oval Office:

You can draw a direct line from the hyperpower manifesto of the Project for the New American Century, which the neocons, abetted by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, used to prod an insecure and uninformed president into invading Iraq — a wildly misguided attempt to intimidate Arabs through the shock of overwhelming force. How’s that going for us?

After 9/11, the neocons captured one Republican president who was naïve about the world. Now, amid contagious Arab rage sparked on the 11th anniversary of 9/11, they have captured another would-be Republican president and vice president, both jejeune about the world.

The neocons aren’t slithering back. Obama has been going along with their strategic insanity to nearly the same extent as Bush. But that’s not enough for them – one wonders what would be enough – and ominously, Mitt Romney is showing every sign that he will make Bush’s foreign policy look like the humble one it was once promised to be by comparison.

But the media must be truly fearful about the electoral backlash facing Obama as a result of the recent incidents in Libya and elsewhere across the Arab world, considering their desperate attempts to change the subject to Bush, or Romney, or anything but the man who is nominally in responsible for addressing them. And they must be terrified about what he’s going to say next after producing that “I don’t think that we would consider them an ally” gem about Egypt.

Ignore the polls

When they’re being run by pro-Obama Democrats, it should hardly be surprising that they are wildly inaccurate:

The Pew Research Center and Rasmussen Reports were the most accurate in predicting the results of the 2008 election, according to a new analysis by Fordham University political scientist Costas Panagopoulos. The Fordham analysis ranks 23 survey research organizations on their final, national pre-election polls, as reported on pollster.com.

On average, the polls slightly overestimated Obama’s strength. The final polls showed the Democratic ahead by an average of 7.52 percentage points — 1.37 percentage points above his current 6.15-point popular vote lead. Seventeen of the 23 surveys overstated Obama’s final victory level, while four underestimated it. Only two — Rasmussen and Pew — were spot on.

It’s not an accident that 17 of the 23 polls overstated Obama’s vote margin. And keep in mind that this is a comparison of their final polls, which is when the more egregiously pro-Democratic organizations suddenly start cleaning up their act a little so they don’t get it too noticeably wrong. And where are the Pew and Rasmussen polls today?

Rasmussen has Obama 50, Romney 45. Pew has Clinton 29, Obama 16, and Michelle Obama 15, but their poll concerns who gave the best speech at the DNC so I don’t think there is much to be learned from that. What might be informative would be to look at where the 23 polls were in the middle of September 2008 and compare them with the current polls. I may do that at some point, but not today.

WND column

Obama’s 2nd Term

There has been a good deal of speculation, some of it bordering on the apocalyptic, concerning what Barack Obama will do if the American people are foolish enough to give him another four years to preside over them. Obama says that he would grade his performance as “Incomplete,” thereby indicating that he has plans he has not yet been able to fulfill. But what are those plans? And has he truly given us any indication of them in his recent speech to the Democratic National Convention?

Disengaged

I told you last year that Obama doesn’t really want to win the election. I’ll bet he’s now wishing he’d gone with his original impulse, which was to find some excuse to gracefully evade the nomination and go on the international speech circuit.

Obama at the DNC: That’s it? It would have been better had he not spoken. Seriously. Like an aging rock star, President Obama, in a downsized venue, with downsized proposal and spewing downsized rhetoric only reminded us how far he has fallen from the heady days of 2008. The man, the agenda and the aura are faint imitations of their 2008 incarnations.
– Jennifer Rubin

I was stunned. This is a man who gave one of the great speeches of our time in 2004. And he gave one of the emptiest speeches I’ve ever heard on a national stage… There was nothing in it…
– Charles Krauthammer

The president’s aides understood they could never re-create the power of the past but hoped to convince voters that more has been done than commonly recognized. The “promises kept” theme was intended to address the same swing voters Mr. Romney sought last week to win over. Mr. Obama directly acknowledged the disappointments…. The president appeared to become emotional toward the end of his speech as he spoke of wounded veterans who somehow managed to walk and run and bike on prosthetic legs. He said he did not know if they would vote for him, but added that they nonetheless gave him hope that difficulties could be overcome.
– The New York Times

the president often felt flat, rote, and unconvincing — almost as though he wasn’t quite convinced by his own arguments and promises, and felt a little awkward selling them to us…. I think that while this convention helped the Democrats overall, the president himself delivered one of the weakest major performances of his career.
– Ross Douthat, The New York Times

Rubin, Krauthammer, and Douthat could be dismissed as Republicans simply looking to criticize the rival presidential candidate were it not for the New York Times article saying essentially the same things between the lines. The striking thing about the NYT’s summary of Obama’s speech is the complete lack of superlatives that characterizes their normal coverage of Obama. If they could have found something, anything, to inflate and praise in his speech, they would have done so. But they didn’t, because Obama gave them nothing.

Obama is disengaged and he is too much of a narcissist to throw himself into a campaign that he doesn’t even want to win. All he wants at this point is to avoid an embarrassing landslide in the presidential vote; one potentially informative metric might be to compare how many Democratic candidates for other offices appear on stage with him during the last three months compared to past presidential campaigns. I’ll bet Obama doesn’t appear with half as many candidates this fall as he did in 2008 or George W. Bush did in 2004.