Nate Silver to Joe Scarborough: Wanna Bet?

The Atlantic Wire ^ | 11/1/12 | Dashiell Bennett

[AmericanSamurai]

Political polling guru Nate Silver is so confident in his statistical models that he just offered to bet MSNBC's Joe Scarborough $1,000 that Barack Obama will win re-election. Scarborough, you may recall, criticized Silver's math earlier this week, saying that "Anybody that thinks that this race is anything but a tossup right now is such an ideologue ... they're jokes." He was specifically talking about Silver's FiveThirtyEight website, which shows Mitt Romney with just a 1-in-4 chance of becoming president.

RELATED: FiveThirtyEight Says Obama Is in Command ... For Now

Silver has spent the week firing back, criticizing political pundits for not understanding how odds and probability work and aggressively defending his method against critics. As the week has progressed, his model has only shown Obama's chances of winning increasing, which has not coincidentally increased Silver's confidence in the outcome. (As of this morning, Five Thirty Eight gives Obama a 79 percent chance of winning, with a final Electoral College total over 300.)

The back-and-forth swipes all came to head today with this tweet, with Silver offering a friendly $1,000 wager on Tuesday's result, with the winnings going to charity.

[driftdiver]

Anyone willing to go on MSNBC is automatically suspect.

[arrogantsob]

I will take that bet Senior Silver.

[LibLieSlayer]

Bet him every cent that you have silver and then I will worry... obama will cover any loss old nate the lying shyster loses... and his grand is gone baby... obama is getting an arse whuppin’ and nate cannot stop it.

LLS

[AmericanSamurai]

Guy is in the tank for Soetorro.

[apillar]

Silver is a radical homosexual activist and a liberal New York Times Columnist, anybody that says he is unbiased, independent and doesn't favor Obama over Romney is either lying or terminally naive.

[oblomov]

Let’s see what his baseball models can do with this election.

[arrogantsob]

Oh, I know.

[ncalburt]

Silver the former Daily Koz employee is a
Fraud .

The day before the Scott recall this Axelrod flunky went around
Spreading the false polling data that Scott was in trouble ,
Stupid CNN took the propaganda along with the other left wing networks and looked like idiots .
Quietly old Nate massaged his model to give himself an margin of error fall back line .
He did the same media scam for the 2010 election when the gop won !
He will do the same in 2012 .
He thinks no one will remember his antics this election cycle too !
Leftist never do .
He is pure Daily Koz slime !

[RatRipper]

If he had been really sure, he would have bet at least 100 G’s.

[ncalburt]

Bingo
Right in all accounts

[notfornothing]

I think he might be following the European betting markets. I've had the presidential race bookmarked on one of the British bookmaking sites and they've had Obama as the heavy favorite for weeks now. Obama was 1/3 (75%) yesterday and this morning he had gone up to (1/4) (80%) - and anyone who's been following the race at all lately knows those numbers are insane.

Here's the kicker - Obama is 4/9 to win the popular vote as well...and Romney's been ahead in the popular vote polls for a while now.

Obviously what's going on is Obama is the sentimental favorite in Europe and the majority of the people there are betting on him to win...and the bookmakers are having to adjust the odds accordingly. You'd have to be a fool to think those odds reflect anything approaching reality though.

[paolop]

He is offering even odds while claiming 4:1 odds (or better). How about betting with HIS odds not the even odds that he is trying to disprove! And then a lot more say 10G?

[xkaydet65]

There’s a good recap of Silver on Red State. The guy is mostly responsible for developing the PECOTA stat system used by Baseball Prospectus and rotisserie nuts like me. He made his bones predicting a 90+ win season for Tampa in 02 and they won 97 after losing 90 in 01. The Red State piece is a good analysis and rebuttal of his current models. Just good analysis without the insults.

[verum ago]

I think he might be following the European betting markets.

Which is largely what InTrade has become lately.

Obviously what's going on is Obama is the sentimental favorite in Europe and the majority of the people there are betting on him to win...

Sentimental favorite is part of it, but consider a couple more things:
• The media environment in Europe makes the US MSM look positively centrist. It's slant affects the information and opinion pieces reaching European speculators, enhancing their skew toward Obama.
• The polls the Euros see most are Reuters/Ipsos, which have been a major Left-outlier this election cycle. How major? As far as I know, Reuters/Ipsos has shown nothing but Obama in the lead (which to anyone in the US obviously isn't true).

So it's not just bias in Europe that makes Obama a favorite over there- it's that the information they receive is bad and falsely (and decisively) favors Obama. Think about it: if you took a truly unbiased observer and exposed him to nothing but BBC International opinion pieces and news and Reuters/Ipsos polls, who would he think is gonna win?

Europe needs the alternative media even more than we do.

[InterceptPoint]

When FR goes down next Tuesday (I take that as a given), checking in on Nate should be very entertaining. Assuming things go as well for Romney as I expect them to.

[AmericanSamurai]

I hope you are right!