Posted on 05/08/2015 11:42:01 AM PDT by jimbo123
Nate Silver fared terribly in Thursday's UK election: In his pre-election forecast, he gave 278 seats to Conservatives and 267 to Labour. Shortly after midnight, he was forecasting 272 seats for Conservatives and 271 for Labour. But when the sun rose in London on Friday, Conservatives had an expected 329 seats, against Labour's 233.
The fault, Silver claimed, was with the polling: "It’s becoming increasingly clear that pre-election polls underestimated how well Conservatives would do and overestimated Labour’s result," the statistician guru wrote in the wee hours of the morning. (He also overestimated the Liberal Democrats' result by roughly 20 seats).
(Excerpt) Read more at politico.com ...
He even got the Germany versus Brazil World Cup wrong.
Not a soccer fan, but it looks like the data is showing him to be just another prognosticator.
Polling today is being skewed primarily by the most concentrated and accessible contacts which is made worse by growing non participation in polling. Households increasingly don’t pick up the phone when it is from an unknown or unsolicited source. The media also knowing the power of polls to create impressions doesn’t always have an interest in trying to really capture the sentiment of voters but instead make some voters feel like they are so outnumbered that it’s not any use for them to vote. Its massive implementation of peer pressure. A good example of how bad polling can be is the 2014 MD governor’s race where only one pollster got it right with one other pollster within the margin of error.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2014/governor/maryland_governor_race.html
He had inside access to the campaign and had access to a lot more polls.
Stats fail when non-quantitative data is at play. Home field advantage, prior record, touches on the ball, hours of travel, can be counted, but those do not account for lack of rest, improper diet, head games, adrenaline, team chemistry, desire, ambition, etc.
That's what makes contests such as matches, elections, exciting. Silver is way out of his league and shows that analytic models have limitations, especially when the analyst builds in bias!
There's nothing worth reading after that patently absurd statement. Nate Silver is bought and paid for by the evil trio of hussein/holder/jarrett. And as I already mentioned, his recent article in the ESPN magazine reveals how dim-witted he really is. Go ahead, read his disjointed writings in Rich Data, Poor Data. It's a bizarre enumeration of unrelated factoids, so very typical of pointy-headed leftist.
The reason he got 2008 and 2012 right was because the polls for those two elections were all showing the same thing, an Obama victory
I know a Brazilian lady who was floored at their loss. The crowd was chanting, getting angry at their president, who spent so much money getting things ready for the World Cup. It was seen as a national embarrassment.
Silver was so far off it was an embarrassment, too. It’s why the game is played. And Nov. ‘16 is far, far away.
Polls are much like “climate change” models. GIGO.
In today’s world Polling has indeed become tougher.
Polling people with Cell phones are probably not going well as they do not want to tie up the phone doing this, I know I don’t.
So the people they poll that are still using land line phones tend to be older and give the pollsters very skewed results.
They can be pretty accurate when they self police. When they don't adjust for their own biases, they are not.
Probably.
My guess is that Silver was played like a drum by the leftist shills that are the British media. Garbage in, garbage out. He’s a credulous liberal when it comes to other liberals.
There’s a reason games are actually played and elections are actually held. A model that is accurate has to be as complicated as the reality it is describing, and no ‘model’ is.
True, but try telling that to an economist.
Yep.
Unless Silver can make a string of accurate predictions that contradict his own liberal biases, he’s just another carnival barker who had a streak of luck.
Time to retire Nate.
Most of us consider how we vote to be nobody’s business but our own. I, personally, do not answer the phone when the pollsters call. Leftists, on the other hand, get sexual pleasure out of sharing their ignorance with others, so they always answer the polls. Skews the results leftward every time.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.