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Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza!

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Farron Cousins: Repealing ObamaCare could kill 36,000 people per year.

Kimmel: The Christmas Wall.

Slate: What dinosaurs really looked like.

PsychoSuperMom: If there’s a war on Christmas, Christmas is winning:

All-Wrong:

Stephen: Family meeting with Joe Biden.

White House: West Wing Week.

Samantha Bee: Eroding electoral confidence.

Mental Floss: 16 myths about blindness.

The Sexual Preditor, Sociopath, Racist President-Elect:

Stephen: Will Joe Biden run in 2020?

Young Turks: Ohio destroys reproductive rights.

Trevor: Making sense of the Electoral College:

Sam Seder: Corey Lewandowski appears on Hannity propaganda vehicle to announces victory in fake war on X-mas.

Last week’s Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza can be found here.

Drinking liberally — Seattle

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DLBottleCome in from the cold this evening, warm your hands at the wood burning stove, order the beverage of your choice, and then join us for discussions and merrymaking at the Seattle Chapter of Drinking Liberally.

We meet every Tuesday at the Roanoke Park Place Tavern, 2409 10th Ave E, Seattle. You’ll find us in the small room at the back of the tavern beginning about 8pm.




Can’t make it to Seattle? Check out one of the other 191 chapters of Living Liberally, including ninteen in Washington state, three in Oregon and one in Idaho. Find, or go out and start, a chapter near you.

Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza!

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The world’s most polluted cities.

Mark Fiore: Pipeline Protector

Roll Call Decoder: How does new member orientation really work?

Trevor: The Dakota Access Pipeline’s reservation reroute.

Denying climate change is like living in a burning house:

Mental Floss: 27 amazing accomplishments of elderly people.

Farron Cousins: The fight for 15 has tens of thousands hitting the streets to fight for a living wage.

Facebook Live with President Obama.

Young Turks: Veterans deploy to Standing Rock #NoDAPL.

The Serial Philanderer, Con Man, Putin-loving, President Elect:

Full Frontal game night.

Adam Ruins Everything: How prostitutes settled the wild west.

Conan: Celebrity survey.

David Pakman: Texas now requires funeral services for all abortions.

White House: West Wing Week.

Jimmy Dore: Low wage workers rise up to demand livable wage.

How to make fake news.

Olbermann: “Government-backed attackers” may have hacked my account.

Last week’s Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza can be found here.

Drinking Liberally — Seattle

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DLBottleIt’s Tuesday. And that means the Seattle Chapter of Drinking Liberally meets for an evening of politics over a pint. Please stop by!

We meet every Tuesday at the Roanoke Park Place Tavern, 2409 10th Ave E, Seattle. You’ll find us in the small room at the back of the tavern beginning about 8pm.

Can’t make it to Seattle? Check out one of the other 189 chapters of Living Liberally, including twenty in Washington state, three in Oregon and one in Idaho. Find, or go out and start, a chapter near you.

Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza!

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Daily Show: R.I.P. Facts.

David Pakman: The truth about the alt-right.

Young Turks: The Emails Mike Pence doesn’t want you to see.

Adam ruins everything: The Shocking Way Private Prisons Make Money:

Common Ground: The game we can all agree on.

Jonathan Mann: Fight These Fucking Nazis Right Now.

The Serial Philanderer, Con Man, Putinophile, President Elect:

Farron Cousins: Glenn Beck attacks alt-right, forgetting he helped create it.

Trevor interviews Wesley Lowery, author of “They Can’t Kill Us All”.

Geologist’s nightmare.

Jonathan Mann: Recount!

PsychoSuperMom: I’m not a scientist:

Thom: How many Japanese sent to internment camps were US citizens?

Young Turks: Republican gerrymandering ruled unconstitutional

Last week’s Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza can be found here.

The “This could be the last Thanksgiving ever” open thread

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How to cook a Royal Thanksgiving turkey.

James Corden: Thanksgiving edition of Side Effects May Include.

Thanksgiving Classic: Sarah Palin’s Thanksgiving Massacre (with a side of word salad):

Stephen Colbert’s Turkey Tips, Part I.

Stephen Colbert’s Turkey Tips, Part II.

Late Night: What we are thankful for.

Turkeys try Thanksgiving food.

Obama pardoned the Turkey that killed my family. (Thanks, Obama!)

Late Show: How to draw a turkey by hand.

Congress talks turkey, turkey ham, and other food.

Daily Show: “U Name It” challenge for a stressful Thanksgiving:

James Corden: Friendsgiving—Thanksgiving with weed.

Stephen: The Late Show’s post-election Thanksgiving survival tips.

Drinking Liberally — Seattle

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DLBottlePlease join us Tuesday for an evening of politics over a pint at the Seattle Chapter of Drinking Liberally. This is the place to go for some post-election discussions of the future.

We meet every Tuesday at the Roanoke Park Place Tavern, 2409 10th Ave E, Seattle. You’ll find us in the small room at the back of the tavern beginning about 8pm.




Can’t make it to Seattle? Check out one of the other 189 chapters of Living Liberally, including twenty in Washington state, three in Oregon and one in Idaho. Find, or go out and start, a chapter near you.

Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza!

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Can California form its own country?

Alex meets the President.

Adam Conover: The sinister reason weed is illegal:

David Pakman: Hillary Clinton leads Donald Трамп by more than one million votes.

Sam Seder: Can Obama make a Supreme Court recess appointment?

The Sexual Predator, Путин Puppet, President Elect:

David Pakman: NSA Chief, Russia hacked the 2016 election.

Mental Floss: 39 U.S. City Name origins.

Minute Physics: Is the moon held up by a spring? How perspective shapes reality.

David Packman: Racist assholes call Michelle Obama an “ape in heals”.:

Joe Biden: Building on a record of economic progress.

Kimmel: The week in unnecessary censorship.

Last week’s Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza can be found here.

Drinking Liberally — Seattle

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DLBottle

The election is over, and one thing is clear: we have a lot of work to do! Please join us Tuesday evening at the Seattle Chapter of Drinking Liberally for a post-election debriefing and discussions about the future.

We meet every Tuesday at the Roanoke Park Place Tavern, 2409 10th Ave E, Seattle. You’ll find us in the small room at the back of the tavern beginning about 8pm.




Can’t make it to Seattle on Tuesday night? Check out one of the other 189 chapters of Living Liberally, including twenty in Washington state, three in Oregon and one in Idaho. Find, or go out and start, a chapter near you.

Poll and prediction postmortem podcast

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curmudgeonscornerLast Thursday, I was a guest on the Curmudgeon’s Corner podcast post-election edition. The host, Sam Minter, does his own polling aggregation site at ElectionGraphs.com. Along with co-host Iván Bou, we discuss the polling results from the election, our own final predictions and how they fared with other such sites for the first part of the podcast.

For the second part of the podcast, we explored the causes and consequences of the “greatest upset in electoral history,” and examine some possible responses to a single-party government.

Listen to the podcast here.

Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza!

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John Oliver: Multilevel Marketing.

Young Turks: So…George Zimmerman walks into a bar…

Samantha Bee: A beautiful, faraway dream.

VSauce: Is it okay to touch Mars?

White House: West Wing Week.

David Pakman: Marijuana wins in 5 more states.

Catastrofuck 2016. America Elects a Racist, Sexist, Groping, Philandering, Swindling Narcissist:

Mental Floss: 28 facts about The Beatles.

Slate: The election in facial expressions.

Do Presidents get paid after leaving office?

Young Turks: GOP gloats about suppressing Black vote.

Bill Maher with Eric Holder: Abolish the electoral college.

Daily Show: Bringing America together again.

Get ready for an extra special supermoon.

Late Show: Choke it down.

Last week’s Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza can be found here.

2016 National Polling

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How did the pollsters do for the 2016 election? That is a big and complicated question, because there are many different types and levels of polling done. In this post, I’ll look at the national polling in the Clinton—Trump race.

If my Twitter feed is any indication, the media seems hell-bent on the meme that “the polling was terrible” or “this is the end of polling.” But, as I show below, it wasn’t completely terrible for the national polling.

Yesterday, I heard a story on KUOW (I don’t remember the show, but perhaps All Things Considered or Here & Now) about the national polls. The story had things exactly wrong. They interviewed the director of the LA Times/USC poll (you know, the one that consistently had Trump leading Clinton), introducing it as “the one that got it right.” In fact, the LA Times/USC poll was the one that got it wrong.

Remember, national polls only tell us about the popular vote. And, as of this morning, Clinton leads in the popular vote. The LA Times/USC poll does use very interesting methods, asking their internet panel of respondents the probability of voting for each candidate. That is very cool (except for the internet panel part). But ultimately something about their poll led them to, almost uniquely, pick the wrong winner.

There are other criteria besides picking the right/wrong winner that are useful for evaluating the polls. A natural criterion is to ask which poll gets the percentages closest. That is what I have done. I’ve taken the national polling data as posted by Real Clear Politics and statistically evaluated “goodness of fit” between the poll result and the actual election outcome (as of this morning). The test I use is call a G-test of Goodness of Fit.

First I begin with the polls that did 2-way Clinton–Trump match-ups. Here are the polls from 31 Oct on, sorted newest to oldest (click for a larger image):

table1

The “fit” of the poll is better for smaller numbers in the X^2 column, and the last column gives, essentially, the probability of observing deviations from the actual outcome at least this large given the sample size, assuming the poll was a true reflection of the outcome. I’ve highlighted the best fitting with darker colors (orange). The shades of yellow denote other polls that do not differ significantly. The worst fitting, those that differ significantly from the results, are shown in white.

The best polls are the four highlighted in orange, in order: The Gravis poll taken on 31 October, the FOX News poll taken from 1-3 Nov, IBD/TIPP Tracking poll taken 4-7 Nov, and the McClatchy poll taken 1-3 Nov. Odd that the three oldest polls are the closest.

The worst poll, by far, was the NBC News/Survey Monkey online tracking poll. This poll was way too optimistic for Clinton.

The LA Times/USC poll was middling. There is only a 6% probability of observing results this bad by chance. And, of course, the poll got the wrong winner.

But we see, using 4-way races, most of the national polls were, statistically, in the ball park. Ten of 14 weren’t had outcomes that were not statistically different from the actual election.

Here is the polling for the 4-way race. The extra two categories (Johnson and Stein) provides for more ways a poll can “deviate” from the observed election results, so the polls don’t fit as well overall. Many polls are heavily penalized for doing a lousy job in the Johnson or Stein percentages, even if the Trump and Clinton percentages are okay.

table2

The best poll was by Gravis on 1-2 Nov. A later Gravis poll taken 3-6 Nov was actually one of the worst polls.

We see that, looking at a four-way race, the pollsters did not do that well. Only two of 19 polls did the results not differ significantly from the actual four-candidate distribution.

But what if we only consider the races that matter—Clinton and Trump? I’ve taken the four-way races and turned them into 2-way races. Mathematically, when doing the test, I “normalize” the results so that the sum of Clinton and Trump percentages are now 100%.

table3

We see that for 14 of the 19 polls, the results did not differ from the actual outcome. Again, the worst poll, by far, was the NBC News/Survey Monkey online tracking poll. With such a large sample, they should have been much closer than they ended up being.

So, whatever you’ve heard, the national polls were generally not that far off in predicting two outcomes of the popular vote: The winner of Clinton v. Trump, and the relative proportions of Clinton v. Trump votes.

Election 2016 Open Thread

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Here we go!

4:00: Georgia is too close to call! Trump takes Indiana and Kentucky. Hillary takes Vermont (thanks, Bros!)

4:01: South Carolina is slightly Trump leaning, but too close to call (really…not enough returns.)

4:03: Tim Scott (R), Pat Lehey (D) and Rand Paul (R) are going back to Washington D.C.

4:09: Dear MSNBC: Keep fucking Ghoul Giuliani off the fucking TV, for fuck sakes!

4:10: (p.s. if you could minimize Tweety’s time on the TV, we’d appreciate that, too.)

4:18: In my opinion, if Trump loses either Florida or North Carolina, he will lose.

4:50: SC has been called for Trump! Not a big surprise. I predicted 100% with BS polls and 77% chance without for Trump winning.

4:55: Shit’s gonna start happen’ soon.

4:45: North Carolina was called at 7:53pm PST in 2012. But, I believe a judge just extended the poll close time in some areas on account of erroneous announcements. Expect later call.

5:00: CALLS: FL, PA, NH, MO, ME, GA, NC, VA too early to call. IL, MA, CT, RI, DE, DC goes Clinton. MS, OK, AL, TN goes to Mr. Drumpf

5:03: Duckworth takes IL SEN!!!!!!!

5:05: The Duckworth win isn’t a surprise, but it is significant. Without this win, there is no way Dems would take the Senate. As it is, Dem control of the Senate is iffy.

5:09: Steve Kornacki, “…with Hillary Clinton cleaning up with Black voters in Florida….” Ummm…maybe rephrase that?

5:25: As I predicted, Young takes Indiana! That is a blow to Dem’s taking the Senate, but not unexpected given the recent polling.

5:30: Virginia has moved from “too early to call” to “too close to call”. Frankly, I don’t view that as a good sign.

5:44: Some networks call the House for the GOP. Probably true, but AP hasn’t called it yet.

5:45: Georgia is too close to call. Really?!? Georgia could go for Clinton?

5:46: On the other hand, Florida isn’t looking good for Clinton.

5:47: Clinton has a +7% lead in Ohio right now, but really the lead may not be representative.

5:55: Hassan leads Ayotte in NH, but it is too close to call.

5:56: It took four days to get a call in Florida in 2012. It looks like FL is going to fuck with America again in 2016.

6:07: Clinton wins NY. Trump takes IN, ND.

6:08: Trump takes NE. Not sure about the NE CDs, but he probably takes them, too.

6:11: Trump takes Texas. Maybe President Hillary Clinton can arrange for Trump to become president of an independent nation called Texas.

6:16: I understand FAUX News has called Arizona for Sen. McCain. Could be.

6:18: Feingold is looking strong in WI.

6:45: Frankly, it is pretty disappointing that the election is this close.

7:17: Virginia is going to Clinton. This is a “must win” for Clinton in case she loses NC and FL. She’ll need NV, WI, MI, and MN too…

7:20: The Donald takes OH. Totally expected, but an important development.

7:28: Okay…Two swing states called: OH Trump and VA Clinton.

7:36: PA is looking better. Clinton is up by 5%, although “calling” the state requires knowledge of what precincts have reported.

7:38: Are we having fun yet?

7:49: Looks like some media is callin NC for Trump…

7:52: Pennsylvania is looking good for Clinton. So here is the deal. If Trump wins FL and NC (as seems likely), Clinton needs VA and PA, which she probably has. Then she needs to sweep WI, MI, and MN, which is likely (even if Trump leads in WI right now). The critical state will be NV. It will likely determine the winner. If Trump takes one of WI MI and MN, bad news for Clinton. I had NV likely going for Trump, but I am told by a campaign doing internal polling in NV that NV will be in Clinton’s column. I’d be happy to be wrong.

BTW: Alaska is a 3-vote wild card. Last non-internet poll in AK had Clinton leading by +4% (or something). On the other hand, it is the ONLY poll that found her leading. And it was from an unknown pollster, so don’t bet the farm on AK.

7:59: Another point about NV: Most polling is likely to underestimate Clinton support because most polls don’t do Spanish versions.

8:00: Clinton takes CA, WA, and HI. Trump gets ID.

8:03: Unbelievable: Johnson is called in WI. No Senate for the Dem’s.

8:04: A couple of other points: First, I am assuming Trump will win IA, but Clinton seems to be running Strong there.

8:05: Trump takes NC.

8:22: Wisconsin is going to be VERY close. Humanity as we know it may depend on the cheesehead vote.

8:32 Trump takes Iowa and Utah. So it all comes down to MI (looking good for HRC), WI (too close) and NV.

9:20: Okay…Kathy has called and said we’ve lost power at the house, estimated until 11:00. I’m heading home.

11:32: AP has just called the election for Donald Drumpf. Should thing go as expected by Inauguration Day in January, we will be in for chaos.

Image of Trump as President of KAOS

Follow-up: Poll aggregation and more on bogus pollsters

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I was hoping for a bunch of last minute polls being released today, but nada. Perhaps they were all released all last night.

I’m a bit unhappy with the way this election cycle is ending. Since I started aggregating state presidential polls in 2007, one of my objectives has been to see how accurate a simple binomial model can be at predicting the presidential election, using only polls as the data. The model did very well in the 2008 and 2012 cycles.

It is also a more difficult business in 2016. Obviously, the demise of the norm that there be a landline in nearly every home is an emerging problem. Many pollsters supplement landline polls with a cell phone sub-sample. This is expensive, because these calls must be done by people. Interactive voice or digit response polls aren’t permitted for cell phones.

A more difficult problem for my analyses is that there has been a proliferation of internet-based polls. You’ve probably seen them: YouGov, Insights West, Google Analytics, Ipsos/Reuters, SurveyMonkey, to name a few. Most of these polls work by surveying from a very large opt-in panel, and then mathematically adjust the results to match a demographic profile. So, if not enough 50-60 year old White women respond, the few who do respond are, essentially, cloned.

I’m sure this technology can work very well with a huge panel and careful background work to perfect the methods. It may be that some internet pollsters, say YouGov, have done so. But for every YouGov, there are probably a dozen internet polls that haven’t, and they frequently have bizarre results. I don’t want to be in the business of making subjective judgments about whose polls are “good enough” to accept. Therefore, I simply exclude polls that survey internet panels.

Another problem is that internet polls generally don’t have well defined sample sizes. My analyses need to know the “effective” size of each poll to work. “Effective” means the equivalent number of individuals who, if live-polled, would generate the same statistical information as the internet poll. This should, in principle, be easy to estimate using simulation methods like bootstrap resampling, but I am not aware of direct analytical solutions (which would, at a minimum, have to use the distribution of weights). In any case, “effective” sample sizes don’t see to have made it in internet polls yet.

Unfortunately, a number of pollsters switched—sometimes right in the middle of the election season—to using an internet panel. Pollsters that come to mind include Rasmussen, Gravis, and Public Policy Polling. These three pollsters make up a substantial fraction of the total state polls done in any season. I suppose I should accept an internet panel as an approximation of the cell phone sub-sample in a poll, but I didn’t this year. Rules and all that….

Finally, there is the bogus pollsters. Regular readers may recall my fisking of a bogus Pennsylvania poll earlier this year. That was easy…they were amateurs. But the issue could be difficult to identify in real time with a bit more competence.

If you haven’t read Goldy’s takedown of Remington Research and, to a lesser extent, Trafalgar Group, read it now. This development has me down, because I am now in the predicament of ignoring suspicious polls, or playing “poll cop,” something I detest.

I frequently laugh (and mock) right-wingers and their beefs with individual polls or pollsters—think “Unskewed Polls” from 2012. The charges usually amount to nothing but hating the fact that their candidate is losing. Get a grip!

But now, that is what I seem to be doing—calling out a pollster (or two) for bogus polls. There is one difference: my motivation is to be as accurate as possible. Bogus polls fuck with me, whether they come up showing the Democrat up or the Republican up. If lefties launched an effort to dump bogus pro-Democrat polls on the market in order fuck up the aggregated results, I would call the out as well, because their bogus polls would fuck with the accuracy of my polling analyses.

As an aside, remember Birther Queen Orly Taitz? She wrote a blog post a couple of days ago calling upon both Remington Research and Trafalgar Group to swoop into New Hampshire to stop the polling trend there. Here is part of her screed:

However, Democratic Party came up with an absolutely bogus poll from WMUR/UNH, showing Trump behind by 11%, which lowered his average from winning to being 0.6% behind and his total electoral votes from winning 270 to 266. This is a clear psy-op. You can see that all the polls showed Trump leading from 5% to Clinton leading by 1%. This poll showing Clinton ahead by 11% in NH is a complete farce. By the way, Republican senator, Kelly Ayotte, is leading by the same margin and the same WMUR/UNH came with a similar bogus poll to show her far behind.
Remington and Trafalgar pollsters need to post a true poll for New Hampshire ASAP. This poll will move Trump into the lead in NH and his total electoral votes will go up from 266 to winning 270!
Readers of Taitz report are asked to call Remington and Trafalgar pollsters and urge them to publish asap a true poll for New Hampshire

Huh…

So, now I am in a position of having TWO sets of results. One set based on my stated rules and assumptions set out over a year ago. And I have the results excluding Remington Research and Trafalgar Group, whose polls I strongly suspect are bogus. Fuck, I hate that!

  • If these two pollsters are legit (full write-up): Clinton wins with 84.5% probability with, on average, 282 votes. The most likely outcome is 276 electoral votes with a 9.03% probability
  • If they are bogus, as I suspect (full write-up): Clinton wins with 98.7% probability with, on average, 310 votes. The most likely outcome is 305 electoral votes with a 5.09% probability

With any luck, we’ll know which version corresponds most closely to reality very soon. Finally, here are the relevant graphics, side by side. Click for a larger image.

bothdists

bothmaps

bothpmaps

bothtrendplots

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