HorsesAss.Org

Open Thread

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In Monday’s Open Thread, I mentioned that I’d like to keep a Washington State exchange. But the more I think about it, the more I would like Washington State to just set up a public option of our own and sell it across state lines. Maybe we can keep our exchange and sell the public option to Washington State residents at cost, but sell it to the rest of the country at a profit. Of course, we’d probably need a Democratic State Senate to make that happen, but it’s worth the push.

0pen Thread: November 16

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There may be a lot of internally displaced refugees in Trump’s America. If Kansas collapses under its own weight, it may be that nobody can save them. If ICE raids are as bad as we fear, people might move to sanctuary cities. If police aren’t even doing the basics to protect Black people, Latin Americans, or gay people, they might have to move to other parts of the country where they feel safer.

I say this as a warning for Seattle and Washington: We have to get our shit together. We have to solve our homeless problem because more people are coming (and because it was always the right thing to do). We have to make sure people still have health care here because healthy people in Washington are more productive, and more people coming are going to need it (also, because it’s the right thing to do). We have to get serious about police reform so people who come here aren’t afraid of them (also, it’s the right thing to do).

I generally push back against people who say people who don’t like policies in their state should move to a more liberal state. But if we want to be an option for people, we have to work on ourselves.

For the Good of the Nation President Obama Must Martyr Hillary Clinton, Not Pardon Her

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screen-shot-2016-11-15-at-10-59-31-am

Jesus Christ, I just have to take a moment to remark on what is perhaps the stupidest fucking editorial ever from the Seattle Times, a newspaper that has turned stupid fucking editorials into a veritable art form:

PRESIDENT Obama should pre-emptively pardon Hillary Clinton to protect her and the United States from a vindictive, showboat prosecution by the incoming Trump administration.

No, NO, NO… President Obama should not pardon Hillary Clinton under any circumstance! A pardon would be understood by the vast majority of Americans both as an admission of guilt and as conclusive evidence of endemic corruption in the Democratic establishment! How fucking stupid can the Seattle Times be not to see the politics of the situation through to its logical conclusion?

While I understand and even agree with the editorial board’s impulses (“The danger to America is not Clinton’s freedom but in having a presidency that even threatens to use its power for vendettas and jailing opponents”), it is far too late for such democratic high-mindedness. The threat has already been made! And the American people (well, the Electoral College) rewarded Trump for it with the White House. Obama pardoning Clinton would only embolden and enrage the trumpenproletariate, while freeing Chancellor Trump from the responsibility of fulfilling one of his most disturbing campaign promises.

Rather, cold political calculus tells us that we must let Trump be Trump. We must not allow him to escape this defining moment. He must either demonstrate to his base the weakness that is at the vile heart of all tyrants, or demonstrate to the world how little he honors the rule of law, let alone our nation’s two-and-a-quarter centuries of peaceful transfer of power.

A Clinton show trial would no doubt be a shock to the American psyche and a permanent scar on our nation’s world standing. But so would the show trials of Clinton underlings that would no doubt ensue should the Trump regime be denied its promised revenge (a Clinton pardon should be a sign for Huma Abedin to flee the country). It may be too late to avoid this trauma. But at least it would finally and totally rip away the fiction that there is anything normal about the alt-right regime that has seized the White House.

If Trump prosecutes Clinton, he turns her into a martyr of the democratic resistance. But if President Obama pardons Clinton, he transforms the two of them into political villains against which the Republicans will effectively run for decades to come. It isn’t fair. It isn’t comforting. But that is the America in which we now all live.

It is also an America that newspapers like the Seattle Times helped create through their endless coverage of the trumped up email witch hunt, and a shameful campaign of false equivalency that now trivializes “go hang yourself” and “go back to India” as mere “complaints” while characterizing Breitbart’s obvious and indisputable white nationalism as a mere he-said/she-said allegation of “critics say“—the critics explicitly othered on the paper’s front page as “angry … Jewish and Muslim groups.”

Like most of the rest of media, the Trump-normalizing Seattle Times has surrendered the moral authority to even report the news, let alone comment upon it. It does not matter if the editorial board’s motives were good: their advice is more than just wrong, it is dangerous.

The sole purpose of a free press is to safeguard democracy. On this the Seattle Times and the rest of the old guard news media utterly failed. So please, Seattle Times, for the sake of our nation, shut the fuck up before you do more harm.

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.

Open Thread: November 14

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Soooo, does anyone have the first clue what happens to states like Washington that have our own health care exchanges if Obamacare is repealed? If they replace it with a you-can-buy-plans-across-state-lines, what sort of restrictions can and should we add to it then? Can we do a multi-state, West Coast exchange? It would probably require Congress if it’s a governmental thing.

HA Bible Study: Revelation 17:8

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Revelation 17:8
The beast that thou sawest was, and is not; and shall ascend out of the bottomless pit, and go into perdition: and they that dwell on the earth shall wonder, whose names were not written in the book of life from the foundation of the world, when they behold the beast that was, and is not, and yet is.

Discuss.

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.

Open Thread: 11/11

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Darryl already did a Veteran’s Day Open Thread, but since I wrote this yesterday and was going to post it today, here it is, a bit late:

It’s Veteran’s Day, and so it’s Armistice Day. On this day On this day 98 years ago, a madness of war ended. Mechanized slaughter stopped. The War to End All War didn’t, obviously, so we still mint new veterans. But while all war didn’t end, that war did. And today’s conflicts will end. What we replace them with is up to us.

So here’s to a Veteran’s Day in the future where there are no veterans. Where war has been eliminated for so long that the idea becomes impossible to imagine. Here’s to a future where we don’t send people off to mechanized slaughter or whatever the fuck else we can dream up.

Until that day, a thank you to the veterans who read this.

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.

Open Thread 11-9

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Jesus, guys. I love the American ideal, but damn did we not live up to it last night. I know Darryl has a lot of analysis, but all I have is hope.

The markets seem to know this is bad, but all I have is hope. Hope that we can figure something out at the state level if Obamacare gets repealed. Hope that we can survive it. Hope that we can prevent national stop and frisk. Hope that the bottom isn’t as far as we think it is. It’s scary. And it’s infinitely scarier if you’re not white. If you’re not a man. If you’re not Christian. America is trying to tell a lot of people that it’s not for them, but I still have hope because America still is for all Americans.

I don’t know what the future holds, but even now, when we’ve elected a man who looks like a fascist, and while there are checks and balances, the other branches are also controlled by Republicans, so who the fuck knows? Anyway, I’m much drunker writing this at 11:30 than I usually am just in general (and sorry (?) it’s so late). In conclusion, fuck, but don’t give up hope.

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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