FiveThirtyEight.com: Political Analysis for Stat Geeks

Thought I'd pass this along for those of you who might not have heard of it. I just came upon it a few days ago and am really, really digging it.

Anyway, FiveThirtyEight.com is the brainchild of SABRmatrician Nate Silver, who helped revolutionize the world of statistical baseball nerdery by inventing the PECOTA stat a few years back. Since then, he's turned to politics. Using cold, hard numbers and algorythms and crap that I don't even come close to understanding, he's been consistently more accurate than any other pollster this primary season at predicting the outcomes.

In short, it's like Real Clear Politics, except without all of the nonsense punditry. Silver is an Obama backer, but his methodology remains neutral. For what it's worth, right now he's predicting Obama to win 306 electoral votes to McCain's 232.

Highest Recommendation.

my head hurts.

Blimey, that's overwhelming. Though I'll be interested to keep an eye on it if he's as accurate as you say.

I <3 stats.

holy mother of stat porn.

Could someone help us undereducated (in mathematics and statistics) people interpret this mountain of information?

Thanks for showing me another site for me to waste hours on.

The Super Tracker and Swing State Analysis. I don't understand what those are actually talking about.

I have to admit I check fivethirtyeight almost obsessively.

As a stats junkie this site has become a huge place for me to analyze stuff until my brain hurts.

It has been accurate thus far, and really interesting.

Ok now I am hooked. Goddamnit. I have too many damn chores to be this smart.

That site gave me a boner.

See? Learned me something new right there.

I think I'm in love.

Me too. And it's shit like this that seals it for me. Here's ABC News, reported gleefully by Real Clear Politics:

Only one problem with all of that: it's total fucking bullshit, as 538 points out using actually relevant metrics.

The more the mainstream media continues to frame this election (as they did with Obama-Clinton) as a "tight race" where "anything can happen", the more I'm starting to believe the conspiracy theories about the networks trying to puff up their ratings. The fact is that right now Obama's up, and up big. Of course, he can still lose it and anything can happen, but the idea that this is somehow "tight" at the moment or that things are shaping up to be a nailbiter is totally ridiculous.

I read about this in Newsweek and the first person I thought of was Subrosa. Hand to god. You go boy.

you don't really need mathematics or statistics to see that obama is going to blow out mccain this next election. If the 2006 congressional elections were any indication, the nation is completely tired of the last eight years of elitist schism-inducing terrible politicking favoritism. I mean come on, does anyone really think that top-down economics actually works? or that the war is a good idea? (discrediting anyone who holds stocks in either halliburton, or any of the other institutions in the military industrial complex.) He simply has the right idea when it comes to pandering to what the nation wants at this particular moment. but, if you really want change, please don't expect it from this vector. the first thing he did was to appoint a washington insider to vett his vice-presidential candidates. if anyone seriously consciously wants change, please attempt to hold him accountable and lobby your local congressmen/women for public finance for political campaigns. Because that is the only true way we are ever really going to get real representatives into public office.

How do I dissect the "Poll Detail?" What do the bars mean?

Not that this is all that relevant to the thread, but did it ever occur to you that a "Washington Insider" might be good to vett VP candidates because they'd presumably have the connections and inside knowledge to best effectuate finding the right Veep?

I mean, whatever. There are plenty of ways you can point to Obama's lacking a true reformer's zeal, but that seems a particularly silly one. He hired a Washington insider to do something that really only a Washington insider would know how to do. Oh noez!

God this site is absolutely addicting. Like I don't spend enough time sitting in front of a computer.

It's like they combined baseball with politics and said to me "Come, Subrosa. Bask in all that you've ever loved."

If they could have fit tits in there somewhere, I think I might have imploded with joy.

SG Set idea?

Which bars? If you mean the bars that look like a cell phone reception thingy, I assume that's a pictorial representation of the weight that each poll is being given in his formula. Unlike RCP, he's looking at each poll and assigning (through a mathematical formula) a reliability weight to each one. The factors that go into the reliability weight are listed in his FAQ, but they include the time the poll was taken, the accuracy of that particular pollster in the past and the sample size. The weight of each poll is adjusted daily to work into his formula.

When he gets a new poll, he works it in, crunches the numbers and it spits out a new set of predictions.

Just like how the new Quinnepac polls (which have Obama comfortably ahead in Ohio, Pennsylvania and even with a lead in Florida) have adjusted Obama's overall win percentage from 67% to 75% overnight. (No Post-Clinton Bump my ass.)

I like how he talks about what a utter and complete joke larry sinclair and jake gannon are.