US Election Week 2020

[FunkMonk]

Sounds like Biden will have at least 270 soon enough. Philadelphia and possibly Atlanta are doing what they need to do to overcome his deficit in PA and GA.

[Razgovory]

Theory: Statistics is supernatural and Data Scientists are witches who spread woe.

[alfred russel]

He doesn't necessarily.

Assuming he gets NC and AK, he needs PA plus two of three: NV, GA, Arizona.

At this point he is close to drawing dead. Based on vote shift, I think he is a huge underdog in PA, which kills everything. He might get GA, probably won't get AZ or NV.

OK, I'm looking at a map (Google's) that has Arizona called.

AP & Fox have called Arizona for Biden. Everyone else is being a contrarian. Especially AR.

I'm not being contrarian. If we are talking about Trump's paths to win--which are very limited--probably at least half of them go through Arizona. Professional prognosticators like Nate Silver are on this train. If you think AZ is in the bag because two media outlets called it, on predictit the have dollars on sale for $0.82.

There are a lot of outstanding votes in Arizona, Biden's lead is significant but not insurmountable, and there doesn't seem to be a good reason to think the outstanding votes are significantly skewed to Trump, but it isn't guaranteed they aren't either. There just isn't a good track record with this type of election to get a sense of the potential skew of the remaining ballots.

I think AP & Fox called it too soon. It doesn't seem 99.5% probable (which is what I think the standard was supposed to be).

[DGuller]

Something is wrong with the way the polls are done.  This is the second time in a row that Trump has performed substantially better than expectations.  There is a bug in the models.

Some statistical problems may simply be unsolvable, you just have to mix some judgment in and hope for the best.  The people who agree to speak to pollsters are a self-selected bunch, and selection bias is deadly and often unavoidable. 

When you deal with a possibly biased sample, you have to try to figure out how to reweight it to make it representative, but it's hard to do and requires judgment, which can be biased itself.  I don't think the poll miss this year is a bug by pollsters, it's just a reminder that statistics has intractable limitations.

[The Minsky Moment]

What is the likely hood of Biden winning PA and GA?

Biden is likely to win at least one.
Hoods are more a Trumpy thing.

[alfred russel]

Regarding the called status of Arizona.

Arizona initially fucked up and said they had like 96% of precincts in rather than 87%. Some groups called Arizona.

Then today Arizona said that they had 400,000 uncounted late arriving early votes in one county. Then later in the day they said more than 600,000 in multiple counties.

I don't know what the decision matrix is to reverse a call, but it may be they said, "well we thought it was 99.5% likely Biden would win, now we think it is 92% based on corrected, we aren't going to make a highly public reversal when it is still highly likely Biden will win. We will revisit if the race begins to tighten." Trump screams about everything, but I can see why he would scream about this: I bet Biden would too. The screaming is also irrelevant--the votes are going to get counted and what falls out is where we land.

I can see everyone's point of view and none of them are unreasonable here, but ultimately I don't think any of it matters. Arizona remains one of Trump's best hopes for getting re elected - which is highly unlikely.

Betting odds now have Trumpy AZ more likely than PA--19% for AZ and 16% for PA.

[DGuller]

I think they're going to have to retract the Arizona call, I don't think it's defensible now to keep it.  Fuck, AZ going Trump is really not the surprise we need this late in the game.

[grumbler]

What would happen if that's the case? Or rather--what is supposed to happen?

It's kind of fucked up.  The House of Representatives votes to decide the election, but each state delegation gets one vote.  Yes, that means Wyoming has as much power in that vote as California does.  I guess the delegates get together and vote, and then whomever wins that vote puts one vote in the hat for Trump or Biden.

I think Republicans will have ~27 delegations so that means they would ostensibly win. But they have no obligation to chose Trump or Biden. The one rep from Wyoming and one rep from Alaska could decide that someone better than Trump exists, and insist on electing Paul Ryan or something.

They have to pick from among the three candidates getting the most EV for President.

[DGuller]

They have to pick from among the three candidates getting the most EV for President.

How do you break the tie for third?

[alfred russel]

I think they're going to have to retract the Arizona call, I don't think it's defensible now to keep it.  Fuck, AZ going Trump is really not the surprise we need this late in the game.

Nate Silver seems to be pessimistic on Arizona...I'm interpreting his comments as he would rate it a weak lean to Biden. He seems significantly more optimistic on Pennsylvania, and Trump needs both.

And of course also Georgia unless he can pull a rabbit out of his hat in Nevada.

Yep I'm still going back to Nate Silver. Anyone who has volunteered at a women's shelter would understand.

[DGuller]

I think they're going to have to retract the Arizona call, I don't think it's defensible now to keep it.  Fuck, AZ going Trump is really not the surprise we need this late in the game.

Nate Silver seems to be pessimistic on Arizona...I'm interpreting his comments as he would rate it a weak lean to Biden. He seems significantly more optimistic on Pennsylvania, and Trump needs both.

And of course also Georgia unless he can pull a rabbit out of his hat in Nevada.

Yep I'm still going back to Nate Silver. Anyone who has volunteered at a women's shelter would understand.

I'm becoming pessimistic on AZ too.  The first batch of long-awaited votes was for Trump at the margin he needed.  I'm also unclear about other county's votes, because it seems like Maricopa is the best case for Biden.  I'm struggling to see how it's anything but very close.  I think the Fox stats guy and the AP are now torching their credibility with every minute that goes buy where the "called" state is the most uncertain of the ones remaining.

[alfred russel]

But really at this point, Arizona seems like a curiosity.

Biden is moving toward closing things out in PA and Georgia.

[DGuller]

But really at this point, Arizona seems like a curiosity.

Biden is moving toward closing things out in PA and Georgia.

I want to be triple sure, literally, that's the only way to be sure.

[viper37]

I think the Fox stats guy and the AP are now torching their credibility with every minute that goes buy where the "called" state is the most uncertain of the ones remaining.

Presumably, they called it when they were told 96% of the vote was counted.  If I see a large advance on Biden that can't be gapped with 99.5% of the 4% remaining votes, I'd be calling it to.  However, it seems Arizona fucked up in reporting the results, since it was 82-84% of the vote counted instead of 96% and that makes a huge difference, unknown to Fox and the AP who called it.

If they called it for Biden at 82% of the vote in, and knowning such, then they were obviously wrong.

[viper37]

Are there automatic recounts in States where the margins are razor thin?