2016 elections - because it's never too early

[Caliga]

I like how Weiner is in his underpants.

[dps]

I like how Weiner is in his underpants.

Whatever turns you on, I guess.

[derspiess]

http://www.theroot.com/blog/the-grapevine/trevor-noah-says-hillary-clinton-is-living-the-black-experience/

Noah spoke about all the reasons why black people should support Clinton; the main one being that she's treated like one.

"Yes, Hillary Clinton may be a white woman, but she's been living the black experience," he said. "Think about it: She always rolls in an Escalade, she's spent most of her life in government housing, and her baby daddy's got side-chick issues."

And Noah also said she dresses like a black preacher.

[Jacob]

Looks like Nevada is going for Clinton: http://www.ktnv.com/news/ralston/the-nevada-early-voting-blog

[alfred russel]

Trump is almost up to 30% on the realclearpolitics betting odds - the highest I remember (I've only been watching for a week or so).

Those are respectable odds. I think I'd short them--his path to win seems narrower than 30% with info like what Jacob is posting--but it gives me pause.

[Valmy]

Hillary is just incapable of holding a lead. But the past two times the race tightened she turned it around. Hopefully she can do it one more time.

I have to say I am pretty disappointed with her as a candidate. I thought the Clintons had more savvy than this. Obama and Bush controlled the message and were far more disciplined.

[Admiral Yi]

Trump is almost up to 30% on the realclearpolitics betting odds - the highest I remember (I've only been watching for a week or so).

Those are respectable odds. I think I'd short them--his path to win seems narrower than 30% with info like what Jacob is posting--but it gives me pause.

I think 538 gave him higher odds right after Hillary's aneurysm.

[Jacob]

Sam Wang has been giving Hillary 99% for quite a while, with fewer "intangibles" in their analysis than 538.

[The Minsky Moment]

Sam Wang has been giving Hillary 99% for quite a while, with fewer "intangibles" in their analysis than 538.

I took a quick glance at his FAQ.  I may not be understanding his method properly.  But it seems that he assumes away the possibility of correlated errors between states, which IMO will over-state certainty of outcome.  He also seems to assume pollster error is completely uncorrelated, with the same effect.

The eyeball test tells me that 99% vastly understates the degree of uncertainty inherent in the state polling and if I'm understanding the methodology correctly, I don't think its reliable.  Silver's model may be too swingey and fat-tailed but takes into account serial correlation.   

[OttoVonBismarck]

There's a lot of weird stuff going on with polling and etc this election. There's also good evidence people's opinions aren't changing much. I don't believe Trump/Clinton have seen much crossover voters who have gone from supporting one to supporting the other. The actual rates of full 180 flips like that are pretty low even in a normal year, I think this year we've had "undecideds" or people who have decided to vote for "neither" top candidates have persisted to the very end. Normally these voters have anti-establishment piques early, and you see a Gary Johnson type surge up, but toward election day they gravitate back to whichever tribe they normally truck with. But I think this year a few more of them are staying out of the two major parties. In a relatively close election where 80% of each side's base will never falter, it can be a small number of these voters behaving this way that puts the real "decision" into an even smaller pool of the "true swing" voters, and that may lead to wider variability than we're used to seeing.

I also think few pollsters (Silver acknowledges it, but doesn't seem to do much with it) have fully incorporated the reality of early voting into modeling. That's one thing that I believe made a few of the primaries come out "weird", a lot of primaries on the Democrat side where Hillary started looking "soft" versus Bernie, then ended up beating him healthily, were states with some form of "early lock in" either through early voting or registration switch deadlines. States with 30-50%+ early voting have a similar type of lock in, in that a lot of these people voted at a point in the race very different from what we'll see on Nov. 8th.

[Barrister]

So in the case of a tie, the Presidential election goes to the House.

But how they do that is weird.  It's not just a majority vote of the congressmen.  Instead each state gets 1 vote, and I gather each state delegation has to come together to decide who to vote for.

Has anyone done the math to figure out who would win that election? 

[OttoVonBismarck]

Trump wins in a landslide, he's got like 34 states.

Each state gets 1 vote, but states which have split delegations (at least in 1824 and 1800) abstained as they couldn't come to an agreement (i.e. if a state has 4 total Senators + House members, 2 D and 2 R, they probably will cast no vote.)

[OttoVonBismarck]

It's an example of where the Republican's geographic dispersion is a huge advantage. States like Wyoming count as much as California, and there are a lot of 3-4 rep states in the West/Plains that are deep red, don't have many electoral votes, but who count just as much as California in a contingent election. The Dems have the northeast corridor where some of those New England states only have 3 reps, but the Dems support is disproportionately in high rep states, so a lot of their potential votes in a contingent are "wasted."

[Ed Anger]

If I ever found out who gave my email to Ralph Reed's group of retards, I'm gonn punch them so hard their great great grandchildren will feel it in the future.

[The Minsky Moment]

Casting call for Trump TV (?) scheduled day before election -
http://nypost.com/2016/11/03/trump-tv-speculation-swirls-as-up-and-coming-network-issues-casting-call/

CANT MAKE THIS STUFF UP