Air Travel Survey

I don't think moving to an unsold seat is necessarily rude. Source.

2012 GOP Candidate Graph

(Via - Nate Silver)

Nate Silver: GOP Will Gain 49 In House

Over at FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver updates his forecasts today to predict that the GOP will pick up 49 seats in the House. That's far fewer than the 100+ being claimed by some Republican flacks, but still enough for the GOP to take the majority by six seats. Silver hedges his bets:

As I have warned repeatedly in the past, we believe that the uncertainty in the forecast is intrinsically quite high, stemming from the unusually large number of seats in play, and from differences of opinion among pollsters in how to calibrate their likely voter models to account for the so-called “enthusiasm gap.” There are only 170 seats that the model thinks of as “safe” Republican — those where their chances of winning are 95 percent or higher. However, there are only 151 seats that the Democrats are at least 95 percent assured of winning.

According to Silver, there's still about a 25% chance for the Dems to hold the House, a result which would, of course, depend on a strong turnout from Democratic voters. Hit the link for an interactive breakdown of each race by district.

U.S. House Forecast Update

Nate Silver's latest forecast gives the Democrats only a 35% chance of holding their majority in the House.

Republicans are assigned a 65 percent chance of taking over the House by our forecasting model, up slightly from 62 percent last week. They are projected to control 224 House seats in the new Congress, up a single seat from 223 last week; this would imply a gain of 45 seats from the 179 they have now (counting one vacant seat most recently held by a Republican member). Substantially larger — or smaller — gains are possible, however.

Latest Forecasts From Nate Silver

More at FiveThirtyEight.

Nate Silver's 2010 Senate Predictions

Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight makes its debut as part of the New York Times today, where he gives us the above predictions for this year's Senate races. It looks like Silver is predicting that the Democrats will lose about seven seats, yet retain a slim majority.

Nate Silver On Marriage Polls

Nate Silver:

Something to bear in mind is that it's only been fairly recently that gay rights groups -- and other liberals and libertarians -- shifted toward a strategy of explicitly calling for full equity in marriage rights, rather than finding civil unions to be an acceptable compromise. While there is not necessarily zero risk of backlash resulting from things like court decisions -- support for gay marriage slid backward by a couple of points, albeit temporarily, after a Massachusetts' court's ruling in 2003 that same-sex marriage was required by that state's constitution -- it seems that, in general, "having the debate" is helpful to the gay marriage cause, probably because the secular justifications against it are generally quite weak.

I know you freaks are dying to comment on the shape of the graph.

(Via - Towleroad)

NATE SILVER: 250 Million People Live In Jurisdictions With Full Marriage Equality

Nate notes this about his graph:

The big spike you see in 2008 is California recognizing gay marriage through the courts, and then un-recognizing it through the passage of Proposition 8. Right now, it's possible to marry your same-sex partner in Buenos Aires, in Mexico City, in Ames, Iowa, and in Pretoria, South Africa, but not in San Francisco. With countries like Argentina and Portugal now recognizing same-sex marriages, however, the global trajectory has returned to its slow-but-steady upward pace.

NYT Takes Over Nate Silver

The New York Times has taken over hosting of FiveThirtyEight, the popular elections prognostication site run by statistics guru Nate Silver.

Mr. Silver, a statistical wizard, became a media star during the last presidential election season for his political projections based on dissections of polling data. He retains all rights to FiveThirtyEight and will continue to run it himself, but “under the banner and auspices of NYTimes.com,” The Times said in a news release. The arrangement is similar to one The Times struck with the authors of the blog Freakonomics in 2007. The Freakonomics blog appears in the Opinion section of NYTimes.com. FiveThirtyEight content will be incorporated in the politics section of NYTimes.com.

The hiring of Silver, a loud supporter of Democrats, will further annoy the Freepers and their ilk, who usually disparage the paper as the "New York Slimes." Good.

JMG Makes Advocate's Top Political Blogs

This here website thingy made the Advocate's Top Political Blogs list.

From Joe.My.God to The Daily Beast, Advocate.com spotlights a few of the best blogs that cover politics, inside and way outside the Beltway.

Joe.My.God: The name sounds salacious, but the content is anything but. Not to say Joe Jervis's six-year-old blog is boring -- it just gets to the point when it comes to gay politics and news. Reporting from New York, Jervis also has his ear to Washington. He seamlessly blends big-picture posts (on the White House, GLAAD, "don't ask, don't tell" protests) with more local stories, covering gay bashings that often go unreported.

Here's the complete list in the order of the story.

The Bilerico Project
Gay Patriot
Immigration Equality Blog
BlogActive
David Mixner
Politico
Joe.My.God.
HRC Backstory
Chris Crain
Daily Beast
Drudge Report
Andrew Sullivan
FiveThirtyEight
Gay Politics/Victory Fund

I think I'd have rather been on their Top 15 Gay(ish) Blogs list, but whatevs, go me,

Gay Marriage: Tipping Point?

You'll have to embiggen this graph from FiveThirtyEight to make sense of it.

Jeff Lax and Justin Phillips put together a dataset using national opinion polls from 1994 through 2009 and analyzed several different opinion questions on gay rights. Here I'm going to talk about their estimates of state-by-state trends in support for gay marriage. In the past fifteen years, gay marriage has increased in popularity in all fifty states. No news there, but what was a surprise to me is where the largest changes have occurred. The popularity of gay marriage has increased fastest in the states where gay rights were already relatively popular in the 1990s. In 1995, support for gay marriage exceeded 30% in only six states: New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, California, and Vermont. In these states, support for gay marriage has increased by an average of almost 20 percentage points. In contrast, support has increased by less than 10 percentage points in the six states that in 1995 were most anti-gay-marriage--Utah, Oklahoma, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Idaho.

Nate Silver, The Geeky God Of Polls

With all the often wildly-conflicting polls, the one site I kept drifting back to was stats geek Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight. History will be very kind to Silver's predictive prowess. His final call of 349 electoral votes for Obama is dead-on for the current results, although Obama's total may increase slightly as the couple of still deadlocked states are finally decided.

The Cellphone Gap

Could this explain the great disparity between polls? Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight:

The polls in the Cingular-y orange color include cellphones in their samples; the polls in gray do not. The cellphone polls have Obama ahead by an average of 9.4 points; the landline-only polls, 5.1 points.

I did a radio hit the other afternoon with Mark DeCamillo of California's vaunted Field Poll, which does include cellphones in their samples. He suggested to me that it was much easier to get the cooperation of cellphone users on the weekend than during the week. How come? Because most cellphone plans include free weekend minutes. Conversely, one might expect that young people are particularly difficult to reach on their landlines over the weekend, since they tend to be away from home more (especially on a weekend when some nontrivial number of them are out volunteering for Obama). So, while I haven't tried to verify this, it wouldn't surprise me if the "cellphone gap" expands over the weekend, and contracts during the week.

Scenario Analysis

Probabilities by FiveThirtyEight.com, a site that you should be following (if you aren't already). The author is 30 year-old stats whiz Nate Silver.