Nate Silver: Hillary Has A 50/50 Shot

Statistics guru Nate Silver says that while Hillary Clinton will doubtlessly be the Democratic nominee, at present he gives her a 50/50 shot at becoming president. In a piece published yesterday on his FiveThirtyEight site, Silver lays out his case:

Start with the fact that there’s no incumbent president running. There actually haven’t been a lot of cases that precisely meet the circumstances voters will face next year: Barack Obama, assuming he serves out the rest of his term, will become just the fifth president limited by the 22nd Amendment from seeking an additional term in office. This is slightly different from the case where an incumbent voluntarily declines to run again.  Still, the evidence we have from presidential elections and from other contexts like gubernatorial elections is that these cases default to being toss-ups.

Clinton’s chances will be affected by Obama’s popularity as he exits office. The relationship between the popularity of the previous president and the performance of the new nominee from his party isn’t perfect — Al Gore (narrowly) lost in 2000 despite Bill Clinton’s popularity, for example — but it certainly matters some, especially given that Clinton served in Obama’s cabinet.  However, Obama currently has an approval rating of about 45 percent, and a favorability rating of 48 percent — about average, in other words. If those numbers decline into the low 40s or climb into the 50s, they could matter more, producing either a “hangover effect” or “halo effect” for Clinton. But don’t bet on this: Obama’s approval ratings have been extraordinarily stubborn for most of his presidency, rarely deviating much from the mid-40s.

Hit the link for much more.

HomoQuotable - Nate Silver

"On Friday, I posed the question of whether the polls would have to be systematically wrong for Democrats to hold the Senate. Technically speaking, we’re not quite there yet. If Democrats win Georgia and Alaska and North Carolina, and [independent] Orman wins Kansas and caucuses with them, they’d hold the Senate even if Republicans flipped Iowa, Colorado and the five other Democratic-held seats where GOP candidates have an advantage in the polls. But that’s quite a parlay to pull off.

"Here’s one way to think about it. The FiveThirtyEight model accounts for the possibility that the polls could be systematically biased — in either direction. If I instead tell the model to assume the polls have no overall bias — even though they might be off in particular states — the Democrats’ chances of keeping the Senate would be just 17 percent. Democrats are becoming increasingly dependent on the possibility that the polls will prove to be 'skewed.'" - Polling guru Nate Silver, who correctly called all 50 states in the 2012 election.

Tweet Of The Day - Nate Silver

(Tipped by JMG reader Shawn)

Nate Silver Compiles Prop 8 Donations By Staffers At Major Silicon Valley Companies

Using a Los Angeles Times database of donations to the 2008 Proposition 8 campaign, stats guru Nate Silver has compiled a list of how the staffers of major Silicon Valley tech companies weighed in with their wallets.

The list includes Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Cisco Systems, Apple, Google, Sun Microsystems, eBay, Oracle, Yahoo, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Symantec. I limited the search to donors who listed California as their location. In total between these 11 companies, 83 percent of employee donations were in opposition to Proposition 8. So Eich was in a 17 percent minority relative to the top companies in Silicon Valley. However, there was quite a bit of variation from business to business. At Intel, 60 percent of employee donations were in support of Proposition 8. By contrast, at Apple, 94 percent of employee donations were made in opposition to Proposition 8. The opposition was even higher at Google, where 96 percent of employee donations were against it, including $100,000 from co-founder Sergey Brin. There isn’t much data on Mozilla. Only four Proposition 8 donors listed it as their employer: Eich, who donated in support of the measure, and three others who opposed it.

Silver notes that his result does not include those who chose to donate to either side of the campaign without disclosing the name of their employers. About 12% of those in the database did not.

Nate Silver Predicts: GOP Has 60% Chance Of Winning Back The Senate In 2014

Out's 100 Most Eligible Bachelors

Out Magazine has published its annual 100 Most Eligible Bachelors list and while bear icon/PA state Rep. Brian Sims is on the list...so is Ken Mehlman.  Also featured: Jason Collins, Mo Rocca, Nate Silver, and Ricky Martin.

UPDATE: Out is asking readers to vote on their favorites. Sims is currently in second place behind Adam Lambert.

Tweet Of The Day - Nate Silver

Sullivan: "I guess I can die now."

ESPN Buys Nate Silver's Blog

Nate Silver, the gay man who saved the sanity of millions of progressives during the 2012 election, is moving to ESPN.

ESPN bought the FiveThirtyEight site and name outright, which differs from the New York Times’ current licensing deal, Silver said. Skipper described ESPN’s partnership with Silver as a “long-term, multi-year” deal; the purchase price was not disclosed. Silver said that the main model for the new FiveThirtyEight will be Grantland.com, the ESPN-owned sports and pop culture site founded by sports columnist Bill Simmons. “Grantland was as close to anything in the media right now” as what he wants to do at ESPN, Silver said. When considering offers — and there were “a lot of them” — Silver said he looked at “who can actually put this vision into practice…I have a lot of confidence that [ESPN] is going to do this the right way.” Another model for the new site was Ezra Klein’s Wonkblog, which is owned by the Washington Post.

Click over to TIME for a great analysis of how this all went down.

Nate Silver's Marriage Population Charts

Nate Silver writes at the New York Times:

By August, there will be about 585 million people living in countries or jurisdictions where same-sex marriage is legal. That is roughly double the 289 million people living in such places in August 2012. Still, that represents only about 8 percent of the global population. No country in Asia, which has well more than half the world’s people, has authorized same-sex marriage. Instead, it’s the New World that has taken the lead. Of the 585 million people living in jurisdictions where same-sex marriage will be legal by August, about 360 million are in the Americas.

Silver notes that with the addition of California, 30% of Americans will have access to same-sex marriage in their home states. By comparison, 23% of Europeans do.

Nate Silver On Failed Senate Gun Bill

Nate Silver examines last week's failed gun control bill:

Among the 26 incumbent senators who will face elections next year (this definition excludes those senators who have announced their retirements), there was a near perfect relationship between the states’ rates of gun ownership and their votes. Among the 12 senators running for re-election in states where the gun ownership rate is below 42 percent, all but one (John Cornyn of Texas) voted for Mr. Manchin’s amendment. Among the 14 senators running where the gun ownership rate is above 42 percent, all but one (Mary Landrieu of Louisiana) failed to do so.

(Tipped by JMG reader Win)

Apple CEO Tim Cook Tops Out's Power 50

Via press release:

Tim Cook, number 1 on this year’s Power 50 list, took charge of tech giant Apple as CEO in 2011 and has guided the company through significant upgrades on all of its product lines and helped the brand increase its market share to 20% of all money spent on U.S. consumer technology. This year marks the first time Anderson Cooper (No. 5) is publicly out on the list. Meanwhile, Nate Silver, a newcomer to the list, proved to be a wunderkind statistician, prognosticating the 2012 presidential election with, at final count, 100% accuracy on his New York Times blog, FiveThirtyEight.

R&B star Frank Ocean makes his list debut at #10. Closeted homocon Matt Drudge is #21. See the full list.

Nate Silver On Marriage Support Trends

From Nate Silver's blog:

For right now, it is probably best to treat the question of whether a majority of Americans support same-sex marriage as having an ambiguous answer. Polls are on the verge of saying that they do, but the ballot results are more equivocal. By 2016, however, voters in 32 states would be willing to vote in support of same-sex marriage, according to the model. And by 2020, voters in 44 states would do so, assuming that same-sex marriage continues to gain support at roughly its previous rate.

Thus, even if one prudently assumes that support for same-sex marriage is increasing at a linear rather than accelerated pace, and that same-sex marriage will not perform quite as well at the ballot booth as in national polls of all adults, the steady increase in support is soon likely to outweigh all other factors. In fact, even if the Supreme Court decision or some other contingency freezes opinion among current voters, support for same-sex marriage would continue to increase based on generational turnover, probably enough that it would narrowly win a national ballot referendum by 2016.

Nate Silver Handicaps The Oscars

Details.

HomoQuotable - Nate Silver

"The polls can certainly affect elections at times. I hope people don’t take the forecasts too seriously. You’d rather have an experiment where you record it off from the actual voters, in a sense, but we’ll see. If it gets really weird in 2014, in 2016, then maybe I’ll stop doing it. I don’t want to influence the democratic process in a negative way. I’m [hoping to make] people more informed, I don’t want to affect their motive because they trust the forecasters." - Nate Silver, speaking to students at Washington University.

Ranking Of Two-Term Presidents

Nate Silver yesterday contemplated the place that President Obama might one day hold among the presidents that historians consider to be the "greatest."

As common sense might dictate — and as the statistics will also reveal — it is far too soon to conclude very much about this. Second-term presidents may be derided as lame ducks, but it is often in the second term when reputations are won or lost.

Still, we can say this much: Mr. Obama ran for and won a second term, something only about half of the men to serve as president have done (the tally is 20 or 21 out of 43, depending on how you count Grover Cleveland). We can also note, however, that Mr. Obama’s re-election margin was relatively narrow. Do these simple facts provide any insight at all into how he might be regarded 20, 50 or 100 years from now?

In fact, winning a second term is something of a prerequisite for presidential greatness, at least as historians have evaluated the question. It is also no guarantee of it, as the case of Richard M. Nixon might attest. But the eight presidents who are currently regarded most favorably by historians were all two-termers (or four-termers, in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s case).

Hit the link for more graphs and analysis.

HomoQuotable - Nate Silver

"I've always felt like something of an outsider. I've always had friends, but I've always come from an outside point of view. I think that's important. If you grow up gay, or in a household that's agnostic, when most people are religious, then from the get-go, you are saying that there are things that the majority of society believes that I don't believe." - Nate Silver, telling Britain's Guardian that his "dorkiness" has helped him succeed.

Gallup Takes A Swipe At Nate Silver

Last week Nate Silver ranked Gallup as the worst polling firm when it came to accurately predicting the 2012 election results. Gallup's editor fired back on Friday.

We have a reverse law of the commons with polls. It’s not easy nor cheap to conduct traditional random sample polls. It’s much easier, cheaper, and mostly less risky to focus on aggregating and analyzing others’ polls. Organizations that traditionally go to the expense and effort to conduct individual polls could, in theory, decide to put their efforts into aggregation and statistical analyses of other people’s polls in the next election cycle and cut out their own polling. If many organizations make this seemingly rational decision, we could quickly be in a situation in which there are fewer and fewer polls left to aggregate and put into statistical models. Many individual rational decisions could result in a loss for the collective interest of those interested in public opinion. This will develop into a significant issue for the industry going forward.

Silver responded on Twitter by saying that Gallup "needs to hire better statisticians."

#DrunkNateSilver

Twitter's meme for today. Lots more at the link.

Breitbart: We Were Totally Wrong

As I noted many times here in the last year, leading the wingnut charge that all the polls were faked, fixed, or outright wrong, was Breitbart.  Lamestream media collusion! Romney landslide! 330 electoral votes!  Today Breitbart editor John Nolte apologized. 

Mea culpa. We were dead wrong about the polls. Not only did the Real Clear Politics poll of polls end up being almost perfectly precise, but the most accurate pollster of the 2012 election cycle ended up being the Daily Kos' Public Policy Polling (PPP). My guys, Gallup and Rasmussen, didn't even make the top twenty. And that's the bad news; not that we were wrong, but that what seemed inconceivable isn't: the 2008 electorate wasn't an anomaly. The electorate (at least with a Democrat presidential candidate at the top of the ticket) has shifted. That doesn’t mean our ideas are wrong or that the GOP must change its core convictions. But it does mean that tactically we have to wrap our heads around that fact that Democrats have the ability to summon enough voters required to eke out victory. Moreover, Democrats were able to do this during a year where it seemed enthusiasm would all be on our side, not theirs.  Monday we were 100% sure this wasn't reality. We certainly weren't alone in this belief, but we were wrong -- not the polls, not Nate Silver, not Chuck Todd, not anyone in the media.

It will be interesting to see how the right treats people like Nate Silver during the 2014 midterms.

Headline Of The Day

Enjoy!