Werthless wrote:

dajafi wrote:Nobody's arguing otherwise. I think the point is that the level of analysis they evidently showed, and the seeming propensity toward magical thinking, isn't what you want in the presidency.

Admittedly there's a lot we don't know here. Maybe they really had a range of scenarios and internal debate and the sort of process you'd hope for--and frankly that I would expect, given Romney's reputation as a manager and analytical thinker. But nothing we've heard so far would indicate that.

It's not fair to say they engaged in magical thinking just because the analysis/projections/assumptions did not hold true. If Romney had won, would it have been Silver and the Obama campaign engaging in magical thinking unbefitting of the presidency?

dajafi wrote:

Werthless wrote:

dajafi wrote:Nobody's arguing otherwise. I think the point is that the level of analysis they evidently showed, and the seeming propensity toward magical thinking, isn't what you want in the presidency.

Admittedly there's a lot we don't know here. Maybe they really had a range of scenarios and internal debate and the sort of process you'd hope for--and frankly that I would expect, given Romney's reputation as a manager and analytical thinker. But nothing we've heard so far would indicate that.

It's not fair to say they engaged in magical thinking just because the analysis/projections/assumptions did not hold true. If Romney had won, would it have been Silver and the Obama campaign engaging in magical thinking unbefitting of the presidency?

I thought about writing this in my original. If you're going to conflate an independent analyst and the campaign (which you probably shouldn't), the answer is no because Silver always acknowledged the doubt. He was at pains to frame everything in if-then form, specifically "if the polls aren't systemically biased, Obama is very likely to win."

The magical thinking--the analogue to "we'll be greeted as liberators" and "deficits don't matter" and "waterboarding isn't torture because we say it's not"--was that they thought they'd win because their crowds were large. It seems there was little daylight between the idiot Peggy Noonan and the supposedly very smart Mitt Romney.

jerseyhoya wrote:

phdave wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:When you're living in a world where only 9% of people called are willing to be polled, and the response rate differs across demographic groups, you're going to have to make assumptions about turnout in building your poll. The Romney campaign made plausible assumptions. They turned out to be incorrect, and most of the public polls were closer to being correct. Youth turnout was much higher than they were expecting, and white voters made up a slightly smaller share of the electorate, and that was enough (along with things sliding away in the last week due to Sandy or whatever else).

Assumptions are not plausible if they are contradicted by a mountain of evidence. This wasn't a thought experiment. There was a lot of data out there and taken as a whole it clearly pointed to an Obama win. I'm thankful that Romney's reliance on echo chamber assumptions only #$!&@ his campaign and not the country like the last Republican administration.

But over the course of the campaign, a lot of national polls pointed toward the same thing the Romney people were seeing in their polling. A GOP enthusiasm gap, strong support from Independents, much closer partisan makeup of the electorate. The assumptions were very plausible. They just ended up being incorrect.

A recent example where the exact opposite was true was the Wisconsin recall. Democrats kept talking about how their internal polls were tied even as Republican and most public polls had Walker with a consistent lead at the edge of the margin of error. Republican polls ended up nailing the electorate, while Democratic polls were off the mark. Then there are times where the internals of one party are right, while the public polls are wrong. A good example being 2010 Nevada Senate race, where most public polls expected Reid to lose, but Democratic polling correctly foresaw the strength Reid had among Latino and union voters, and that was what lead him to reelection.

dajafi wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:

phdave wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:When you're living in a world where only 9% of people called are willing to be polled, and the response rate differs across demographic groups, you're going to have to make assumptions about turnout in building your poll. The Romney campaign made plausible assumptions. They turned out to be incorrect, and most of the public polls were closer to being correct. Youth turnout was much higher than they were expecting, and white voters made up a slightly smaller share of the electorate, and that was enough (along with things sliding away in the last week due to Sandy or whatever else).

Assumptions are not plausible if they are contradicted by a mountain of evidence. This wasn't a thought experiment. There was a lot of data out there and taken as a whole it clearly pointed to an Obama win. I'm thankful that Romney's reliance on echo chamber assumptions only #$!&@ his campaign and not the country like the last Republican administration.

But over the course of the campaign, a lot of national polls pointed toward the same thing the Romney people were seeing in their polling. A GOP enthusiasm gap, strong support from Independents, much closer partisan makeup of the electorate. The assumptions were very plausible. They just ended up being incorrect.

A recent example where the exact opposite was true was the Wisconsin recall. Democrats kept talking about how their internal polls were tied even as Republican and most public polls had Walker with a consistent lead at the edge of the margin of error. Republican polls ended up nailing the electorate, while Democratic polls were off the mark. Then there are times where the internals of one party are right, while the public polls are wrong. A good example being 2010 Nevada Senate race, where most public polls expected Reid to lose, but Democratic polling correctly foresaw the strength Reid had among Latino and union voters, and that was what lead him to reelection.

This is a fair point, but strikes me as the rare case where the plural of anecdote really sort of is data. For them to have been right, the polling error would have had to persist through state after state--as Silver repeatedly pointed out. And even in the two cases you mention, my recollection (maybe self-serving but I don't think so) was that by the end of the campaigns, those two races were likely to go the way they ultimately went. In Walker's case, the money seemed to be decisive; with Reid it was his machine (the same reason I never much worried Obama would lose NV this year, though it didn't tip that Senate race).

They made three key miscalculations, in part because this race bucked historical trends:

1. They misread turnout. They expected it to be between 2004 and 2008 levels, with a plus-2 or plus-3 Democratic electorate, instead of plus-7 as it was in 2008. Their assumptions were wrong on both sides: The president's base turned out and Romney's did not. More African-Americans voted in Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida than in 2008. And fewer Republicans did: Romney got just over 2 million fewer votes than John McCain.

2. Independents. State polls showed Romney winning big among independents. Historically, any candidate polling that well among independents wins. But as it turned out, many of those independents were former Republicans who now self-identify as independents. The state polls weren't oversampling Democrats and undersampling Republicans - there just weren't as many Republicans this time because they were calling themselves independents.

3. Undecided voters. The perception is they always break for the challenger, since people know the incumbent and would have decided already if they were backing him. Romney was counting on that trend to continue. Instead, exit polls show Mr. Obama won among people who made up their minds on Election Day and in the few days before the election. So maybe Romney, after running for six years, was in the same position as the incumbent.

TenuredVulture wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:

phdave wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:When you're living in a world where only 9% of people called are willing to be polled, and the response rate differs across demographic groups, you're going to have to make assumptions about turnout in building your poll. The Romney campaign made plausible assumptions. They turned out to be incorrect, and most of the public polls were closer to being correct. Youth turnout was much higher than they were expecting, and white voters made up a slightly smaller share of the electorate, and that was enough (along with things sliding away in the last week due to Sandy or whatever else).

Assumptions are not plausible if they are contradicted by a mountain of evidence. This wasn't a thought experiment. There was a lot of data out there and taken as a whole it clearly pointed to an Obama win. I'm thankful that Romney's reliance on echo chamber assumptions only fucked his campaign and not the country like the last Republican administration.

But over the course of the campaign, a lot of national polls pointed toward the same thing the Romney people were seeing in their polling. A GOP enthusiasm gap, strong support from Independents, much closer partisan makeup of the electorate. The assumptions were very plausible. They just ended up being incorrect.

A recent example where the exact opposite was true was the Wisconsin recall. Democrats kept talking about how their internal polls were tied even as Republican and most public polls had Walker with a consistent lead at the edge of the margin of error. Republican polls ended up nailing the electorate, while Democratic polls were off the mark. Then there are times where the internals of one party are right, while the public polls are wrong. A good example being 2010 Nevada Senate race, where most public polls expected Reid to lose, but Democratic polling correctly foresaw the strength Reid had among Latino and union voters, and that was what lead him to reelection.

"Plausible" is a nice fudge word. It's plausible to believe that with a 9% response rate, the polls had a systematic bias. However, we know that people with higher levels of education and older people are more likely to respond to polls than less educated and younger people. So, really, if anything, that would suggest that the polls were undersampling likely Obama voters. They also believed that partisan identification is largely a static characteristic--that people don't switch parties. But there's lots of evidence that PID doesn't work today like it worked 40 years ago--it's fluid, so you can't simply look at the electorate and assume that everyone who was a Republican identifier in 2004 is a Republican identifier in 2012. The unskewed poll guy based his model on this faulty assumption. You simply can't weight polls on party id. Finally, the turnout issue was an interesting one. And experience intelligent hack knows that real enthusiasm has to be for someone, not just against someone. 2004 was the obvious example of this. There really has never been much enthusiasm for Romney, even if there was enthusiasm for getting rid of Obama. So, big increases in turnout over 2008 was unlikely. Finally, why did Republicans count on lower turnout among young voters and ethnic voters? I suppose you could believe that 2012 was going to be different from 2008. But the reality is that youth participation has been increasing steadily since the 90s. On election night, I said that anecdotally it appeared that young people today are much more enthusiastic about voting than young people were 25 years ago. Social media allows for constant reinforcement. Standing on line to vote isn't so bad if you've got a smart phone and bunch of people are tweeting you, encouraging you to stay in line.

I suspect the long lines in Florida, if an intentional ploy to drive down minority and youth participation may have had the opposite effect, driving down old white participation.

jerseyhoya wrote:Another thing that I don't think too many people noticed is Romney was about 1% closer in Ohio than he is nationwide.

He would have had an electoral college problem if the national vote swung uniformly, but not from Ohio as was maybe expected but from Colorado or Iowa or whatever the extra state would have been beyond FL, VA, OH.

jerseyhoya wrote:Stop what

mozartpc27 wrote:If Mitt and his team were genuinely surprised that they lost, that does not speak well for their competence.

Doll Is Mine wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:Stop what

Living.

phdave wrote:

Doll Is Mine wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:Stop what

Living.

A bit much.

TenuredVulture wrote:

CalvinBall wrote:Any recommendations on a book that explains taxes and economic growth? Maybr just and article or two. The simpler the better. I know that their hasn't historically been a correlation between the two, but I don't understand thus can't talk about it with great confidence.

For example, was talking about it with friends and they said "Well we have the highest corporate taxes in te world and people don't want to start companies here because of that." So I don't really know how to explain while seemingly true may not be.

You could do a lot worse than read Robert Reich's stuff.

dajafi wrote:jh is correct that Ohio remains a bit redder than the country as a whole, and that this is slightly surprising given the polling there and everywhere else. Without digging too deeply into it, my guess is that the different demographics of OH as opposed to the other mega-swing states would account for it, but who knows.