Kevin Drum - November 2012

Note to the Columbus Dispatch: 84 Percent Is Not a Toss-Up

| Mon Nov. 5, 2012 4:30 PM GMT

The Columbus Dispatch's final pre-election poll has Obama leading Romney 50 percent to 48 percent. Their headline calls this a "toss-up," and Robert Wright is unhappy about that:

Presumably the reason the headline writer felt justified in calling the race a toss-up was this paragraph in the story: "The final Dispatch poll shows Obama leading 50 percent to 48 percent in the Buckeye State. However, that 2-point edge is within the survey's margin of sampling error, plus or minus 2.2 percentage points."

That wording suggests that Obama's two-point edge has no meaning. And that's a common way for journalists to interpret results that fall within the "margin of error." For example, in September a conservative columnist in the New York Post asserted that Obama's lead in state polls didn't matter because the "polls separating the two candidates are within the margin of error — meaning that there is no statistical difference in support between Obama and Romney."

Wright is right. The MOE for a single poll represents a 95 percent confidence interval for each individual's percentage, but it doesn't represent a 95 percent confidence for the difference between the two. In fact, a 2 percent difference in a poll with a 2.2 percent MOE suggests that there's about an 84 percent chance that the guy in the lead really and truly is in the lead.

And guess what? Based on averaging lots of polls, and thus reducing the MOE, Nate Silver figures that Obama's chances of winning tomorrow are 86 percent—largely because he thinks those are Obama's chances of winning Ohio. So it turns out that everyone is saying the same thing, but the Columbus Dispatch just doesn't know it. Obama seems to have about an 84 to 86 percent chance of winning Ohio, and therefore an 84-86 percent chance of winning the election.

Advertise on

Judge Throws Book at S&P Over Shoddy Rating Practices

| Mon Nov. 5, 2012 12:15 PM GMT

Good news! Standard & Poor's is finally being held to account for transparently manipulating its own models solely in order to give one of its customers a AAA rating for a rocket-science derivative product. Long story short, they plugged in whatever numbers it took to generate the AAA rating, even though they knew the numbers were bogus. In fact, says Felix Salmon, if they had plugged in reasonable numbers, "the CPDO would almost certainly not even have been investment grade, let alone triple-A."

And the bad news? The ruling came from an Australian judge. And it's 635,500 words long (!). Wouldn't it be nice to get a few rulings like this from American judges too? In the meantime, Felix has a reasonably understandable explanation of the whole thing here. Read it and weep.

The Kafkaesque World of the No-Fly List

| Mon Nov. 5, 2012 11:55 AM GMT

Glenn Greenwald recounts the story today of Saadiq Long, an Air Force veteran currently living in Qatar, a close U.S. ally. His mother in Oklahoma is sick, but when Long bought a ticket to visit her, he discovered that he had been put on the no-fly list:



Is there a good reason that Long is on the no-fly list? I have no idea. There might be. But what's outrageous about this, aside from the sheer number of people we've placed on the no-fly list over the past decade, is the lack of judicial oversight. Someone has put you on the list, but you don't know who. There's presumably a reason for being put on the list, but no one will tell you what it is. There's a procedure that provides you with a "redress control number," but it often appears to be meaningless. If you go to court, a judge will tell you it's a national security issue and there's nothing to be done about it. It's a cliche to call this kind of system Kafkaesque, but what other word is there for it?

And as Glenn reports, things were bad under Bush, but have gotten worse over the past four years. "Secret deprivation of core rights, no recourse, no due process, no right even to learn what has been done to you despite zero evidence of wrongdoing: that is the life of many American Muslims in the post-9/11 world. Most significantly, it gets progressively worse, not better, as the temporal distance from 9/11 grows."

Again: maybe there's a good reason that Long is on the no-fly list. But if there is, the government should be required to stand up in court and make its case, and Long should have the chance to fight back. The executive branch should never have the power to do something like this with no oversight and no accountability.

Eggheads: The Secret Source of Democratic Campaign Success

| Mon Nov. 5, 2012 10:45 AM GMT








Would Mitt Romney Be Good For Short-Term Economic Growth?

| Mon Nov. 5, 2012 9:31 AM GMT







Poor Early Voting Turnout Apparently a Big Plus for Republicans

| Mon Nov. 5, 2012 8:46 AM GMT

I love this headline from Katrina Trinko over at NRO:


Got that? No? Let's allow the RNC to explain:




Uh huh.

Advertise on

Voter Suppression Enters the Home Stretch

| Mon Nov. 5, 2012 8:07 AM GMT









California Propositions - November 2012

| Mon Nov. 5, 2012 6:43 AM GMT













Election Forecasting Update - 4 November 2012

| Sun Nov. 4, 2012 9:11 PM GMT

Here's my penultimate update on the status of the most popular presidential forecasting models. On the top are Nate Silver and Andrew Tanenbaum; on the bottom are Sam Wang and Josh Putnam. Sam's model showed an unnerving single-day decline in Obama's numbers today, but all four models still predict a convincing Democratic victory, with Obama winning an average of 305 electoral votes.

So what are the odds that these models are wrong? The basic polling itself is almost certainly sound, so there are really only two ways that the polls could be significantly off:

  • The few remaining undecided voters could all break for Romney. However, this is unlikely given the polling numbers we're seeing, since they'd have to break something like 80%-20% to overcome Obama's lead in the key swing states. There's no precedent for that.
  • On the great gittin' up day, all those folks who say they support Obama might not get to the polls in the same numbers as all the super-energized Romney supporters. But this is basically just an assertion that the likely voter screens are wrong on virtually all the polls, something that seems unlikely since the screens are little more than questions asking whether you plan to vote. They've worked in the past, and there's no reason to think they won't work this year just as well. For all practical purposes, the "enthusiasm gap"—if it exists—is already accounted for in the polling numbers.

But suppose there is a systematic bias in the polls. How big would it have to be in order for Romney to win? This is what Sam Wang's "meta-margin" tells us, and it currently stands at 2.72%. That's how far off the polls would have to be—either because undecideds break heavily for Romney or because the pollsters' likely voter screens are wrong—in order for Romney to win, and it's a pretty big number. It's unlikely that either of these effects is anywhere near that large.

What else? Conservatives are currently pinning some of their hopes on poll internals, which show independents breaking strongly for Romney. However, Nate Cohn suggests this is just an artifact of the Republican Party's lousy brand image these days: the tea party has driven away lots of centrist Republicans, who now call themselves independents even though they still plan to vote for Romney. This is likely what's driving up Romney's share of the "independent" vote.

For myself, I'm still predicting an Obama win for two reasons. First, models that are based on fundamentals suggest that Obama—an incumbent presiding over a so-so economy—should score a modest win. Second, Obama is leading in nearly all the polls two days before the election, and that also suggests a modest win. There's no magic here. Both of the models that seem like reliable predictors are pointing in the same direction, so that's the direction I'm leaning too. I guess I'd add to that one anecdotal piece of evidence: the Romney campaign is spending a lot of time complaining that the polls are wrong, and that's usually something that only losing campaigns do. In any case, we'll know in 48 hours.


| Sun Nov. 4, 2012 11:54 AM GMT




