Bizarro Election Update

Hillary Clinton has 232 electoral votes at this time, presuming all of her pledged electors vote for her and none of Trump’s 306 pledged electors defect and vote for her (since the electors are chosen by the party which won the state, this is pretty much assured, although one or two may abstain or vote for a third-party candidate in protest). Ms. Clinton would need an addition thirty-eight electoral votes to become President.

At this time, five states are involved in recounts or have had recounts requested. In order of likelihood of a recount happening, those states are :


Wisconsin: A recount is underway right now. Trump won Wisconsin by a little short of 23 thousand votes, so a recount was never expected to change things much. With 23 out of 72 counties completed, Trump’s margin in Wisconsin has actually increased by 146 votes.

www.westernjournalism.com%2Fwisconsin-recount-shows-only-one-winner%2F&usg=AFQjCNEBAvzog5LXPsXaPAyHOlQyH9MJ5Q&sig2=qeZ9BvZVUu5YxUhtTDQhTg

The recount is underway, but all evidence indicates Trump will continue to hold the victory in Wisconsin.


Michigan: A recount has been ordered and is underway, but the Attorney General for Michigan has filed suit to stop it due to taxpayer cost and Stein’s alleged lack of standing. A Michigan Court of Appeals appears to be siding with the Attorney General.

Judge to issue order on requests to end Mich. recount

That could send the case to the Michigan State Supreme Court.

To make things ever stranger, more than half the precincts in Detroit apparently broke their scanners by forcing the machines to accept ballots in a non-approved manner, creating a conflict which - among other things - makes recount impossible because physical ballots in those precincts cannot be matched to computer results.

Half of Detroit votes may be ineligible for recount

The recount may not continue. If it does not continue, Trump will continue to hold the victory in Michigan. If the recount is allowed to continue, the remaining countable ballots are in counties where Trump won convincingly, indicating he would still hold the victory.


Nevada: A very late filing was made by Independent candidate Roque De La Fuente for a recount just two days ago. The recount is ongoing, even though the reason for the recount and the intended objective are both unclear.

Election recount underway in Nevada

The results so far indicate Clinton will continue to hold the victory in Nevada.


Pennsylvania: Jill Stein asked for a recount in Pennsylvania but was denied by the state. She filed in state court to contest the election, then withdrew the suit and instead filed in federal court to contest Pennsylvania on grounds that the election procedures violated the 1st and 14th Constitutional amendments.

Judge schedules hearing for Green Party's Pa. recount push

A federal judge has scheduled a hearing on the suit for Friday.
If the federal court dismisses the suit, Trump will continue to hold the victory in Pennsylvania. In the unlikely event that the judge rules in Stein’s favor, the most likely result would be that Pennsylvania’s electoral votes would be thrown out, and no one could claim them in the electoral count.


Florida: A very late recount suit was filed two days ago in Florida by three plaintiffs. A fatal flaw is that Trump’s lawyers are not required to respond until after the electoral college votes,

Florida voters sue for recount

so that Trump can win the case by simply ignoring it.

There is no evidence that Florida’s results will be changed.

What this means is essentially that there is no real path for Hillary Clinton to become President, short of multiple courts all deciding to award states won by Trump to Clinton, on no evidence Clinton actually had more votes than Trump in any of those states.

The Inexcusable Arrogance of The Pundits

Tuesday, Donald Trump defeated Hillary Cinton to become President-elect of the United States.  Trump celebrated the win late that night, Ms. Clinton conceded early Wednesday morning, but as the week ended the major pundits were largely unwilling to admit that they were wrong.   Excuses for blowing the call ranged from blaming inaccuracy on late voter decisions to complex explanations that – statistically – the pundits weren’t that far off.  

                     

For example, Nate Silver (who boasted for four years how well he did in predicting state and national results in 2012),  presented a weak defense of his statistical model.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-fivethirtyeight-gave-trump-a-better-chance-than-almost-anyone-else/

Silver also claimed that the results were within the standard margin-of-error, implying that he didn’t really get it wrong.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-a-difference-2-percentage-points-makes/

Silver gave Trump a 29% chance of winning early Tuesday night.  It’s important to keep in mind that Silver also limited Trump’s chances of winning to 12.6% back on October 18,

http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/

and that Silver’s forecast fluctuated as polls did; Silver locked his forecast into poll accuracy, even though he claimed to adjust for bias and outliers – he bluntly failed to consider the effect of groupthink.

Next up is the Huffington Post, which boldly predicted a 98% chance of a Clinton win, then blamed the loss on a “black swan event” (and Trump only a 2% chance),

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/pollster-forecast-donald-trump-wrong_us_5823e1e5e4b0e80b02ceca15

which amounts to claiming no one could have seen it coming.   This would be a lie.

The New York Times gave Clinton an 85% chance of winning the day of the election, down a bit from 93% on October 25.   This equated to giving Trump a 15% chance, up from 7% on the respective dates.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/upshot/presidential-polls-forecast.html?_r=0

Rather than candidly admit their bias and its results, the NYT actually blamed … the data itself.   Hypocrisy in print, folks.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/10/technology/the-data-said-clinton-would-win-why-you-shouldnt-have-believed-it.html

Larry Sabato, who has made a nice living from predicting elections over the years, actually claiming a 99% success rate in 2004 and 97% in 2012.

http://ijr.com/2016/08/667335-famed-election-predictor-with-97-100-track-record-reveals-his-trump-vs-hillary-2016-results/

Sabato called 347 Electoral Votes for Clinton this year, which cannot be sanely called anything but a faceplant.

Forbes, best-known for business reporting, also got into the election forecast game, and when they got it badly wrong they blamed ‘statistical error’.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2016/11/09/the-science-of-error-how-polling-botched-the-2016-election/#452ff2e27da8

And so it goes.    At this writing, exactly none of the people who made money and gained fame from predicting elections, had the guts to plainly admit they got this one completely wrong.

Why should we care?  Because a lot of media paid attention to these pundits all through the election, especially at the end.  They threw out predictions that were clearly way off the mark.  A lot of them have offered excuses, but let’s step back and see why the explanations are worthless.

Silver, for example, goes into great detail about different factors and how they influenced the election results. 

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-fivethirtyeight-gave-trump-a-better-chance-than-almost-anyone-else/

Some of that is interesting reading, but the sum effect is that it comes off as butt-covering, not least because any professional should have properly included such factors in their pre-election forecast.

So what should the forecast have looked like?  To answer that, we need to step back and ask what we expect from a forecast.  A forecast should have general similarity to what actually happens.  For example, in a weather forecast we often hear about, say, a ‘30% chance of rain’.  That’s actually a little vague, since it doesn’t tell us where that rain will happen or when, but if we hear 30%, we would expect some clouds and only in some places.  A completely clear, sunny day or a torrential downpour would mean the forecast was wrong, no matter what explanation the weather guy offered. So the election results can be seen this way:

In a straight look at the Popular Vote, Hillary Clinton claimed 47.8% to Trump’s 47.3%.   Of course, the actual election does not depend on the Popular Vote, but this result is consistent with a national picture, and the main point is that none of the major pundits gave Trump a 47.3% chance.  By this metric, the major polls grade out this way in their calls:

FOX News: Called 44% for Trump (-3.3%), called 48% for Clinton (+0.2%), aggregate (-3.5%)

LA Times:  Called 47% for Trump, (-0.3%), called 44% for Clinton (-3.8%), aggregate (-4.1%)

ABC/WaPo: Called 43% for Trump (-4.3%), called 47% for Clinton (-0.8%), aggregate (-5.1%)

IBD/TIPP:  Called 45% for Trump, (-2.3%), called 43% for Clinton (-4.8%), aggregate (-7.1%)

CBS News: Called 41% for Trump (-6.3%), called 45% for Clinton (-2.8%) aggregate (-9.1%)

Bloomberg: Called 41% for Trump (-6.3%), called 44% for Clinton (-3.8%), aggregate (-10.1%)

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/latest_polls/president/

Pretty much everybody was outside a statistical margin of error (Fox was almost inside that line). No one can claim to have nailed that call, but each poll got close-ish on at least one candidate.  Grade them C’s and D’s at a professional standard.

But Presidential elections depend on wining electoral votes from state contests.  In the end, Trump won 306 electoral votes to Clinton’s 232 electoral votes, or 56.9% of the EV to 43.1%.  No one at all came close to predicting Trump would nearly 57 percent of the EV.  Absolutely none of the pundits listed above were anywhere close to being right.   If these were students, we’d be comparing different levels of ‘F’ grades on an exam.

Again using Real Clear Politics’ published results,

http://www1.realclearpolitics.com/elections/live_results/2016_general/president/map.html

we can see the average results of each state by vote for each candidate; the average should give us a reasonable forecast for a candidate winning election.  Using the vote results by state, Trump claimed an average 48.9% of the vote to Clinton’s 45.2%.  Again, none of the pundits came close to this result.

Pundits will sometimes point to variables, margin of error, and other technicalities to excuse blowing the call. But never forget that the main reason for any forecast is to give you a reasonable expectation of what is coming.  It’s fair (but very rare) for a statistician to admit that he cannot forecast a clear outcome; pay attention here to the fact that both Gallup and Pew refused to publish election predictions this year.  But if a pundit publishes a forecast that projects a clear winner by a wide margin, as Silver, Huffington, the New York Times, Sabato and so on all did, they cannot pretend that they did anything but fail when results are so plainly different from their predictions.  Aggregation is a poor tool in election forecasting, and sooner or later the public should demand better work from people who are happy to take credit and publicity for their projections.

Man up, you wimps.  You blew it.         

The Battleground At Race’s End

Today is the last day of Early Voting in many states, meaning that the race after today comes down to Tuesday.   Both the Trump and Clinton campaigns are busy working to get out the vote, and the media is pretty much acting the way they have all campaign.  The Internet is full of all kinds of predictions, from psychics to professors and computers.  I’m kind of old school, in that I still find the polls useful in gauging the location of where each candidate stands.  So this post is a brief look at the last part of the last leg of this marathon.

Presidential elections in the United States depend on the Electoral Vote, not the Popular Vote.  So, while national polls can give a snapshot of the overall mood of voters, it can miss the condition and position of each campaign.   So I want to start by looking at the Electoral condition.  While some people are very critical of political opinion polls, and believe me there are good reasons why major players like Gallup and Pew flat-out abandoned polling for the candidates’ support in this year’s race, the polls do give us a good idea of the electoral condition.

Using the averages from Real Clear Politics state polling,

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/latest_polls/state/

Hillary Clinton has commanding leads in fourteen states plus D.C. for 195 electoral votes.  She needs 75 more votes to win.  Donald Trump, meanwhile, has commanding leads in nineteen states for 159 electoral votes.  He needs 111 more votes to win.  There are seventeen states where the leading candidate has a margin of seven points or less, as depicted in the chart below:   

		RCP Averages
STATE	EV	T	C	U		range
Iowa	6	44	44	7		0.0
New Hampshire	4	42	41.5	6.5		0.5
North Carolina	15	46.33	45	5.33		1.3
Colorado	9	40	41.5	8		1.5
Florida	29	46	47.5	2.5		1.5
Alaska	3	37	34	17		3.0
South Carolina	9	42	38	11		4.0
Maine	4	39.67	44	7.33		4.3
Arizona	11	48	43.5	3.5		4.5
Pennsylvania	20	42.5	47.17	6		4.7
Michigan	16	43.5	48.5	3		5.0
New Mexico	5	40	45	4		5.0
Ohio	18	46	41	6		5.0
Virginia	13	41	46.5	6		5.5
Nevada	6	49	43	3		6.0
Wisconsin	10	40	46	7		6.0
Oregon	7	34	41	9		7.0

The minimum number of states Hillary needs to close the deal on to win, is four, while Trump must win at least six of these states to win.  Those numbers are based on claiming the top EV states left in play; if current leads hold for these 17 states, Hillary Clinton would get at least 307 EV to Trump’s 225 (Iowa is dead even in poll average right now). 

Important to keep in mind, though, is the undecided vote.  Twelve of these seventeen states have undecided numbers greater than five percent, meaning this could easily change the final result.  Also important to keep in mind, is the margin of error.  If the sum of the MOE plus the undecided vote is clearly greater than the range between the two candidates, that state has to be considered in play.  Whether or not you agree with the polls, the fact that seventeen states remain in play to some degree immediately before the election should serve as clear evidence of how volatile the outcome remains.