USA Mid-term Elections--Off to the Races

A bit of a random question, but how many different positions do you vote for in these elections? I was over there last week, and saw a few houses with about 8 different election mini-poster things in their garden, and I saw this picture on the bbc site, and thought that does not look like a voting paper, it looks more like a newspaper!


I voted for a senator and a house representative at the federal level. At the state level, we had a governor ticket, secretary of state (state-level elections guy), attorney general, treasurer, auditor, state senator, state representative, and city councilor, plus four ballot measures. I might be forgetting one at the state level.

So that's... 2 federal positions, 8-9 state/locals, 4 ballot measures.

I'm going to make a non-RD election results thread for all the snarkiness CFC can muster.

EDIT: It's here.
 
Voted Burke in Wisconsin. Went democrat on all candidates and issues except the minimum wage issue. If they wanted to raise it to 8.50 instead of 10.15, I probably would have voted in favor of it 10.15 is swinging for the fences too much at this time.

I feel like Walker is going to take Wisconsin by a slim margin though, sigh..
 
I feel like Walker is going to take Wisconsin by a slim margin though, sigh..

Do you think Wisconsin is going to break out into a hockey fight? That is the sense I had a few years ago.
 
The poll average is dominated by a single Walker +7, the rest are clustered around a tie. If that's an outlier, it could go either way.
 
The poll average is dominated by a single Walker +7, the rest are clustered around a tie. If that's an outlier, it could go either way.

Cluster around a 1% lead for Walker is closer. Like a lot of the state races, this will be turnout driven. On the subject of turnout, it seems to be larger than expected, perhaps because of close state races. Nothing to back that up except rumor. However, it will be interestig to see where the turnout is heaviest.

The big shocker of the polls open period has been the Senate race in Virginia. Two weeks ago this was a double digit lean, with 20% as recently as Sept 19. I doubt it was mentioned at all in this thread. Last week one poll came in at 7%. That looked like an outlier, but the early reports are a close race. Polling was thin, partly because the race generated no excitement.

J
 
Given the margins of error on the polls and relatively small set, that's a statistical tie.
 
Yeah, I understand that but based on past results even a 1% lead in polls has given a 70% win rate in the past so I'd give the edge to Walker still. I hope Burke wins though.
 
Given the margins of error on the polls and relatively small set, that's a statistical tie.

Agreed, though though other factors support the lean. Over the last month, polling is 5-1-1, for example. 538 says this

Burke will need the polls to be wrong to win. Marquette’s most recent survey found that a majority of voters thought the state was headed in the right direction and that Walker was up 7 percentage points among likely voters. That may be overstating Walker’s lead, though it’s doubtful the poll is off by enough for Burke to win. Walker is a 75 percent favorite.​

J
 
So the governor of the state of Connecticut was turned away from the polling place this morning.....

Spoiler :
http://www.ctnewsjunkie.com/archives/entry/malloy_campaign_headed_to_court_to_keep_hartford_polls_open/



In other news, Obama called into a local Hartford radio show unscheduled this afternoon.
 
Agreed, though though other factors support the lean. Over the last month, polling is 5-1-1, for example. 538 says this

Burke will need the polls to be wrong to win. Marquette’s most recent survey found that a majority of voters thought the state was headed in the right direction and that Walker was up 7 percentage points among likely voters. That may be overstating Walker’s lead, though it’s doubtful the poll is off by enough for Burke to win. Walker is a 75 percent favorite.​

J

You just cited the possible outlier. :cringe:

Standard statistical practice is to either take the median or ignore the best poll for both candidates on the assumption the best ones are outliers, both of which reduce the impact of said outliers on your analysis.
 
The election is over, so this will be about polling. The first and obvious question: why were so many people blindsided? The answer is both simple and complex. Short version polling was not generally reliable.

Nate Silver has the following:



Not only did the polls overstate the Democrat's chances, they did so by more than the reported error. Sam Wang uses only polls. He warned that there are many types of error that go unreported and that it was possible for the error to favor a Republican sweep. Given his dependence on polls, it is not surprising that he was the furthest off. Best of the commenters, by far, was the Washington Post. It was a very low standard.

J
 
You just cited the possible outlier. :cringe:

Standard statistical practice is to either take the median or ignore the best poll for both candidates on the assumption the best ones are outliers, both of which reduce the impact of said outliers on your analysis.
I intended to. The point of the quote was that you cannot treat it as a outlier. In practice you should be very cautious about apparent outliers, because they sometimes are valid. You can disrupt an entire data set that way.

J
 
Yea the polls were quite off. Hagan for instance was supposed to have been leading, even leading up to the election. Of course not the result that manifested itself
 
Is there anyone here from VA who can explain why it was so close there? Gillespie wasn't supposed to have any chance, yet he came within 15k of winning.
 
Not only did the polls overstate the Democrat's chances, they did so by more than the reported error. Sam Wang uses only polls. He warned that there are many types of error that go unreported and that it was possible for the error to favor a Republican sweep. Given his dependence on polls, it is not surprising that he was the furthest off. Best of the commenters, by far, was the Washington Post. It was a very low standard.

This is a bit of what I was getting at in the other thread. Was the correct call 100% GOP, and thus the closer to 100% GOP your call was the better it was? Or, because the polls ended up being so wrong, was Sam Wang's call of 60% +/- 15% actually the best because it worked uncertainty into the prediction?

I intended to. The point of the quote was that you cannot treat it as a outlier. In practice you should be very cautious about apparent outliers, because they sometimes are valid. You can disrupt an entire data set that way.

There are two things here that I think are getting confused. First, there is a firm, purely mathematical definition of an outlier that is based on the standard deviation of a data series compared to the potential outlying point. I'll admit I didn't do the calculation because I don't have my high school stats book with me, but since the data range in this race was around a tie with a fairly narrow deviation, it looked like it would fit. It's definitely harder to identify them, though, because the variance in the polls this time around was really high and there were fewer than in presidential election years.

Second, what we would need to dive into to determine which poll was more accurate, regardless of outlier status, would be the cross-tabs. Did the Walker +7 poll get the demographic percentages right for their sample? Or at least closer than the rest of the polls clustered around a tie? Or did it have the same voter breakdown but the people who answered, by a random fluke, happen to line up their preferences with election day? I haven't done that either because I have enough work to do and I figure one of the stat gurus will do it in the coming weeks.

Yea the polls were quite off. Hagan for instance was supposed to have been leading, even leading up to the election. Of course not the result that manifested itself

Hagan's lead was always pretty narrow, though, usually 1-2 points for her over Tillis. From other races, we know that at least a couple 1-2 point leads go down on election day, it just so happened it was Hagan this time around. In 2010, the same thing happened in the Angle-Reid race, Reid was supposedly losing by a few points but pulled out a win on election night. There are dozens of examples.

Democrats have benefited from that before, this time around it clobbered them. Along with the midterm electorate, an unfavorable map, an unfocused and quite likely mismanaged set of campaigns, gaffes, etc. it was one of those perfect storm metaphors.

Is there anyone here from VA who can explain why it was so close there? Gillespie wasn't supposed to have any chance, yet he came within 15k of winning.

If you compare Warner's gubernatorial and first senate race with this map, you will see the 2014 map looks a lot more like the 2008 and 2012 presidential election maps. His older maps indicate he had more support in rural counties which he lost this time around.

I don't know if there is a fully comprehensive, exit-poll-backed theory as to why this happened. But it looks like a combination of low turnout, a heavily-nationalized race, and the local polarization where people were voting down party lines. If anything this might end up being an ironic bright spot for the Democrats: when you look at the last gubernatorial race and this one, both went a hair for them under mostly unfavorable circumstances.
 
The funny thing to me is seeing the media reaction to the drubbing the Democrats just took.

They (the media) are taking chicken (excrement) and trying to dice & slice it into chicken salad.
 
Top Bottom