Nate Silver believes Clinton could've won if the FBI letter didn't come out

Nate Silver believes that Comey's letter hurt Clinton's chances to be President.

He tweeted

There's more evidence, too: Late-deciding voters broke strongly against Clinton in swing states, enough to cost her MI/WI/PA. pic.twitter.com/8r801ahDQO

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) December 11, 2016

Here's more

"I'll put it like this: Clinton would almost certainly be President-elect if the election had been held on Oct. 27 (day before Comey letter)," Silver tweeted.

Comey in October sent a letter to lawmakers about the discovery of new emails the FBI said were potentially relevant to the investigation into Clinton's use of a private email server while serving as secretary of State.

The emails were reportedly found during a separate FBI investigation into former Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.). Weiner is the estranged husband of one of Clinton's top aides, Huma Abedin.

Republicans and members of Donald Trump's campaign seized on the new information, attempting to cast Clinton as corrupt and praising the FBI for the development.

Then just days before the general election, Comey announced the FBI had not changed its July conclusion not to bring charges regarding Clinton's private server.

Since the election, Clinton campaign officials have put blame on Comey for the Democratic nominee's loss.

"There are lots of reasons why an election like this is not successful," Clinton told donors on a conference call one week after the election. "Our analysis is that Comey's letter raising doubts that were groundless, baseless, proven to be, stopped our momentum."

Nate Silver fact checks Kellyanne Conway in a Tweet

Nate Silver got Kellyanne Conway together yesterday. She claimed that Trump won a historic landslide over Hillary. But that's a lie.

Nate gave her the facts in a tweet

Actually way below average for a winner's total:
1984—525
1980—489
1988—426
1996—379
1992—370
2008—365
2012—332
*2016—306*
2004—286
2000—271 https://t.co/C9z8I9jPYZ

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 28, 2016

Nate Silver: Trump won't be the GOP .Nominee

Mostly everybody already know this, but to some who don't, Donald Trump will not be president or the nominee.

Nate Silver looked into the madness of Donald Trump's polling and found out the facts. Candidates like Gingrich, Pat Buchanan and Perry had similar polling at this time in the past... And look how that turned out.

Also, this polling isn't really reflective of the average voter. These are hype opinions (my term). Hype opinions are played up by the media and folks who are not consistent in their voting. I do believe by November, we will see a huge difference.

Nate also points out:

Much of the party’s influence consists of what you might call “soft power,” the ability to influence outcomes by persuasion rather than coercion. But the party also has some “hard power”: It literally makes the rules. It can rule against candidates it doesn’t like in the event of delegate-counting disputes. It can probably even change the rules midstream. There isn’t a lot of precedent to worry about violating, since it’s been 40 years since Republicans came close to a brokered convention. 

If Trump made it this far, the Republican Party would go to extraordinary lengths to avoid nominating him. In “The Party Decides” view, parties are basically looking for two things from their nominees: They want them to be reliable (meaning, they can be counted on to enact the Republican agenda once in office), and they want them to be electable (meaning, they can win in November). It’s hard to think of a candidate who does worse on those two measures than Trump. He’s exceptionally unpopular among independent voters. But he also has a checkered political past that includes once having supported abortion rights and universal health care. For the Republican Party, he’s the worst of all possible worlds.

So there, not need to worry... even though, you shouldn't be worried

FiveThirtyEight on the Pace of Same-Sex Marriage

Gay marriage is on pace to be legal in 73 states by next Tuesday. http://t.co/zJQNitOyAo
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) October 9, 2014

Looks confusing? Well, here's more:

Legal same-sex marriage has come to a majority of Americans, and over the past few years it’s come swiftly.

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a series of appeals cases on same-sex marriage, drastically altering the landscape of same-sex marriage in the U.S. Immediate legalization came to five of the 11 states affected by the decision (Indiana, Oklahoma, Utah, Virginia and Wisconsin), pushing the share of Americans living in states with same-sex marriage past the 50 percent mark (to 52 percent). The six other states affected by Monday’s decision — Colorado, Kansas, North Carolina, South Carolina, West Virginia and Wyoming — may also have same-sex marriage soon. If that happens, the percentage of the population living in states with marriage equality could be as high as 60 percent.

This has been an amazing week, maybe by the end of the year this madness will over? Maybe.

Nate Silver believes the GOP has 60% Chance of Winning the Senate this year - VIDEO

Nate Silver thinks the New Pope will Die Soon

This is what Nate said, judge for yourself.

As a matter of actuarial science, Francis is not likely to have an especially long tenure. The nine previous men who were known to be 75 or older at the time of their election to the papacy served for an average of only five years.

That may be too pessimistic an estimate in the case of Francis: it is based on a small sample size and does not account for modern improvements in health and medical science. Acknowledging that there are considerable lifestyle differences between an Argentinian pope and an average American citizen, the life expectancy for a 76-year-old American man is now about 10 additional years. Of course, Francis could follow Benedict XVI’s precedent by resigning the papacy before his death. It is probably safe to say that a tenure shorter than five years would be considered brief for Francis, while a regime of much more than 10 years might be unexpectedly long.

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Nate Silver talks about his Quirkly Gay life in OUT

The adorable Nate Silver is OUT Magazine's Person of the Year. In the interview, Nate let us in on who he is and how he views himself.

Here's a little bit from the interview:

If these pastimes—poker, baseball, debating Chinese–U.S. relations—seem atypical of the average twentysomething gay guy, perhaps it’s because gay nerds have a low profile in our culture. “To my friends, I’m kind of sexually gay but ethnically straight,” explains Silver, who came out to his parents after spending a year in London studying economics—“I don’t know how I got any work done”—and considers gay conformity as perfidious as straight conformity. He supports marriage equality, but worries that growing acceptance of gays will dent our capacity to question broader injustice. 

“For me, I think the most important distinguishing characteristic is that I’m independent-minded,” he says. “I’m sure that being gay encouraged the independent-mindedness, but that same independent-mindedness makes me a little bit skeptical of parts of gay culture, I suppose.”

The rest is a good read. Please check it out.

Interesting Quote: 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."

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Nate Silver's gives President Obama a Huge Lead into Election Day

I hope, I hope he's right.

Nate also talks about Hurricane Sandy's role:

If President Obama wins re-election on Tuesday, the historical memory of the race might turn on the role played by Hurricane Sandy.
Already, some analysts are describing the storm as an “October surprise” that allowed Mr. Obama to regain his footing after stumbling badly in the first presidential debate and struggling to get back on course. Some Republicans seem prepared to blame a potential defeat for Mitt Romney on the storm, and the embrace of Mr. Obama by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and other public officials.
The theory has some appeal. The last three days of polling have brought what is almost certainly Mr. Obama’s strongest run of polling since the first presidential debate in Denver. Mr. Obama led in the vast majority of battleground-state polls over the weekend.

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Interesting Quote: Dean Chambers

Nate Silver is a man of very small stature, a thin and effeminate man with a soft-sounding voice that sounds almost exactly like the “Mr. New Castrati” voice used by Rush Limbaugh on his program. In fact, Silver could easily be the poster child for the New Castrati in both image and sound. Nate Silver, like most liberal and leftist celebrities and favorites, might be of average intelligence but is surely not the genius he's made out to be. His political analyses are average at best and his projections, at least this year, are extremely biased in favor of the Democrats.

Dean Chambers created Unskewed Polls, which claimed that any poll supporting Obama was fake.

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Nate Silver predicts 2012 election

He knows his stuff and that's why I trust him

Polls According to Nate Silver

This is from last night...

Polls According to Nate Silver

When it comes to polls, I only trust Nate Silver. His styling and smarts are usually on point and correct.

Today he gives us this figure

Nate says the Pew Poll gave Romney a rise but now that's in question:

There are two smarter questions to ask about the Pew poll. First, is it really likely that Mr. Romney leads the race by 4 points right now? The consensus of the evidence, particularly the national tracking polls, would suggest otherwise. Instead, the forecast model’s conclusion is that the whole of the data is still consistent with a very narrow lead for Mr. Obama, albeit one that is considerably diminished since Denver.

It might be granted that the situation is more ambiguous than usual right now. But our forecast model looks at literally all of the polls; it estimates Mr. Romney’s post-debate bounce as being 2.5 percentage points, not quite enough to erase Mr. Obama’s pre-debate advantage.

The other valid line of inquiry concerns the timing of the poll. The Pew poll was conducted from Thursday through Sunday, although more of the interviews were conducted in the earlier part of that period. There’s nothing in the poll that really refutes the story that Mr. Romney initially received a very large bounce after the debate (perhaps somewhere on the order of 4 or 5 points, if not quite as large as Pew shows it), which has since faded some between the news cycle turning over and the favorable jobs report on Friday.

Very interesting

Nate Silver brings a Harsh Reality to Romney

Nate Silver drops some knowledge about the recent polls and Romney's bounce. As you can see there were very little change.

Nate says that the debate helped Romney, but not in a way he probably hoped:

However, the fact that Mr. Romney did not make further gains in the polls on Sunday can be read as mildly disappointing for him. The way tracking polls work is to replace the oldest day of interviews with fresh interviews conducted the previous day. In the Sunday release of the polls, this meant that interviews from Saturday were replacing a day of interviewing from before the debate. The fact that the Saturday interviews that entered the polls were roughly as strong for Mr. Obama as the predebate day of interviews that they displaced is an encouraging sign for Mr. Obama — at least as compared with most of the polling news that he has received since the debate.

This is getting tight, folks.

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Would California Voters Overturn Prop 8 in 2012? Nate Silver says 'Yes'

Whiz Kid Nate Silver presented his mega-chart of the Gay Marriage measure in the country. In his analysis, Nate believes if the Gay Marriage Ban was put back on the ballot, Cali's peeps would overturn it.

Nevertheless, even the relatively cautious Linear Model predicts that 54 percent of Californians would vote against a measure like Proposition 8 if one were on the ballot next year, while 55 percent of Oregonians would vote against a ban on same-sex marriage like the one the state’s voters approved in 2004. Neither prediction seems too far out of line: Oregon’s marriage ban was rejected by 43 percent of voters seven years ago, and California’s by 48 percent two years ago, and public opinion has shifted meaningfully in favor of same-sex marriage since then.

Interesting, there has been a lot talk about this. I wonder if this will steer the LGBT community back to the ballot in 2012. I'm so not sure, but this will make great conversation here in Cali-Cal.

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Gay Marriage now has the Majority of the Support

Nate Silver shows us the support for gay marriage has moved up. We now have the majority for marriage equality.

This is the fourth credible poll in the past eight months to show an outright majority of Americans in favor of gay marriage. That represents quite a lot of progress for supporters of same-sex marriage. Prior to last year, there had been just one survey — a Washington Post poll conducted in April 2009 — to show support for gay marriage as the plurality position, and none had shown it with a majority.

And...

The trendline — derived through regression smoothing — estimates that about 50 percent of Americans now support gay marriage and that 46 percent are opposed, with a small percentage of voters undecided. By contrast, at this time two years ago, the numbers were 42 percent in favor and 53 percent opposed, according to the same technique.



The change — about a 4 percentage-point shift in favor of gay marriage in each of the last two years — is about double the longer-term rate of progress for supporters of gay marriage, which has been between 1 and 2 percentage points per year.

There is a margin of error associated with the calculation of the trendline, so it is too soon to say with confidence that support for gay marriage has become the plurality position (let alone the majority one). Other polls — like a Pew survey released in March — continue to show opinion split about evenly.
However, opponents of gay marriage almost certainly no longer constitute a majority; just one of the last nine polls has shown opposition to gay marriage above 50 percent.

I wonder how NOM feels about this news.

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Nate Silver doesn't think the GOP will Takeover

You hear this everyday. Repubs are going to takeover!

The media and several LGBT bloggers pour this mess out like cold Kool-Aid at a Southern Georgia summer camp.

Well, it turns out that the Repubs may not win a lot after all. Super-whiz, Nate Silver might have the truth in his hands:

This consensus, however, is somewhat misleading — because it does not adequately capture the fact that there is considerable uncertainty on either side of that 50 seat estimate, more so than in past elections. This is for two principal reasons.
First, as we mentioned, about twice as many seats are in play as in other recent elections. Thus, fairly subtle shifts in the political environment between now and Nov. 2 could have relatively profound implications for the seat count.

Second, there is considerable disagreement among pollsters on the magnitude of the enthusiasm gap. If Gallup’s likely voter model, which implies extremely lopsided turnout in favor Republicans, were to be correct, G.O.P. gains would be well in excess of 50 seats. Other turnout models, however, imply more like a 4- or 5-point enthusiasm gap, which would be more consistent with patterns in a typical midterm election. With an enthusiasm gap of that magnitude, Democrats would probably lose the House only narrowly and would have decent chances of holding onto it.

It is also important to remember that there are some factors, like the fact that many pollsters do not include cellphones in their sample, that could potentially result in the polls underestimating the position of Democrats. Our model assumes there is a chance that the overall “consensus” of polling could be off, which could affect the results in a great number of individual districts. This is one reason that it thinks such disparate outcomes as a 70-seat Republican gain or a mere 30-seat gain are not exceptionally unlikely. But such systematic bias in the polling could run in either direction.
Some trading markets imply that Republican chances of a House takeover are already in the neighborhood of 85 percent; in my view, this is too confident a position.

Usually, he's on point. I don't think the Repubs will gain many seats. I just can't see this happening. However, we will find out in two weeks, right?


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According to FiveThirtyEight: Gay Rights are not a High Priority in both Polticial Groups

Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight took a gander at the campaign Web sites of Republican and Democratic candidates. He wanted to see what are the hot topics of the parties:

With the help of FiveThirtyEight’s news assistant, Micah Cohen, I studied the campaign Web sites of Republican and Democratic candidates for the House in the 33 Congressional districts currently labeled toss-ups by The New York Times political desk. Although a few candidates did not highlight particular issues on their official Web pages, and a few others remain engaged in primaries where there is no clear favorite, we were able to examine the sites for 29 Republicans and 29 Democrats who are likely to be on the ballot in November. We then examined the subjects these candidates highlighted on the “issues” sections of their sites, dividing them into roughly 30 categories.

Here's a chart of what's the top priorities of both groups:

As you can see, we are not in the top tier, but to be honest, I kind of knew that. With everything that's happening, I knew we would be somewhere around that range.

Nate said:

And both Republicans and Democrats avoided the issue of gay rights, where public opinion is shifting. Even if gay marriage were too controversial to be a part of the Democratic agenda in most swing districts, the Democrats might theoretically gain ground by highlighting their support for allowing gay men and lesbians to serve openly in the military, where large majorities of the public back their position. But perhaps hamstrung by Mr. Obama, who has taken a series of half-steps on the issue, few of these Democrats have chosen to do so.

What do you think about it?


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Prop 8 Breakdown

Finally we have a deeper look at the numbers by a writer from FiveThirtyEight blog, Nate Silver.

He says that the Obama turnout did not send Prop 8 to soaring heights. However more experienced or older voters came out to support Prop 8.

Silver also said Latinos aged 18-29 (not strictly the same as 'new' voters, but the closest available proxy) voted against Prop 8 by a 59-41 margin. These figures are not available for young black voters, but it would surprise me if their votes weren't fairly close to the 50-50 mark.

At the end of the day, Prop 8's passage was more a generational matter than a racial one. If nobody over the age of 65 had voted, Prop 8 would have failed by a point or two. It appears that the generational splits may be larger within minority communities than among whites, although the data on this is sketchy.

This is very interesting and probably something to focus on the next time around.