Electoral College
gregladen | December 16, 2016Putin probably owns Trump. In the past, Trump has spent enough high profile time traveling in and out of Russia, that any smart intelligence agency would have long ago gotten the goods on such a sloppy self absorbed person. Assume there are movies. Young girls. Whatever. Putin probably owns Trump. The ex KGB officer probably owns a lot of people, a lot of foreign rich or influential individuals. That's how these things work.
Trump is a man that relies on the image of great personal wealth. But, if he has great personal wealth it is a mere couple of billion or so. Alternatively, he may…
gregladen | December 5, 2016Right now the number one problem we face in the US is the fact that a) the president of the United States can not be stopped or deterred from launching nuclear missiles if he choses to do so, by design; and b) Donald Trump will be inaugurated, if the electoral college so decides, in January.
If you are in a state that has electors slated to vote for Trump. send your city and state name to this email address:
votehrc@gmail.com
You will then receive instructions as to what to do next.
Pass it on.
gregladen | November 24, 2016Clinton beat Trump by a large margin, by electoral standards. A couple of percent is actually a lot these days. Yet so far it appears that Trump won the electoral vote, even though those votes are not yet cast and who knows what is actually going to happen.
But this year, strange as it it and stranger thought it may become, is not the strangest ever. That goes to 1876.
Wow.
gregladen | November 11, 2016Secretary Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. The way the current Electoral College works, Trump won the Electoral Vote.
However, from the point of view of Federal Law, he didn't win anything yet. The Electors who gather in each state, with each state's Secretary of State, to vote on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December are not bound by Federal rule to vote for Trump. They could cast their vote for Clinton.
Those organizing protests may want to consider having some of those protests at the Secretary of State's office, with the idea of having a very large protest on the…
gregladen | November 5, 2016Who will win the electoral vote on Tuesday, November 8th?
It is not what you say, but how you say it. For several days now, I've been told by some how totally wrong I am in my various analyses of the electoral map. Half the naysayers say "But but FiveThirtyEight says this, so you are wrong" and the other half say "No, no, Sam Wang at Princeton says that, so you are wrong!" But all along, we've all three been saying something very similar. The difference in how we say it is, Sam Wang says something like "I'll eat my shorts if Clinton doesn't win" and I say "I think Clinton will win, but…
gregladen | October 31, 2016A couple of weeks ago, it was impossible to find a pundit or poll maven who saw a Trump victory as a possibility. I made the audacious claim at the time that this was incorrect, and I've been taking heat from it since then. Much of this widespread misunderstanding is ironically caused by the good work of the folks at FiveThirtyEight and their imitators such as the New York Times, who have been publishing probability statements about the outcome.
If I know for near certain that Mary is going to beat Joe in an election, then I can say something like this:
Probability of winning
Mary: 97%
Joe…
gregladen | October 29, 2016No.
Many many people, well intended, smart people, keep talking about the rout, the landslide, that will happen. They may be basing this on the new trend started by FiveThirtyEight and picked up by the New York Times and others of deriving a probability statement about the race. But when you see something like "87%" for Clinton in such an estimate, that does not mean that Clinton will get 87% of the votes. It means that it is very likely that Clinton will get 270 or more electoral votes. There is, for example, a zero chance that Clinton will get a single electoral electoral from Montana,…
gregladen | October 16, 2016There are some interesting, and in some cases, potentially disturbing, things going on with the state by state numbers in the current election. Most of this has to do with third party candidates, and most of it with Gary Johnson.
First, I'll note, that despite fears among liberals and progressives that a lot of Bernie Bots would flock to third party candidates and eschew Clinton, there is no strong evidence that Clinton is losing much to any third party candidates. However, in some states, especially those with libertarian tendencies, Gary Johnson is doing fairly well. And, this had been…
gregladen | October 11, 2016Above is my latest electoral college projection.
This uses the technique previously described. However, instead of using RCP averages for all polled states and then using extreme (non-tossup) states to develop the regression model, this method uses only polling from states with one or more recent poll, and only with good polls. these poll numbers are then "predicted" by black/hispanic/white/Voted_Romney numbers, and that generates a model, based on just over 20 states, designed to predict all the states.
As expected, the r-squared value is much lower using this method, but this method does…
gregladen | October 10, 2016I've made my first stab at a prediction for the electoral college outcome for the US Presidential race, 2016. I use a roughly similar methodology as I did to accurately predict most of the Democratic primaries. However, since primaries are different from a general, the methodology had to be adapted.
For the primaries, I eventually used this methodology. I used results form prior primaries to predict voter behavior by ethnicity, in order to predict final behavior. That worked because primaries are done a few states at a time, and because all the people being modeled were Democrats.
It turns…