It is extremely easy to screw up a data analysis in my humble experience. That said: an experienced and proven statistician in a domain they are expert in using solid raw data as a starting point using tools they are familiar with, is typically worth way more than anyone who doesn't meet all those criteria.

Unfortunately you can be smart and wrong if any of the above doesn't hold. Worse, one can sound expert without much expertise.

I think that last may be the tragedy of our age.

Long winded way of saying I agree with you.

On the other hand, GIGO. But in this case you are probably right (see what I did there?)

What's very gratifying is that there is actually a right answer to this question. All we have to do is wait for 4 days, and we will see who was right all along, and who was just blowing smoke. I wish we could add the condition that the losers have to STFU for a set period of time, but I'll settle for the re-election of President Obama as a consolation prize,

I found this Deadspin article to be an interesting take:
http://updates.deadspin.com/post/3478090…

The parallels to his Sabermetrics baseball stats experience are illuminating.

Well, Jonathan, here's a dark & cynical theory for your consideration:

Say you want to maintain the capacity to manipulate the vote-tabulation process somewhere.

If the results from a manipulated district deviate from the forecast by more than the margin of error, it's unacceptably conspicuous.

So if you want to maintain a capacity to manipulate vote tabulation, it's important that predictive forecasting methodologies not gain too much credibility. Better that every district should be a "toss-up," where outcomes are influenced by vague, various and subjective influences that cannot be measured.

I'm with you....nivac.

ELECTORAL COLLEGE MODEL PREDICTS ROMNEY WILL WIN EVEN BIGGER THAN PREVIOUSLY THOUGHT IN 2012

Despite the fact that polls still show a dead-heat race (Obama is currently at 48.2 percent, with Romney capturing 47.3 percent of likely voters in the most recent Real Clear Politics average), an updated election model shows an even larger gap between the Electoral College votes that Romney and Obama are projected to win. According to Bickers and Berry, the Republican challenger is projected to take 330 of the 558 votes, while Obama is expected to capture only 208 of them.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/electora…

@6 - This method does not even consider polls - just economic data - which is dangerous when trying to predict a win for the most unlikable candidate in the history of likability polling.

(By this method, they predict Romney will win Minnesota! Do you think Romney will win Minnesota?)

Basically, they came up with a formula that retroactively fit the last eight elections. But why stop there? Why not see if your model works against all elections in the 20th century? There is no shortage of economic data to plug into their model.

But they stop at 1980. Odd. My guess is because their model falls apart with a bigger sample size.

Once again Bailo ignores the old add age: "don't bring a pocket calculator to a super computer fight"...

If Silver were an anomaly—just some unknown guy we never heard of whose numbers were way different than everyone else's—then I could see why people would complain. But (1) Silver has a great deal of credibility, and (2) pretty much all of the other major polling aggregators are coming up with roughly the same predictions. All of them are predicting a narrow Obama win at this point. Pollster.com, electoral-vote.com, Princeton, TPM, etc, are all predicting an Obama win. Even Real Clear Politics (a very right leaning site) is showing Obama with a significant lead in the electoral college numbers.

Nate Silver is probably the best known of the data aggregators, so he has apparently become the lightning rod for complaints. But he's not just sticking his finger in the wind and blindly guessing. He's using a lot of hard polling data, and everyone else who is seriously crunching the numbers is coming up with basically the same answer he is: Obama has a narrow but significant and persistent lead in the electoral college. And Rmoney's bump that he got after the first debate has stalled and reversed.

At this point, I'm more worried about R-74 than I am about Obama.

#7

...lead over Mitt Romney has been cut from eight points last month to three last weekend at 47-to-44 percent.

http://www.piercecountyherald.com/event/…

I check 538 daily, though I put more creedence on Real Clear Politics, because they were so spot-on last time, plus they won't give me a rosy picture.

So I like 538. But what I found annoying was the way my fellow liberals slavishly transformed him into a sort of oracle. "Nate said it so it is right." Come on, man. I know he's a liberal like us, but that doesn't mean that we have to shut off our skepticism.

On the other side, I do think that much of the criticism is coming from irate conservatives who root for the team and lash out at anybody who disagrees with them. Nate Silver is a young, well-educated (apparent) liberal who works for the New York Times. He represents hipster success to them. That's why they hate him.

@10 - Fair enough. But seriously, you're advocating a methodology that puts Minnesota in the Romney coumn, yet hands Obama Iowa?

@10 - So you're stating that you do believe Romney will carry Minnesota?

I'm a statistician myself. Building these kinds of models is my job, I do it all day.

That said, Joe Scarborough is doing HIS job, being a journalist on a 24 hour news program.

Scarborough's gotta keep his audience in order to keep his advertisers, so he'll say whatever it takes to keep them watching. And right now, he's got to avoid the facts to accomplish that.

If Jeff Renner predicts an 85% chance of rain and it rains 85% of the days he predicts 85% chance: that's good modeling. Let's say he predicts an 85% chance of rain November 6th. Is he wrong if it doesn't rain?

It's an imperfect analogy but it's closer to what's going on here than a lot of what I'm hearing.

@6: If you think I'm going to read anything from Glenn Beck's shitstain of a website, you are sadly mistaken.