(no subject)

[proximoception]

So you're telling me Obama didn't need Florida, Ohio, or Virginia (where he finished up +1, +3, +4), since he was up more than five percentage points in each of the plethora of blue states that got him to 270 without any of those three. So short of a revelation he'd tried same-sex cannibalism in college he was always a shoe-in and I lost a lot of precious sleep over nothing. Fucking pollsters.

Comments

[andalus.livejournal.com]

I was worried that I wasn't worried enough. Because I wasn't worried. But that lack of worry, made me worry. For a while even the campaigns weren't trying very hard. Like it was all an elaborate long con to steal advertising money.

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

Rove seems to have been involved in the long con: he spent a whole lot less then he took in.

I was worried that I wasn't worried enough.

There was a story that Gallup best predicted who would win by asking people who they thought would win, which was Obama. I had the opposite theory: that everyone's a pessimist, and if more people thought Obama was going to win, that's because they thought their preferred candidate, Romney, was going to lose. But I was wrong, this time anyhow, assuming Gallup polled accurately, which is an iffy assumption. (But if this was inaccurate, their two inaccuracies would presumably cancel out.)

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

Sam Wang and Nate Silver were always near certain Obama would win. I was afraid that their analyses were wrong. But they weren't.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

That's the thing - I assumed those guys were right, so felt fine in the last couple weeks of it. My worry period was back when they were saying he had a 60, 70, 80 percent chance of winning. But they were basing everything on polls that were understating Obama support by over 3 percent on average. I have nothing against Silver and Wang; you can only cook from available ingredients.

If they'd had less race-blind, cellphone-addled, 2010-spooked polls to work with Obama would have been listed at 95 all the way through, and not 99.9 only out of polite deference to the vagaries of senile fate. Maybe Democratic paranoia helped us turn out (not that that gave us the House back, again due to Clusterfuck 2010), but who knows. I just know I didn't like that perennial near-tie in the popular vote and half the swing states.