Rasmussen:Trump takes a decisive lead in the polls

by Guest Thu Oct 20, 2016 9:11 am

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/789095747635572736

by MaxEntropy_Man Thu Oct 20, 2016 9:31 am

http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/?ex_cid=rrpromo

by Guest Thu Oct 20, 2016 9:40 am

why is there so much discrepancy in the polls?

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/elections/election_2016/white_house_watch_oct20

by MaxEntropy_Man Thu Oct 20, 2016 9:44 am

Rashmun wrote:why is there so much discrepancy in the polls?

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/elections/election_2016/white_house_watch_oct20

Fivethiryeight doesn't do much with national polls. It takes state by state polls, aggregates them after assigning weights to them based on what it considers to be the quality of the poll* (higher quality polls receive greater weightage) and does win-lose simulations. National polls are not particularly relevant to the US system of electing a president because the US uses a system called the Electoral College where state electors elect the president. They, i.e. the electors, go with the will of the people. So high quality state polls are far more important than national polls.

* Take CO a state that recently went from the Republican column to lean Democrat.
http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/colorado/

Look at the grade fivethirtyeight assigns to each of the multiple polls. A higher grade means that poll receives greater importance and is more influential in the win-lose simulation.

Nate Silver explained it a while ago. I think the weight also depends upon the recentness of the poll.

by MaxEntropy_Man Thu Oct 20, 2016 9:55 am

Fivethirtyeight's pollster ratings:

http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/pollster-ratings/

by Guest Thu Oct 20, 2016 9:58 am

either Rasmussen or Fivethirtyeight are going to be discredited after these elections. I will not be taking one of these two pollsters seriously after the election results are known.

by MaxEntropy_Man Thu Oct 20, 2016 10:09 am

Rashmun wrote:either Rasmussen or Fivethirtyeight are going to be discredited after these elections. I will not be taking one of these two pollsters seriously after the election results are known.

Fivethirtyeight is not a pollster. They are forecasters who use all available data from pollsters they consider reliable (they avoid pollsters to whom they have assigned an F rating). Rasmussen has a grade of C+ at Fivethirtyeight. Their data are included in Fivethirtyeight's simulations.

by MaxEntropy_Man Thu Oct 20, 2016 10:14 am

More on pollster ratings:
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-fivethirtyeight-calculates-pollster-ratings/

by Guest Thu Oct 20, 2016 10:18 am

MaxEntropy_Man wrote:
Rashmun wrote:either Rasmussen or Fivethirtyeight are going to be discredited after these elections. I will not be taking one of these two pollsters seriously after the election results are known.

Fivethirtyeight is not a pollster. They are forecasters who use all available data from pollsters they consider reliable (they avoid pollsters to whom they have assigned an F rating). Rasmussen has a grade of C+ at Fivethirtyeight. Their data are included in Fivethirtyeight's simulations.

Fivethirtyeight is operated by Nate Silver. Something about Nate:

In September 2015, writer and statistician Nate Silver urged people to "calm down" about the possibility of Donald Trump winning the Republican presidential nomination.

Two months later, he wrote that the media should "stop freaking out about Donald Trump's polls" and that Trump's odds were "higher than 0 but (considerably) less than 20 percent."

Six months after that, after Ted Cruz had dropped out of the race but before John Kasich had done so, Silver wrote: "Donald Trump is going to win the Republican nomination."

"Other than being early skeptics of Jeb Bush, we basically got the Republican race wrong," Silver wrote.

It's easy to cringe at how, in August, for instance, Silver outlined the "six stages of doom" that he foresaw for Trump in the coming months — and how, in December, he updated the post to note that "the most difficult hurdles between Donald Trump and the Republican presidential nomination are still to come."

http://www.businessinsider.com/nate-silver-trump-wrong-2016-5

by MaxEntropy_Man Thu Oct 20, 2016 10:21 am

I like and trust people who admit they were wrong when they were wrong. He has been more right than wrong. You can criticize him, but I know of no other forecaster who is as open with his data and his forecasting methods.

Donald Trump as much as I intensely dislike him is an unusual candidate. I will not write him off until the morning of Nov 9th. This can still go south for Hillary. Who knows what else WikiLeaks has in store.

Having said all that, having 16 candidates in the primaries probably made for difficult forecasting. With two (or four if you add the third party candidates) there is much more clarity.

by truthbetold Thu Oct 20, 2016 6:24 pm

Nate and pundits may have failed to predict Trump's victory in republican primaries but most polls put him among the top few right from the start. The wrong lesson that Trump drew was that US general voter is similar to republican voter. Now he and his are learning how limited their appeal is beyond republican base.

Rasmussen has similar incorrect predictions in 2012. They were known to be right leaning. Having said all that, I want to add Rasmussen is a very well respected polling organization.

by Guest Fri Oct 21, 2016 2:25 pm

MaxEntropy_Man wrote:I like and trust people who admit they were wrong when they were wrong. He has been more right than wrong. You can criticize him, but I know of no other forecaster who is as open with his data and his forecasting methods.

Donald Trump as much as I intensely dislike him is an unusual candidate. I will not write him off until the morning of Nov 9th. This can still go south for Hillary. Who knows what else WikiLeaks has in store.

Having said all that, having 16 candidates in the primaries probably made for difficult forecasting. With two (or four if you add the third party candidates) there is much more clarity.

Just hours after Hillary Clinton dodged a question at the final presidential debate about charges of "pay to play" at the Clinton Foundation, a new batch of WikiLeaks emails surfaced with stunning charges that the candidate herself was at the center of negotiating a $12 million commitment from King Mohammed VI of Morocco.

One of the more remarkable parts of the charge is that the allegation came from Clinton's loyal aide, Huma Abedin, who described the connection in a January 2015 email exchange with two top advisers to the candidate, John Podesta and Robby Mook.

Abedin wrote that "this was HRC's idea" for her to speak at a meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative in Morocco in May 2015 as an explicit condition for the $12 million commitment from the king.

"She created this mess and she knows it," Abedin wrote to Podesta and Mook.

The "mess" refers in part to the fact that the three Clinton advisers were discussing the possibility of the former secretary of state pulling out of speaking at the May 2015 event because it was happening one month after the official launch of her presidential campaign and could raise more questions about her role at the foundation.

In April 2015, Politico reported the Clinton Foundation was accepting a "major donation" of at least $1 million from a Moroccan government-owned company, OCP, a phosphate exporter. Politico added that an official at the foundation said it was "unlikely" Hillary would attend the May 2015 event, just weeks after the April launch of her campaign.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/10/20/abedin-implicated-clinton-in-foundation-trade-off-with-morocco-amid-12-million-commitment.html

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Who is responsible for the email hacks?

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