This week, willard is likely to post his best numbers of the entire election season.
They had their convention. A candidate who is not leading the incumbent president after his own convention does not win. They forfeited their opportunity. First, rmoney did not offer a compelling and specific positive rationale for his candidacy. Outside of committed republicans, he attracted few new undecideds to his cause. Second, Paul Ryan was panned for his lies. Third, the biggest story coming out of their convention was a senile, elderly actor debating an empty chair . and losing.
more below the squiggle
If they had a better candidate and a better rationale (some good reason to believe that they know how to create jobs and have a plan that would help hurting Americans), then they would have a good chance at winning [except that the main reason the economy is not doing better is due to republicans (obstruction in the US Congress) and attacks on public sector employees and the public social safety net (by republican state legislatures and republican governors)]. Retroactively, of course, if the republicans had not placed us in Hell, we might be much closer to Heaven.
Now, by the very nature of their ideological zealotry, republicans have nothing to offer hurting Americans. First, they remove any barriers to the wealthy pillaging the country. Then, they support the status quo. They game the system , socialize the risk, privatize the reward, and destroy the economy.
Their normal policy position is that the government should do nothing to help hurting Americans. They think that unemployment insurance removes the incentive for people to work even though the money received is only given under certain circumstances and is much less than what the person was earning previously. And lest we forget, the republicans are the ones who caused the unemployment situation to become what it is.
Ditto with food stamps ....
First, there is no evidence to support the thesis that the social contract and social safety net hurts the economy. We know that food stamps, for example, are a strong multiplier and that every dollar spent on food stamps cycles through the economy multiple times, resulting in more consumption and demand.
More important than that, of course, is that it is simply heartless to allow people to go hungry, to allow people to not have access to the prescriptions that they need, to allow people to become homeless....
Their philosophy, in this regard, is not unlike Herbert Hoover. It is not unlike the situation on The Titanic with its class structure. Furthermore, the wealthy send their kids to better schools. Their kids get better jobs. They become wealthy. The poor need their kids to work right after high school or sooner. They do not have an equal opportunity to achieve financial success. Their kids do not get the same quality education. And the wealthy buy congresspeople and pay them to write legislation that helps them and hurts the poor.
Furthermore, they ignore the simple fact that their success would not be possible without the infrastructure and education .... that we collectively have made. And many of them were born with every conceivable advantage already. They benefit from the highway system, the police, the fire fighters, the public education system ....
Their Randian view is ignorant. They benefit from the common defense and these investments that we make as a people more than most Americans. They are better able to afford to contribute to these investments. It is only right that they should do so.
Now, they have laws written that enable them to avoid paying the share of taxes that they ought to pay. They fail to realize that if the bottom 90 percent of Americans barely subsist or live near poverty level, then the country, as a whole, economically, is finished. The wealthy alone do not purchase enough goods to create enough jobs for us to avoid the great depression which hurts everybody, even them (although to a lesser extent). The wealthy hide their money in Switzerland and the Bahamas and the Cayman Islands to avoid paying their fair share in taxes. Local businesses throughout the country are supported by the middle class and poor people who live in their community. If the middle class and poor people go down, the whole country, in GDP..., is going down.
And Romney and his company Bain Capital are the source of the problem; they are, emphatically, not the solution. They do not create a more efficient market. They create wealth for themselves. They do not create jobs. They destroy them.
This is today's Republican Party, generally speaking, and it is the philosophy of rmoney in particular. Therefore, when people are hurting, they do not have any solution that they can offer. People need jobs. Their philosophy does not lead to job creation and they cannot make a persuasive argument that it would. Their philosophy led to Hell and everybody knows it, job wise and in many other respects. People need to eat. They oppose food stamps. People need money to pay for rent or their mortgage. And They say, let those people go homeless. They have nothing practical to offer hurting Americans. Just a mess of a failed economic theory that pretty much everybody understands would only make things worse.
Now, let us look at their high water mark.
POTUS has a 74.5 percent chance of getting reelected.
The forecast graph shows President Obama at 51% and Willard at 47.8% and it looks to be widening.
POTUS chances of winning the following states on Nov 6 according to Nate follow
Colorado : 67%
Florida: 59%
Iowa: 68%
North Carolina: 39%
New Hampshire: 80%
Nevada: 79%
Ohio: 72%
Virginia: 70%
Wisconsin: 77%
HoundDog cautions us to be careful
but rather, a more subtle statement that "if the numbers for these current state polls are reflective of who will vote in the polls, and the election were held today, these numbers, (combined with an economic conditions) forecast, can be combined in various ways the if the election were held now, this is the result."
But, if economic conditions, particularly the stock market, and unemployment numbers were to tank, and if Romney's $100 million advertising budget advantage, move the polls, in ways that are impossible to predict, Silvers' model two weeks from now could be predicting a 55% chance that Romney will win, and there is no mathematically valid way of predicting the probabilities that these events will occur. Buried in footnotes, Nate Silver is honest about this, however, he is now allowing a substantial misunderstandings of what probabilities means. I'm going to write to him later, and publish a more mathematical based critique of this later, but in the meantime, I urge Kossacks to be cautious about how they quote these figures and what they mean.
When the system is fully known, the variables are independent, and the system structure does not change we we predict the probability of a certain hand of poker, with perfect accuracies, and even you chances, of contracting certain diseases, under certain circumstances. These are valid uses of the word probability.
I have not reviews Nate's model equations, but from what I've seen of what he publishes he uses "multiple regression mathematics" to build his economic model forecast, which modifies his adjusted "Nowcast." However, the mathematical preconditions formultiple regression statistics to have validity are that the variables are independent, and the relationships in the underlying system do not change, two things we know with near certainty are not true in this case.
HoundDog further elaborates
by his regression based economic influences Silver's model appears to have no mechanism to "predict" the probability that the polls will change, as we should expect them to just give the single factor or Romney's advertising budge advantage. Does Nate's model include this likely influence? I don't see any evidence that it does, and if it did, what valid empirical database could he use. I can imagine none exist at this point, since this particular circumstance has never been encountered.
But, there are bunches of marketing data that show a $100 million in advertising should have a big impact on a market. I dont' this this would be valid either, I'm illustrating how bogus it is to leave such large variables out, because we do not have the data, and then claim that this oversimplified "projected probability" means the same thing as our ability to predict an unshuffled poker hand, -- it does not. And, by the way, in this situation the hand is being reshuffled every day. This is not a quibble, if is a limitation of validity.
Which Nate Silver acknowledge, as well. He has written of the problems in sampling error, introduced by the 10% response rates in return calls, the impact of cell phones, problems with likely voter screen, demographic compositions of the various samples. etc.
I don't object to using such models as "useful" to improving" our understanding, but they are not real probabilities of the election outcomes. If they were, we'd all be betting large amounts of money of the forecasts of the stock market, which this far, has defied such prediction. But, this admittedly unpredictable outcome, is one of the main input variable Silver uses in his forecast.
Caution in interpretation is in order.