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August 23, 2012 07:15 AM UTC

Don't Shoot The Messenger: CU Study Predicts Romney Win

  • 37 Comments
  • by: nancycronk

( – promoted by Colorado Pols)

A new University of Colorado study produced a model that would have correctly predicted every Presidential election since 1980, and it predicts that Willard “Mitt” Romney will be the 45th President of the United States. The study, done by Political Science Professors Michael Berry from CU Denver and Ken Bickers from CU Boulder, uses different indicators than most other models. Instead of looking at one measurement of economic health for each state, it looks at two — per capita income, as well as that state’s unemployment number. According to the model, every battleground state will go to Romney, including Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota, New Hampshire and Colorado, making the grand total Romney 320 to Obama 218.

The model also correctly predicted what happened in 2000, when Al Gore won the popular vote, and George W. Bush won the electoral college.

It is unclear from their press release whether the model included the many recent Republican “War On Women” gaffes, or considers the huge influx of money into the GOP campaigns post-Citizens United. It also does not state if it takes into account Koch brothers’ PACS buying up most of the air time on television.

Thoughts?

My own anecdotal evidence from knocking on doors tells me there seems to be a sizable number of independents and unaffiliateds who seem less enthusiastic about the President than they were four years ago. They claim to be “disappointed” but when asked about specific reasons why, have very little to say (it has crossed my mind more than once that Obama’s PR team may have been more policy wonks than great marketers these past four years).

There also seems to be greater complacency among political activists who supported Obama four years ago. With the number of Republican gaffes and Tea Party members of Congress horror stories, are many Obama supporters so sure of a win for the Dems they have yet to put in any real effort to make it happen?

Comments

37 thoughts on “Don’t Shoot The Messenger: CU Study Predicts Romney Win

  1. Say what? A model that predicted the Supreme Court decision to install the village idiot as president? Anyone who comes up with that and insists it is real has to be partying nude in the Sea of Galilee.

  2. It is called Colorado Pols.  There was a vigorous discussion of this announcement from CU, yesterday.

    And a pollster – sxp151- analysized the so-called study.  You might find it interesting

    OK, they just posted a new link to the paper

    http://polisci.colorado.edu/im

    I don’t know the standards of the field, so I can’t compare how this model holds up against any other model, but essentially what they did is to take eight (8) data points and a statistical analysis of a bunch of variables. The model was only recently devised, so as I suspected it has never successfully predicted an election outcome (only been fit to retroactively predict what happened).

    From the official CU press release:

    “For the last eight presidential elections, this model has correctly predicted the winner,” said Berry. “The economy has seen some improvement since President Obama took office. What remains to be seen is whether voters will consider the economy in relative or absolute terms. If it’s the former, the president may receive credit for the economy’s trajectory and win a second term. In the latter case, Romney should pick up a number of states Obama won in 2008.”

    Their model correctly predicted all elections since 1980, including two years when independent candidates ran strongly, 1980 and 1992. It also correctly predicted the outcome in 2000, when Al Gore received the most popular vote but George W. Bush won the election.

    This is absolutely misleading, and at first I thought perhaps some uninformed publicity writer was responsible for it. But no, it’s one of the authors of the study implying that his model has been successfully used for 32 years to predict Presidential outcomes. Yes, that’s how you get publicity for your paper, but it obviously leads to confusion among people who are not sure how linear regressions work.

    It’s like if I suddenly decided tonight to count Libertad’s posts per day for the past eight days, then confidently predicted he will post 14.27 times on Thursday based on a statistical analysis of the temperature outside, Sean Hannity ratings, and word count of the day’s Wall Street Journal editorials. And then I claimed that my model successfully predicted the last eight days already, so we’re all in trouble. Well no it didn’t.

    In fairness, they do use election data from all 50 states, so it’s not as bad as using only eight data points, and they do note at the end that the model has never been successfully tested, but I’m pretty confident that using a different set of variables with the same analysis could produce a different result. In the end their success rate with state-by-state predictions is about 90%, measuring only which candidate wins or loses, not by how much. Neglecting everything except swing states reduces that success rate a lot. Yet somehow at the end of the paper they make predictions to four digits of each state’s vote share. FOUR DIGITS (e.g., Obama is projected to get 48.19% of the vote in Colorado).

    In short I would trust an election model that’s already made a single successful prediction over this.

    “Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan” = “My ultimate Ayn Rand porn”

    by: sxp151 @ Wed Aug 22, 2012 at 16:57:55 PM MDT

    1. But I heard the posters there are a bunch of egotistical bastards that will be mean to people and may even eat their young.

      What if she goes to this “blog”  and they are mean to her?

      1. I understand that those posters are among the most courteous in Internet land, interested only in the truth and gladly welcome others of whatever political persuasion.

        I have heard that they all pledge to “Disagree with an opinion, but defend to the death the right to express it.”

        Although, I, myself, am not party to their secret code, handshake or decoder ring, so I can only report what I have heard.

        Perhaps you have been listening to NPR.

      2. Like the fat mouse says, “what we always do” . . . write a long-winged keening anecdotal blog a day or two post-relevance.  That’ll teach them bastards . . .

         

    2. 3/4 of the way through the daily open discussion. Silly me for not reading Pols every ten minutes throughout my day! If only I could get an app on my smart phone to ring everytime someone comments on the website!

      So, if I missed it in the open thread, why was my diary promoted?

      1. This has happened before; lots of things come up in the Open Thread that are later written up as diaries and sometimes even promoted. I was tempted to write a diary elaborating my comments, but I figured it would be redundant after the discussion in the Open Thread. So I was also surprised to see Pols promote this. But it’s not a bad thing.

        1. Curious what you think the ramifications are for this particular study, whether it is a credible one or not, in your eyes. My thought is that it might be a kick in the pants to liberals who are sitting back just sending their usual small check, expecting OFA to bring home a win. Thoughts?

          1. then it could motivate them to work for the Obama campaign. But it’s so far from reasonable that the more rational response might be to just ignore it and stay complacent. If the authors’ goal was to motivate Dems, they would have set up the model so that it produced a slim margin. The fact that they use “Democrat” as an adjective in the actual paper makes me think the point was to demoralize Obama supporters, but I think they overdid it and just look kind of foolish.

            1. If you are petty enough to use the word ” Democrat ” in a perjorative sense you don’t really deserve to be taken that seriously, particularly in what is purported to be an objective academic study.

  3. Besides lopsideness of R PAC money (Whare ARE those infamous union bosses when you need them?) I would count:

    1.  Romney losing women’s votes by even more than he never had, thank you Akins.

    2.  The lack of income and tax transparency of Rmoney; lots of average Joe’s will remain pissed off about that.

    No model could have incorporated those and other factors.  

  4. In the Daily Camera, it was stated this method HAD predicted correctly every election since 1980.  Here, it’s “would have predicted….” Which?

    And they pad their prediction by not mentioning all data was corralled five months previous to the election (that would be….April)and they’ll update it closer in.

    There is not enough liquor in Colorado to allow a three digit IQ to value this. The Coors Curia for Conservative Catholic Chickenhawks in Golden – and those face down in their lap – will give it a go, though.  

    1. It was a parameter-fit to old data, so the ethical thing would have been to say “The model reproduces 90% of state election outcomes in past elections” rather than saying “has correctly predicted the last eight elections.”

      1. predicting grain prices on the Chicago Board of Trade.

        I was an intern for a trader – he gave me $100 and told me to never speak of it again.   He also ran out of work for me to do shortly after.  

        This model predicts all kinds of things – That a carefully written release headline will get press all over the world.  That backward fitting data is risky business.  That sometimes the butterfly getting squished has no effect on anything measurable  

      1. instead of supporting your argument with facts just keep repeating a claim over and over.

        The model is methodologically sound !

        The model is methodologically sound !

        The model is methodologically sound !

  5. And, it is being promoted on some newscast as a model that has successfully predicted election outcomes over the last thirty years….that is atrocious…..and it reflects badly on CU, IMHO.

    I really appreciate sxp151 analysis…..I wish to hell he had an agent….

    1. that Nate Silver had many of the same objections and has a much larger audience. So it’s not like nobody will ever hear that there are serious problems with it. Hard to do much public critiquing as an anonymous jerk on a blog though.

        1. I’m not outing anyone to do it though.

          Think about this though-

          Colorado is approximately 1/3 D, 1/3 R, 1/3 U.

          And has been for some time.

          An outsider who didn’t understand CO would think we split most of the time.

          But we don’t.

          Our U’s are slightly less likely to vote than our D’s and R’s. (maybe they don’t get their general ballot because they didn’t vote in the primary – IDK)

          And when they do vote, they tend to vote R.  Not always. But generally.

          That’s why Bennet (an others) was smart to use a Colorado polling company in 2010 – they understand CO.

          But if you’re 538 /Silver you gotta get your insider dope somewhere.

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