Wednesday, November 19, 2008 at 11:23 pm by Darryl
Missouri Finally Called
Now that Missouri has been called the electoral college results should be 365 for Obama and 173 for McCain. I’m feeling pretty damn happy (and maybe even a bit smug) at having predicted 364 for Obama.
I’d gloat some more, except that…I’m busy. Maybe later.
Thursday, November 20th, 2008 at 9:40 am
Of course, you actually called two states wrong. Fortuitously for you, Indiana and Missouri contribute 11 electoral votes apiece, so your pair of mistakes precisely offset each other in the count.
I, on the other hand, got all but one state correct. My only miss — a very pleasant one indeed — was assigning Indiana to McCain. I even called NE-02 for Obama in my prediction of 354-184.
So which is the better prediction? It can be
spuninterpreted either way. You can guess which approach I prefer…Lies, damned lies, and statistics!
Thursday, November 20th, 2008 at 1:18 pm
Hi N,
“Fortuitously for you, Indiana and Missouri contribute 11 electoral votes apiece, so your pair of mistakes precisely offset each other in the count.”
Nope…I wasn’t doing my predictions that way. I was using the electoral vote expectation over 100,000 simulations. Adding up electoral votes according to the state’s color (as, say, Karl Rove did) is the wrong way to predict electoral votes unless each states probability of going blue is near 0 or 1.
The analogy I used before is this: you have a coin with p=0.6 probability of turning up a head. One’s prediction for the number of heads in 100 tosses would be 60 using the expectation or 100 using the sum of the best-guess outcomes for each toss.
Oh…and my final map had Missouri painted red.
Thursday, November 20th, 2008 at 1:33 pm
Go ahead and gloat! You get a beverage of your choice on me at the next DL!