tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post1209682672937772301..comments2024-03-28T21:56:51.675-04:00Comments on Face to Face: Judging soundness of elections from bellwether states / counties (a project for someone else)agnostichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-92145342461066328792020-12-15T03:18:13.595-05:002020-12-15T03:18:13.595-05:00This didnt age well. My hope is diminished to 10% ...This didnt age well. My hope is diminished to 10% at this pointAbelardhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04616697282492502832noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-56926032258220723752020-11-17T14:54:44.950-05:002020-11-17T14:54:44.950-05:00GOP sectors (retail, manufacturing) turn against T...GOP sectors (retail, manufacturing) turn against Trump's re-inauguration. They're threatening to de-fund the party, and even corporate relocations, if the GOP state legislatures don't certify the stolen elections in their states, beginning with Georgia:<br /><br />https://apnews.com/article/top-ceos-met-plan-response-to-trump-ae2790a11be9a73cd3216d17ce06e143<br /><br />Also today, Walmart CEO thanked "President-elect Biden," so that's another major GOP elite coalition member who is turning against Trump. Earlier, Walmart had only used the term as part of a larger group, the Business Roundtable. Now it's saying so through its own CEO.<br /><br />These GOP sectors are OK with the kabuki theater of the recounts, lawsuits by right-wing media talking heads (Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani, et al), etc., if that will mollify the mouth-breathing MAGA mob and Trump himself. But they are putting their foot down when it comes to who's actually getting inaugurated in January -- they demand it be Biden.<br /><br />Naturally they're joined by Democrat sectors like finance and media, but that doesn't matter because it's to be expected, and because they cannot threaten Georgia, as they do not control its patronage networks. Threatening California and Washington state, yes. Threatening the Deep South, no.<br /><br />When the big wigs of the GOP patronage networks are demanding that Trump not be re-inaugurated, that's the end of the story. Their puppets in the govt -- McConnell et al. -- are doing likewise.<br /><br />If the GOP wanted to stop the steal, the Pentagon would be threatening to re-locate Fort Benning unless the state GOP sent a Trump slate of electors. The agriculture cartel of the Plains states would threaten to withhold food shipments to Georgia, or at least the Atlanta metro area, unless they stopped the steal. Big Texas oil would jack up gas prices at the pump for the Atlanta metro area.<br /><br />None of these are happening. The only forces from GOP sectors of society are pushing in the direction of Biden, combined with every Democrat sector like finance and media pushing in the same direction. Analyzing the balance of forces doesn't even need a back of the napkin -- you can do it in your head. It's not Trump. It's Biden.agnostichttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-83436963089212356962020-11-15T16:59:39.283-05:002020-11-15T16:59:39.283-05:00The take junkies are moving onto conspiracizing ab...The take junkies are moving onto conspiracizing about the vote machine company, and drawing "webs of linkages" with all sorts of Reagan-era boogeymen.<br /><br />None of which makes the states / counties / cities in dispute jump out from the rest. None of which can be easily compared to previous elections to show how this one was in a galaxy of its own. None of which anyone in the vast middle of our admittedly polarized society would even begin to listen to -- let alone courts or elected officials.<br /><br />That initial burst of awareness and purpose on election night and the few days after has, once again, devolved back into Reaganite right-wing nutjob bullshit, by and for the consumers of polarized hyper-partisan media, including social media (talk radio shows and callers for the post-Boomer generations).<br /><br />I'll still be detailing how blatant the steal was, but I don't expect anything to come of it now.<br /><br />Especially with the GOP more and more abandoning Trump and his campaign. No Ty Cobb or Emmet Flood from the white-shoe Establishment law firms, or other heavy hitters from BIGLAW. All of his talking-heads-from-right-wing-media lawyers aren't going to accomplish anything.<br /><br />No punishment from the GOP, its elite sectors, etc., for the Georgia Republican executive branch throwing Trump under the bus with the non-audited recount.<br /><br />Chances that Trump is re-inaugurated, by overcoming the steal, now closer to 10-20%.<br /><br />Total implosion of the Republican party. I thought they'd at least go to bat for him since he already cucked to the Establishment throughout his entire first term -- why not get Paul Ryan / Jeb Bush policies for another term? They're too decrepit and moribund to even stand up to a flagrant theft of the highest office, when they have tri-fecta control of the relevant state (Georgia), or at least the state legislatures (Rust Belt).<br /><br />Now the Civil War will mainly be factions of the Democrats clashing with each other over who's going to take the helm after the moribund GOP just got stolen out of office, ending the Reagan era. Biden, Kamala, Pelosi, Bloomberg, Warren, Bernie -- it'll be the primary all over again, with no one on the other side to unify against, since Trump and the entire GOP will be dead.<br /><br />The Year of the Five Presidents -- Rome in 193 AD, and Murica in 2021.<br /><br />Will write more detail later. But you see.agnostichttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-14819671525577021592020-11-13T19:09:49.412-05:002020-11-13T19:09:49.412-05:00Here's the score for 2016 and 2020. For 2016 t...Here's the score for 2016 and 2020. For 2016 there are 16 bellwethers that had gotten 0 or 1 miss out of the past 15 (1956 to 2012). In 2016, 6 of those 16 missed, for a miss rate of 38%.<br /><br />For 2020, there are 10 bellwethers that had gotten 0 or 1 miss in the previous 15 (1960 to 2016). They're the 16 from above, minus the 6 that missed in '16, giving them 2 misses of 15, demoting them out. In 2020, with the results so far, and assuming Biden were the winner, 8 of those 10 missed (voted Trump), for a miss rate of 80%.<br /><br />Obviously a miss rate of 80% is a far stronger signal than 38%. But how to quantify that, using simple statistical tests?<br /><br />How about, is the miss rate from a given year compatible with it being a binomial process? As though each bellwether were a coin being flipped independently of the others, each with chance of "missing" at 50%. That's what the Obeng post would lead you to believe. He's making a somwehat different claim, using only those with *unbroken* 60-year streaks, covering a much broader period, but let's say your big-picture takeaway was bellwethers were no better at predicting a particular election than a coin flip.<br /><br />The 2016 results are not unusual if the process were binomial. Getting 6 or more misses out of 16 has a p-value of about 0.9. That's compatible with it being a bunch of coin-flips. (We're only going in the one-tailed direction of "missed this many or more" because bellwethers are chosen for having had high reliability, so only the direction of "lots of misses" counts as extreme and anomalous.)<br /><br />However, the 2020 results are rejected as being binomial. Getting 8 or more misses out of 10 has a p-value of about 0.05. There's nothing magical about any particular threshold of p-value (b/c you can easily p-hack your way cleanly below 0.05 by minutely tweaking the chance of a miss from 50% to 49.3%). The point is, 2020 not only leaps out as strange in itself, but certainly compared to the previous election.<br /><br />I won't be doing this for any other years to give the historical picture at the county level -- state level with Ohio + Florida is convincing enough. The rest of the project is for someone else to do, but the basic code is already there in Obeng's post and links.<br /><br />One aspect to investigate is using a shorter time-period, maybe 10 elections instead of 15, which would provide a longer list of bellwethers for each year, which had flawless records (or at most 1 miss). If you go back too far, and have too high of a hit rate cut-off, it could leave you with 10 bellwethers as in 2020, making statistical tests harder to run than if you had 20 or 30 bellwethers to get a signal from.<br /><br />40 years is roughly the length of a "party system" (Federalist, Jeffersonian, Jacksonian, Lincolnian, McKinleyan, New Deal, Reaganism). Sounds good -- for someone else to look into, rather than scrolling and shitposting on social media.agnostichttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-29917313078653403382020-11-12T05:32:28.434-05:002020-11-12T05:32:28.434-05:00Correct, *I* said they indicate fraud, which they ...Correct, *I* said they indicate fraud, which they do. If his post did, I would simply quote the relevant parts and not claim it as an original insight.<br /><br />You also don't get the argument, as usual, despite it being simple and repeated many times -- it's not whether any particular bellwether misses, but whether a whole lot of them miss in the same year.<br /><br />He doesn't discuss combining their signals, since he's looking at the classifying angle, which considers them separately -- which ones have a high hit rate.<br /><br />That's also why his remark is irrelevant about "bellwethers with a 60-year streak only getting the next election right half the time". The election he's predicting is not a single one for all of those cases -- e.g., if a bunch of counties had a 60-year streak through 1964, and they're all predicting '68.<br /><br />Some of their streaks went through '64, others through '56, or 2012, or whatever. Each of those cases is predicting its own distinct election, i.e. the one following its own distinct 60-year streak interval.<br /><br />This is silly -- no one uses a combination of bellwethers to predict different elections, but the exact same election, say 1960. And for that single election, some of the bellwethers will have had streaks going back a variety of lengths, and some may have had a miss or two along the way, at different miss-years.<br /><br />His example is wrong for that point anyway. Northampton PA did miss in '68 (D, when nation voted R), after a winning streak going back to 1908. But that was the only miss for awhile after. It correctly called '72 through '96, across both parties winning as well as a realignment in 1980. Only in 2000 did it lose bellwether status, turning mostly into a solid blue county -- although Trump did win it in 2016.<br /><br />And its winning streak goes back further than just 1908 -- correct in '04, though missing in 1900.<br /><br />So that county had only two misses during the entire 20th century, yet he uses it to illustrate the failure of bellwethers due to the '68 miss.agnostichttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-33818475712401559882020-11-11T22:57:15.933-05:002020-11-11T22:57:15.933-05:00I read Obeng's post, and he didn't say any...I read Obeng's post, and he didn't say anything about bellwhethers being evidence of fraud. In fact, he said counties with a hot-streak of 15 in a row still had roughly a coin-toss likelihood of getting the next election right. The conclusion was about how we can't conclude that much from them.TGGPhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11017651009634767649noreply@blogger.com