my election prediction

I have a little election prediction spreadsheet. It takes the poll averages for swing states as reported by RealClearPolitics, generates a random number for each with a 4% standard deviation, and runs 1,000 trials in about 10 seconds. Go to Nate Silver or other online sites for a much more professional and sophisticated approach. I do this just for fun and to help me understand how the system works. So without further ado, here is how I think Tuesday night might unfold. The poll closing times are the earliest closing times in a given state according to ballotpedia, so you would expect some numbers to start tricking in at that point. I’m writing Sunday around noon, just in case there is some big development between now and Tuesday.

Based on RealClearPolitics, if both candidates win the states they lead in right now, Hillary would win with 298 electoral votes to 240 for Trump. Nate Silver predicts 290-247, and puts the odds at 65-35. Betfair puts it at 323-215 and the odds at 80-20. My spreadsheet comes up with an electoral college average of 295-243 and odds of 85-15.

Here is one way the evening could unfold to get in the ballpark:

First, I assume Clinton and Trump have both won all the states considered relatively safe by RealClearPolitics. This means Hillary starts off with 218 and Trump with 165. Seems unfair, doesn’t it? But these are the demographics, and why the breathless media coverage of swing states is a bit misleading. If Trump is leading half the swing states on a given day, that doesn’t mean the race is anywhere near tied.

7:00 p.m. EST

  • Results start to trickle in from Florida, Georgia, Virginia and New Hampshire.
  • The night starts off with a bang for Clinton with wins in Florida and Virginia.
  • Trump gets Georgia and New Hampshire.
  • Clinton leads 247-185.

7:30 p.m. EST

  • North Carolina and Ohio
  • I’ll throw both to Trump.
  • 247-218. Getting slightly interesting.

8:00 p.m. EST

  • Pennsylvania and Michigan
  • I don’t think Trump has a realistic shot at either. They go to Clinton.
  • 283-218. It’s over!

9:00 p.m. EST

  • They split Arizona (Trum) and Colorado (Clinton).
  • 292-229

10:00 p.m. EST

  • Iowa and Nevada
  • I’ll throw both to Trump. I’ll also throw him New Mexico to look like slightly less of a loser.
  • 292-246

This is what I expect to happen. Of course, the votes get counted slowly, and we can pretend there is some suspense as they are counting votes in states that are not expected to be close. Still, I think we might all be in bed at 10 p.m. on the east coast knowing who the next President. And this is what I want to happen. Although I would enjoy some suspense on some level, rationally I know it is better not to live in interesting times.

For Trump to win, a lot of unlikely things have to fall into place, but here is a plausible scenario: Trump starts the night with a huge bang, winning Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, New Hampshire, and Ohio. Clinton gets Virginia. Trump would be up 252-218. By the way, I gave Clinton New Mexico to start off this time. Clinton wins Pennsylvania and Michigan, going up 254-252. They split Arizona and Colorado (263-263!). Trump gets Iowa and goes up 269-263. It comes down to Nevada. Right now it looks like Nevada is reasonably solid for Clinton, so it comes down to a 269-269 tie. The House of Representatives casts the deciding vote, picking Trump for President. The National Guard is deployed in some states to ensure order.

So Florida is a big deal, obviously. We knew that.

my final case against Trump

I write this two days before the election. Trump has announced that he intends to cancel all spending to deal with climate change if elected. The evidence that we need to deal with climate change is so clear, and it is so clearly an existential threat to our civilization, that this is completely unethical. If I liked everything else about Trump, it would be enough, by itself, to cause me to reject him. (For the record, I like nothing about him.) Combine it with the completely unacceptable bigotry, racism, and religious intolerance, and it is just completely unacceptable. Finally, the lack of universal health care continues to be an international disgrace for our country. But we are closer thanks to Obama’s efforts to take on a Congress bought and paid for by the finance industry. Trump has vowed to destroy this progress and replace it with…nothing. Completely unacceptable.

Speaking of the finance industry, if a complex crisis like the 2007-8 financial crisis were to arise, we can’t trust Trump to understand it or to seek out advice from people who understand it. I don’t expect Hillary Clinton to take bold action to support long-term financial stability, which is what we need, but I do trust her to keep a cool head in a crisis, seek out competent advice, and make rational decisions. Similarly, in case of geopolitical crisis, I don’t expect her to be a strong force for peace, but I trust her to keep a cool head, seek out competent advice, and make rational decisions. Trump doesn’t have the ability to understand complex issues, yet he is overconfident and doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, and if he seeks out the advice of others at all, I wouldn’t trust him to know whose advice to seek. Finally, he does not appear to be rational at times. I think he could easily make some horrible mistake if and when he is confronted by a crisis.

I don’t think either candidate will take bold action on campaign finance reform. Bernie Sanders was the candidate for that. Prove me wrong, Hillary!

3C

We’re on a path for 3 degrees C over pre-industrial temperatures, much higher than the target of 1.5-2 C, says the United Nations Environment Program.

The emissions gap for 2030 is 12 to 14
GtCO2e compared with 2°C scenarios, for
1.5°C the gap is three GtCO2e larger. Even
if fully implemented, the unconditional
Intended Nationally Determined Contributions
are only consistent with staying
below an increase in temperature of 3.2°C
by 2100 and 3.0°C, if conditional Intended
Nationally Determined Contributions are
included.

Nate Silver and college football

I thought Nate Silver only looked at professional sports. I was wrong – here is a cool interactive web page he has put together for college football. The numbers don’t always give you the answers you want to hear though – even if my beloved Gators somehow win all the rest of their games, which would include beating Alabama in the conference championship game, he gives them only a 13% chance of winning the national championship. Another nice thing about Nate Silver – he always explains his methodology.

We’ll be updating the numbers twice weekly: first, on Sunday morning (or very late Saturday evening) after the week’s games are complete; and second, on Tuesday evening after the new committee rankings come out. In addition to a probabilistic estimate of each team’s chances of winning its conference, making the playoff, and winning the national championship, we’ll also list three inputs to the model: their current committee ranking, FPI, and Elo. Let me explain the role that each of these play…

FPI is ESPN’s Football Power Index. We consider it the best predictor of future college games so that’s the role it plays in the model: if we say Team A has a 72 percent chance of beating Team B, that prediction is derived from FPI. Technically speaking, we’re using a simplified version of FPI that accounts for only each team’s current rating and home field advantage; the FPI-based predictons you see on ESPN.com may differ slightly because they also account for travel distance and days of rest…

Our college football Elo ratings are a little different, however. Instead of being designed to maximize predictive accuracy — we have FPI for that — they’re designed to mimic how humans rank the teams instead.4 Their parameters are set so as to place a lot of emphasis on strength of schedule and especially on recent “big wins,” because that’s what human voters have historically done too. They aren’t very forgiving of losses, conversely, even if they came by a narrow margin under tough circumstances. And they assume that, instead of everyone starting with a truly blank slate, human beings look a little bit at how a team fared in previous seasons. Alabama is more likely to get the benefit of the doubt than Vanderbilt, for example, other factors held equal.

R code to read Nate Silver’s data

Thanks to Nate Silver for posting all his polling data in a convenient text file that anyone can read! It’s a nice thing to do. Even though not many of us can do as interesting things with it as Nate Silver, it is a fun data set to play and practice with. Here is an R-bloggers post with some ideas on how to play with it.

 

October 2016 in Review

3 most frightening stories

  • The U.S. electric grid is being systematically probed by hackers working for foreign governments.
  • According to James Hansen, the world needs “negative” greenhouse gas emissions right away, meaning an end to fossil fuel burning and improvements to agriculture, forestry, and soil conservation practices to absorb carbon. Part of the current problem is unexpected and unexplained increases in methane concentrations in the atmosphere.
  • The epidemics that devastated native Americans after European arrival were truly some of the most horrific events in history, and a cautionary tale for the future.

3 most hopeful stories

  • New technology can read your heartbeat by bouncing a wireless signal off you. Mark Zuckerberg has decided to end disease.
  • While he still has people’s attention, Obama has been talking about Mars and zoning. Elon Musk wants to be the one to take you and your stuff to Mars.
  • Maine is taking a look at ranked choice voting. Ironically, the referendum will require approval by a simple majority of voters. Which makes you wonder if there are multiple voting options that could be considered and, I don’t know, perhaps ranked somehow? What is the fairest system of voting on what is the fairest system of voting?

3 most interesting stories

the smart grid

Stanford has a research project for the smart grid.

Bits & Watts is a major new Stanford/SLAC initiative focused on innovations for the 21st century electric grid—a new grid paradigm that is needed to incorporate large amounts of clean power and a growing number of distributed energy resources, while simultaneously enabling grid reliability, resilience, security, and affordability.

The initiative organizes its research into three thematic areas: grid core, grid edge, and grid data science. The initiative will advance technologies, policies, markets, regulations, and business models that work in concert between each thematic area.

The Bits & Watts Initiative seeks to:

  • Offer and implement new research ideas and de-risk them for the electricity ecosystem
  • Educate faculty, students, post-doctoral fellows, and staff about the holistic systems-focused approach to solving problems for the electricity ecosystem
  • Offer holistic educational experience for current industry executives and other leaders
  • Create open-source hardware and software solutions rapidly adopted by industry and policymakers
  • Maintain flexibility amid uncertainty to exploit emerging technologies
  • Be a trusted and unbiased convener
  • Create platforms and protocols for sharing data with due consideration of privacy, security and confidentiality

ranked choice voting

Larry Diamond on BillMoyers.com talks about a referendum in Maine that could lead to ranked-choice voting being used in that state in the future. The basic idea is that if no candidate gets a majority of first-place votes on the first ballot, then votes from the lower-ranked candidates get redistributed based on how people ranked all the candidates. Ultimately, this results in a winner who is acceptable to a majority of the voters even though they may not have been the top choice of a plurality of voters. This could encourage a Bernie Sanders or Ralph Nader (or Ross Perot or future Donald Trump) to run as a third-party candidate rather than competing for a major-party nomination.

…the issue at stake in Question 5 (a citizen-initiated referendum) is whether Maine will adopt a system called ranked-choice voting (RCV) in all its elections. If they approve the measure, Maine voters will have a unique opportunity to showcase the transformative potential of US democracy and to send a much-needed signal for reform at a crucial moment.

In RCV, voters select not just one candidate, but a list of candidates in order of preference. If no candidate gets a majority of first-preference votes when tabulating the results, the least popular candidate is eliminated and the second-preference votes of his or her supporters are redistributed to the other candidates. The process continues until someone gets a majority.

The ability to rank all the candidates running for office, rather than voting for only one, is intrinsically more democratic. But, because it forces candidates to try to appeal to a broader cross-section of the public, RCV also makes it much more likely that the winner will be open to moderation, compromise and building governing coalitions…

How often do we have a Presidential winner who did not get a majority of the popular vote? George W. Bush and Bill Clinton are the obvious examples from my lifetime, but it has happened before. This article on History News Network answers the question.

Seven of the Presidents who won without a majority were Democrats—Polk, Buchanan, Cleveland both times, Wilson both times, Truman, Kennedy, and Clinton both times. Six of the Presidents who won without a majority were Republicans—Lincoln, Hayes, Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, Nixon, and George W. Bush. One Whig, Zachary Taylor, and one Democratic-Republican, John Quincy Adams, finish the list.

giants of Cold War era nuclear strategy

This New York Times Book Review article goes through some of the key architects of Cold War era nuclear strategy.

The theories of Cold War defense intellectuals now seem the stuff of a surreal madness that seized Washington during the last half of the 20th century. The core doctrine of nuclear deterrence was Mutual Assured Destruction, aptly known as MAD. It postulated that the best way to prevent a nuclear war with the Kremlin was to build an enormous atomic arsenal that would annihilate the Soviet Union if it dared attack the United States. Effective, yes, but a White House or Kremlin miscalculation would have left millions dead, nations destroyed and the planet reeling.

Albert Wohlstetter, an analyst at the RAND Corporation, was one of the most formidable of the nuclear policy savants. A combative champion of defense spending, he argued that the balance of terror inherent in MAD was unstable. Instead of assuming the MAD standoff would assure a durable cold peace, he feared a Pearl Harbor-like Soviet attack outside the imagined scenarios of defense planners, and he pressed for a nuclear war-winning policy. His ideas coursed through American defense strategy for decades, swaying presidents, attracting acolytes, infuriating opponents and igniting furious debates that ricochet through official circles to this day…

Robin, president of the University of Haifa in Israel, recalls many of the thinkers and baroque theories of the nuclear age. Some attracted national attention at midcentury, including Henry Kissinger, whose 1957 book, “Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy,” became an unexpected best seller, and Herman Kahn, whose chilling ruminations on winning and surviving a nuclear conflict made him an oracle of the unthinkable. Bernard Brodie, the intellectual father of nuclear deterrence theory, played a pivotal role in shaping Cold War nuclear policy.