Biden: never in doubt (much)

So my winning track record on political betting remains intact - an hour or two ago, I cashed out my bet on Biden for a decent profit, although I must admit it was a rollercoaster ride to get to that point, and I almost lost my nerve at one stage.  Even though Biden was very much a value bet before the results started to come in, probably the optimum time to bet on him would have been at around 2am, when incredibly the odds implied that Trump had more than a 75% chance of winning.  I couldn't make head nor tail of that, because at the time Biden had built up decent leads in Ohio and North Carolina - states he didn't even need to win.  My best guess was that punters had massively overreacted to Trump holding Florida against expectations.  

But of course, a couple of hours later, the tables had turned.  Trump had not only secured a comeback win in Ohio and taken what looked like a decisive lead in North Carolina, he had also rapidly built up what looked like telling leads in states that were actually much more vital to Biden's chances, namely Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.  The experts repeatedly cautioned that those numbers might well be misleading due to the order in which different types of votes were being counted, but I remembered waiting for a Clinton comeback in those states in 2016 that never materialised, so I started to wonder if the sensible thing to do would be to cash out at a loss.  I decided to risk seeing if anything had changed after a few hours sleep, and by the time I woke up, as if by magic, Biden had the upper hand in Michigan and Wisconsin.  Although the margin in each case is narrow, those in the know are convinced it won't be overturned, meaning that Biden is assured of a majority in the electoral college unless Trump can overturn his narrow deficit in Nevada, which by all accounts is also unlikely.  And even if an improbable comeback does occur somewhere, it still might not be enough if Biden squeezes out a win in Georgia, which is considered perfectly possible.

I would guess at this stage that Trump's main hope will be that Biden ends up owing his electoral college majority to a narrow win in a single state - that would at least give the appearance of reasonableness to any legal challenge.  But if Trump needs the courts to alter the results in two or three states, his efforts to stay in office are going to look a bit desperate.

I don't actually think it'll take the army to remove him from the White House in January, but ideally he'll want to spin this out for as long as possible to build up a victim/conspiracy narrative, possibly with a view to another tilt at the presidency in 2024.

New Podcast : Trumpocalypse Now

Just a quick note to let you know that myself and Paul Kavanagh (of Wee Ginger Dug fame) are the guests on the latest edition of the Newsnet podcast, hosted as always by Derek Bateman.  Topics under discussion this week include...well, DONALD TRUMP, basically, although we do also touch on the progression of Brexit, and a possible timescale for the second independence referendum.  You can listen to the podcast HERE.

From Brexit to Trump : can we trust the polls anymore?

I think it's probably fair to say that it's been a great many decades since US media coverage of an American election has referenced British politics so frequently.  That's a sign of how Brexit matters internationally in a way that routine changes of government don't, but it's also a sign of Trump supporters casting around for glimmers of hope wherever they can be found.  The theory is that support for Trump is vaguely similar in character to support for Brexit, and that if the latter was underestimated by the polls, there's no reason to think the former isn't being underestimated as well.

From this side of the Atlantic, there have been two reasons commonly cited for why that is probably wishful thinking.  The first is that we knew in the days prior to the EU referendum that the postal votes that had already been cast were painting a different picture from the opinion polls, and that Remain had a significant deficit to overcome on polling day itself.  On the whole, the opposite seems to be happening in the US at the moment, with the early voting data tending to look more promising for Clinton than for Trump.  The second reason is that, supposedly, the opinion polls in the EU referendum were nowhere near as inaccurate as portrayed.

The first reason makes perfect sense to me, but I have to say I think the second one is pushing it a bit.  This goes back to the meat of a rather unpleasant (and now largely deleted) argument I had with a New Statesman journalist and a few others on Twitter in August, on the topic of "can we ever trust the polls again?".  Immediately after that exchange, I had been planning to write a blogpost setting out my thoughts, but I decided against it because the whole thing had become too heated.  However, this may be a good moment to make some of the points I had been planning to make that night (but leaving aside the personalities involved, obviously).

* First of all, it really must be understood that the standard 3% margin of error in individual opinion polls does not provide any sort of alibi for the polling failure in June.  If the methodology used across the industry is basically correct, the error on the polling average should be considerably lower than 3%.  For example, if one campaign is actually on 44%, you would expect just as many polls to have that campaign one, two or three points below 44% as have them one, two or three points above 44%.  The underestimates would balance out the overestimates, and you would end up with an average that is pretty close to being bang on the money.  So it's a form of sophistry to look at the string of late polls that overestimated the Remain vote, and claim that the ones that fell within the margin of error (or came close to doing so) were all technically "accurate".

Regular readers of this blog will remember that I had been completely open to the strong possibility of a Leave victory throughout the referendum campaign, but when the last polling numbers came in on 23rd June, I finally threw my hands up in the air, and said that if the polls were right, there was clearly going to be a Remain victory of some sort.  My exact words were -

"Leave can only really win now if there's been some kind of systemic problem with the public polls - although that's scarcely unheard of."

I entirely stand by that summary, and exactly the same is true of the situation in the US right now.   Donald Trump still has a chance, but that categorically isn't because he's "within the margin of error".  He may be within the margin of error in individual polls, but if he was really tied with Clinton, and if the polls were getting it right to within the margin of error, there ought to be as many polls putting him three or four points ahead as there are putting him three or four points behind.  Self-evidently, that isn't the case.  The reason he still has a chance is because it's fairly common - as our own referendum demonstrates - for polls to be misleading due to factors that are not taken into account by the standard margin of error.  That 3% wiggle-room only allows for normal sampling variation, and basically assumes that the underlying methodology is otherwise going to be perfect - which is pretty optimistic in this day and age.

If Trump wins, or if Clinton wins much bigger than we expect her to, it'll be because the polls were wrong, just as they were on Brexit.  Not necessarily wrong by all that much, or by a historically unprecedented amount, but certainly wrong in a way that the margin of error can't account for.  (Although polling firms will doubtless attempt to make that excuse by cherry-picking individual polls.)

* It's been suggested a number of times that the EU referendum polls were much more accurate than supposed, because people tend to only look at the last batch of polls, and ignore the ones earlier in June that were more favourable for Leave.  That's plainly a load of nonsense, because the reason why the later polls moved towards Remain is remarkably simple - there was almost certainly a genuine swing towards Remain as polling day approached.

The word "accurate" is a bit slippery when used in relation to opinion polls, because strictly speaking, and with the obvious exception of exit polls, all polls are snapshots of public opinion rather than predictions of election results.  A poll can be an accurate snapshot even if it differs markedly from the final outcome.  Nevertheless, if "accurate" is used to mean closeness to the final result, it's perfectly reasonable to say that later polls should be more "accurate" than earlier ones, because the closer you get to election day, the more people have made up their minds.  Therefore, the fact that the EU polls got progressively less "accurate" towards the death of the campaign makes it worse for the polling industry, not better.  It strongly implies that there was a significant in-built error all along.  When Leave appeared to be slightly behind, they were actually slightly ahead.  When Leave appeared to be slightly ahead, they actually had a decent cushion.  And so on.

* One of the apparent saving graces for the polling industry in June was that, against all expectations, online polls proved to be somewhat more accurate than telephone polls.  Nevertheless, the performance of the online polls was significantly tarnished by a Populus poll published on referendum day that was absolutely miles out from reality - it gave Remain a 55% to 45% lead.  It was suggested to me that somehow that poll doesn't really count, because it was the only published Populus voting intention poll of the entire campaign, and is therefore difficult to put into proper context.  I must say I can't make head nor tail of that line of argument.  We know that Populus had been conducting extensive private polls throughout the campaign, meaning they'd had as much opportunity as any other firm to hone their techniques.  It may well be that a 55%-45% lead was an outlier from their normal results, but it shouldn't have happened at all if their methodology had been essentially sound.  (Even the occasional 'rogue poll' that statistically will happen one time in every twenty shouldn't really be out by as much as 7%.)

So, yes, that Populus poll does deserve to be treated as an online poll like any other, and the fact that it was one of the final polls of the campaign (when it should have been more accurate, not less) does detract from the notion that online polls in general performed tolerably well.

*  *  *

To return to the original question, I think the simplest way of putting it is this.  If you want polls to be as accurate as the industry claim them to be, then you can't and shouldn't trust them, because recent history suggests you'll often (but not always) be disappointed.  If, however, you just want a ball-park sense of public opinion that is more reliable than, say, Neil Lovatt's beloved betting and financial markets, then yes, polls are still a very useful tool, and the outcome in June bears that truth out.  It really just depends on how demanding your own expectations are.

Why I held my nose and voted for Hillary Clinton

I've voted in every US presidential election since 2004.  I could have voted in the Bush v Gore election in 2000 as well, but irritatingly I didn't even realise I was eligible to vote until several years later.  I don't need to beat myself up too much over that, though, because I wouldn't have been voting in Florida, or in any other swing state for that matter.  And the latter point is what it all boils down to, really - I've voted for fringe left-wing candidates in all of the last three elections (including a revolutionary communist in 2012, who strangely enough I backed with the encouragement of Lib Dem blogger Caron Lindsay!), because there just didn't seem to be any point in doing anything else.  If my vote has no chance whatever of swinging the balance, why would I give my endorsement to centre-right Democratic candidates who take an abhorrent stance on the death penalty?

There is something intensely irritating, though, about seeing your vote for the most powerful office in the world treated as an abstention or a non-vote.  If you look back at footage of results programmes from previous presidential elections, you'll find that with very few exceptions, the vote tallies for third parties are not even mentioned or shown on screen.  Of course, that's a very good argument in favour of continuing to vote for fringe candidates - ie. to embarrass the media into changing their ways and helping to open up the system.  But throughout this year, there's been a nagging voice at the back of my head saying "wouldn't it be nice, in this election of all elections, to be able to vote for a credible non-Trump candidate, and to do so in all good conscience?"

And for long spells, it looked like that might just turn out to be possible.  Although Bernie Sanders was always the underdog in the Democratic primaries, there were times when it seemed he had a genuine chance of pulling it off.  And there were certainly times when it was hard to see how Clinton could ignore the Sanders movement in her choice for Vice-President nominee - surely, even if she couldn't bring herself to pick Sanders himself, she'd have to reach out to his voters with someone like Elizabeth Warren?  But no, it wasn't to be.  The choice of right-wing, pro-death penalty Tim Kaine seemed like an absolute kick in the teeth, and a classic example of an arrogant politician saying to her own base : "I can do whatever I like and you'll have to support me, because you have nowhere else to go".  Well, there's always somewhere else to go, and I started resigning myself to 'opting out' for a fourth time in a row, and voting for the Green candidate Jill Stein.

However, the attraction of voting for the only candidate who can actually defeat Donald "Make Our Doons Great Again" Trump just wouldn't quite let me go.  When I filled in my ballot paper a few days ago, I voted in every single down-ticket race before I could even bring myself to properly look at the presidential box - that's how ill the dilemma was making me feel.  In the end, I averted my eyes from the words "Jill Stein" and "Green", and got the dirty deed over with as quickly as possible.  This is how I justified it to myself -

1) This election, far more than most, doubles up as a proxy vote to decide control of the Supreme Court - possibly for the next two decades.  In the wacky world of US politics, the Supreme Court has effectively become a quasi-legislature with well-defined conservative and liberal caucuses.  From that point of view, voting for anyone other than Clinton or Trump genuinely is an abstention - because one or the other will be nominating the new justices.  In the dream scenario, if Clinton wins and the Democrats make significant gains in the Senate, there would be no impediment to the shaping of a liberal-dominated court that could transform America over the coming years.  It would be a decisive victory in the interminable culture wars.  (The alternative, of course, is to risk a decisive defeat under Trump.)

2) By American standards, Clinton is reasonably strong on gun control, which was the one issue on which she ran clearly to the left of Bernie Sanders.  That's not nothing.  I haven't bothered checking whether our old friends in the Kevin Baker Fan Club are generally backing Donald Trump or Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party, but I think we can safely assume that a Clinton presidency is just about their worst nightmare.

3) During the primaries, Clinton was dramatically challenged by a man who had spent years on death row for a crime he didn't commit, and asked how she could possibly maintain her support for capital punishment after hearing his story.  I was quite surprised by how far she went in her response - she said she would be happy enough if the Supreme Court eliminated the death penalty in the states, leaving only a federal death penalty for the worst terrorism offences.  It goes without saying that it is disturbing and appalling that in the year 2016, a supposedly "liberal" candidate in a "liberal democracy" is still in favour of the state putting its own citizens to death.  But the depressing reality is that Clinton's words represented progress in an American context.  She may well not really have meant them, but if a Democratic congress were to pass legislation imposing new restrictions on the federal death penalty, she'll find it very hard to justify using her veto after what she's said.

4) I suggested in the spring that there was perhaps a 3% chance of a Donald Trump presidency resulting in the destruction of human civilisation.  A couple of anonymous commenters mocked me for saying that (one of them used it as an example of why I don't understand 'real' politics and should stick to polling analysis!), but I absolutely stand by it.  If you look at the sequence of events that triggered the First World War - an accidental and unnecessary war that nobody really wanted - it's clear that bombast, buffoonery and narcissism played a big part.  The mere possibility of an unstable character like Trump having his finger on the nuclear button is a crisis for the whole of humanity, and averting the danger overrides all other priorities.  What complicates that point, of course, is that Clinton herself is being deeply irresponsible in her hawkish noises-off about Russia, meaning that the risk of nuclear war under her presidency would not be zero.  But I'm confident that the risk would be dramatically lower with her than with Trump.

5) If there's a Brexit-style, small-to-moderate systemic error in the polls, it's still perfectly possible Trump could win the national popular vote.  That obviously matters less than the outcome of the electoral college (which only voters in swing states can meaningfully affect), but if, say, Clinton were to win the presidency and Trump were to win the popular vote, it would be much easier for Trump to cast himself as the 'rightful king across the water', and keep his 'movement' alive to fight another day.  It's probably a good idea to try to prevent that happening.

"Virtually no chance..."

Speaking as a Bernie Sanders voter (and not wanting to pull rank on anyone, but I've now voted for him four times in various elections), I'm obviously delighted that America's only socialist senator managed to pull off a win against all the odds in Michigan.  The most important thing is that it keeps him in with some kind of slim chance of winning the Democratic nomination, but there's another aspect of the story that we shouldn't lose sight of.  Have a look at the verdict FiveThirtyEight were offering just a few hours ago...

"According to our final polls-plus forecast, Hillary Clinton has a greater than 99% chance of winning the Michigan primary."

Even more embarrassingly, the site's live-blog was still talking about how boring the evening was and how Clinton was cruising to victory when over a third of precincts were already reporting and she was trailing by thousands of votes.  Just what does it take for the alarm bells to start ringing?

It might be worth bearing this latest howler in mind the next time that Nate Silver or one of his fellow 'mystics' blunder into another country's referendum campaign, and ludicrously declare with over a year still to go that there is "virtually no chance" that one side or another is going to win.  Once they can get their predictions right on home soil with just hours to go, perhaps they can branch out into the much trickier long-term foreign stuff, but they're clearly not there yet.  OK, Silver can claim that he wasn't technically proved wrong about Scotland, but given what we know about how the indyref campaign panned out in the closing weeks and months, it's very difficult to see how he can credibly justify such an extreme statement with the benefit of hindsight.

Uncertainty may be scary to a stats guy, but that's the world we live in.

If you thought the 'four candles' sketch was funny, wait till you hear the hysterical Obama 'ice cream' gag!

If you believed the events of recent months might have significantly healed the racial and cultural divide in the US, take a look at this viral e-mail my mother received earlier today from an American pal of hers who appears to be just slightly right-wing -

"Ben and Jerry's is coming out with an unbelievable new ice cream in honor of the messiah who was just sworn in as our 44th President. It is being churned in Washington DC and appropriately being named:
'Baracky Road'
half chocolate and half vanilla surrounded by fruits and nuts"

To quote Rowan Atkinson in Blackadder II, if I appear not to be laughing it's only because I fear my sides would split. There have of course been a lot of e-mails over the last couple of years claiming to prove that Obama is a Muslim or a terrorist or not a natural-born citizen or whatever, but this is the first openly racist one I've come across and I was genuinely quite shocked (as was my mother).

For a (marginally) more harmless laugh on the same topic, you could try this old favourite, the Conservapedia entry for Barack Obama. You might think it's a deliberate self-parody, but it's not!