The Polls in Florida

This post went up at 8:30am on Friday; I mostly wrote it Thursday morning, but I did tweak it some Friday morning. It might be a little schizophrenic as a result.

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As I write this, we sit in a state of uncertainty. Will Biden pull through and win? He only has to get Nevada, Pennsylvania, or Georgia to do so... if the media calling Arizona for him was right. Trump needs to take all four to win. But Trump has beaten expectations before.

And he's done so again. In my first draft of this, I complained that "[e]ven if Biden wins, the results we're seeing don't accord with the predictions of most pollsters and forecasters." But on reflection, I don't think that's true. Maybe my FiveThirtyEight buy-in is too high, but I'm pretty sure I saw Nate Silver say (either on Twitter or their election liveblog, though of course I can't find it now, so maybe it was Nate Cohn or Dave Wasserman or someone) that if the likely final results (306 electoral votes for Biden) had come in on election night, people would not have been decrying this as another big polling miss. Indeed, if you look at FiveThirtyEight's ballswarm of maps, you can see the likely final result right there:

It hovers at what I would guess is about halfway between the median outcome and the biggest possible Trump win. So no blowout, but nothing highly improbable either.

That said, it seems like even Silver would agree things weren't great:

In the end, polling averages will probably "call" the winners of all but 1-3 states correctly, along with the winner of the popular vote, which should wind up at Biden +4/+5. That's not great. It's better to look at *margins* and some of the margins were off.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 5, 2020

In a follow-up, he adds, "the polls will have done mediocrely, but not terribly" and that "[t]he Democrats' performance in Congress *would* (correctly, IMO) have been seen as disappointing, and some of the hot takes would be about the contrast between that and Biden's performance."

My home state of Florida is a good example of all of this. FiveThirtyEight gave Biden a 69% chance of winning, with an expected final vote share of 50.9%. Biden's final takings were 47.8%. (Trump got 51.2%.) That doesn't seem too off. But if you look at the last few polls of Florida, you see this:

Biden in fact hit exactly where the last few polls said he would! ABC News seemed to get this one right, while Siena College/NYT and Quinnipiac had Trump way down. Poking around I can see that these two gave third-party candidates around 2-3%, and I assume the rest were undecideds. In actuality, all third-party candidates together took 0.9% of the final vote. Isn't this very similar to what happened in 2016? How did we not see it coming?

I don't know enough about forecasting to really know what went wrong. But it seems to me as though too much trust was placed in the idea of an even split in unallocated voters, and older polls with a higher rate for Biden might have been right when they were taken, but wrong when the election came around, and thus given too much weight? (I have one conservative friend who swung at the last minute from Biden to Trump because of the Barrett nomination. He had given money to the Biden campaign a month ago!)

Anyway, we can handwring about this, but I was curious to see Florida across the board. As mentioned before, I live in Florida's "most flippable" House district. In 2018, the results were 53/47, advantage Republican; this year the Republicans held the seat at 55/45, so we actually trended more Republican. (And, admittedly, FiveThirtyEight only gave the district a 20% chance of flipping; Democratic candidate Alan Cohn never polled too well.) Two House seats in Florida did flip-- but from Democrat to Republican. These were seats both labelled by FiveThirtyEight as districts where the Democrats were "favored" with an 80% chance. Of course, you should expect that things given an 80% chance will not happen 20% of the time, so this isn't impossible, but the margins seemed off across the board.

I thought the overperformance was bad, so I plotted it; on average, Republicans outdid the FiveThirtyEight prediction by 1.8%.* They outperformed in 17 of 25 competitive districts,† but underperformed in eight of them. Not as bad as my kneejerk reaction made it feel, but the districts they flipped, they overperformed by over 5%. If you look at the polling in those two districts, though... there was almost none! The last poll in FL-27 was in October, and the last poll in FL-26 was way back in July... and had the Republican up the amount he actually won by. I am sure making predictions about districts with little or no polling is tricky, but it seems to me then that an 80% certainty was misplaced.

Anything above the dotted line is a better than expected outcome for Republicans. You'll note that Democrats really only did better than expected in Republican strongholds where even a 5% overperformance would make no difference. Republicans overperformed everywhere else, including where it mattered most.

What does all this mean? I'll be honest, and say I don't really know. There's a lot to be written about polling in general, I'm sure, as well as polling in Florida. To me, though, it seems to speak to an underestimating of a particular kind of Trump supporter/Republican that keeps Florida locked "red" despite an apparent "purpleness," and thus an underestimation of a particular kind of American who keeps helping deliver (or nearly deliver, in 2020) this country to Trumpism despite everything.

One thing is certain: the mass repudiation of Trumpism many of us expected just did not take place.

* My final vote tallies come from the Tampa Bay Times as of Thursday morning. Provisional ballots are yet to be assessed, I think, but for the most part Florida counts everything on election day.

† In FL-2 and FL-25, Republicans ran unopposed.

Putting My Money Where My Mouth Is

There are things that I think are important to me, that I actually don't do anything to demonstrate the importance of-- but recently I have. For example, WNYC's On the Media (my favorite podcast) often does episodes talking about how local news coverage is collapsing, and how that has negative consequences for the country as a whole. For example, according to the episode "No News Is Bad News":

PENNY ABERNATHY: We lose transparency at the very local level when we don't have someone showing up to cover routine government meetings. And there's been recent research that shows when you lose on newspaper, citizens in a town tend to end up paying more in taxes because there's just no one reporting on the local bond issue. The second thing we're losing is the watchdog function, which expose corruption of both government and business executives and officials.

BOB GARFIELD: I’m thinking of the case of Bell, California, about 10 years ago, where the town council fleeced the citizens of millions and millions of dollars, largely in public meetings attended by no press.

It's something I've been talking/thinking about myself a long time as a result, but I've never taken action on. But the coronavirus pandemic made the struggles of local journalism that much worse-- as the above episode discusses, the problem newspapers have had is that they were largely advertising supported, and as advertising has shifted to the web, they've struggled to stay afloat. (Craiglist was a big part of the problem, as it destroyed the classified ads page.) The coronavirus accelerated this trend: businesses stopped advertising because they weren't open, so there were almost no advertisements to keep the newspapers going. My local paper, the Tampa Bay Times, went from a daily to a twice-weekly.

A lot of local papers are owned by big media conglomerates who aren't strong incentivized to keep the papers going if they struggle to make a profit, or to keep funding big newsrooms. But the TB Times is actually owned by a nonprofit journalism institute, and it is actually a pretty good paper, having won four Pulitzers in the last decade, and having been nominated for several more. So I've been thinking for a year now that if I believe the decline of local journalism is a problem, and if the TB Times is actually a good paper... why don't I do something about? But I never did.

Until a few weeks ago, when the spirit finally moved me. I think I was trying to read some articles on the TB Times website, and I had reached my free article cap, and instead of getting annoying and switching browsers, I was like, "No, you should just sign up." And I did. I did consider an online-only subscription, but a print subscription was only marginally more, and I felt like I was more likely to read the paper if I had an object in front of me. So now, early every Sunday and Wednesday morning, someone drops a newspaper on my driveway!

Attempts to get my wife to grab my pipe for me while I prop my feet up and read the paper after work have proven unsuccessful.

In a similar vein, I, like much of America, have been fretting over the November elections. After ten years of living in reliably blue (though not as much as people imagine) Connecticut, I once again live in a state that could have a big impact on the presidential election. FiveThirtyEight gives Biden a 59% chance of winning Florida; recent polls average out to Biden being about 2 points up on Trump. There's an 11% chance that Florida could be what 538 calls the "tipping point" state (the state that puts Biden over the 270 electoral votes he needs to win, if you line up all the states in order of margin of victory). According to JHK Forecasts, if Biden wins Florida, he has a 99% chance of winning the country as a whole; if Trump wins Florida, Biden's chances drop to 49%.

So anyway, it matters!

Additionally, I am kind of invested in our local races. I live in Florida's Fifteenth Congressional District, which takes in east Tampa suburbs, rural Hillsborough and Polk counties, and west Orlando suburbs. Because of recent demographic trends, it has gone from 60/40 Republican/Democrat in 2014 to 53/47 in 2018. In 2018, I attended a forum for the Democrats vying for the FL-15 nomination, and really liked Andrew Learned, a Navy vet and graduate of my own University of Tampa. Alas, he didn't win the nomination. This year, he's running for the State House instead, a seat currently held by a Democrat on the back of 2018's blue wave, but only very narrowly. 

I don't see a lot of yard signs in my neighborhood when I take my son out for walks (I feel like I saw more in 2018), but the ones I do see are usually for Trump. There was one house in the whole neighborhood with a Bernie yard sign back during the presidential primary; I don't think I saw any others for either candidate. One neighbor has a Trump 2020 flag and used to have a "Make Liberals Cry Again" sign, though that's gone now. After passing an Andrew Learned yard sign in a roundabout, I started to think, "Should I have a yard sign?"

My first reaction was to say no. I'm not quite sure why. My fear of commitment, of making definitive statements? A vague sense that it was somewhat gauche to populate your yard with advertisements?

But the more I thought about it the more I felt that my reasons were dumb. And the more I thought about it, the more I felt like I could make some small difference. I used to go office-to-office getting grad students to sign union cards, and I was notoriously good at it! I know people are reluctant to sign up for things, but also that their reasons for not signing up are usually not very compelling. What would I say if I encountered me, I thought?

So I "bought" a Joe Biden yard sign (in exchange for a donation), and made a donation to the Andrew Learned campaign (and asked for a yard sign), and made a donation to the campaign of Alan Cohn, who is the Democratic candidate here in FL-15. (If Cohn has yard signs available, there's no indication on his web site.) FL-15 is in fact the most "flippable" congressional district in Florida, and if it were to flip, Florida's House delegation would become majority Democrat. (Some people claim this could be important if there was an electoral vote tie!)

So, in some small way, I am matching my values with actions, because what are values without action?

If you want to know the more Steve Mollmann thing ever, though, it's this: I never actually read my copies of the Tampa Bay Times, because whenever I think about doing it, I also think, "but if you read a book instead, you will increase your 'books read' numbers!" I have no system in place for reading the paper, so I never actually do it.

Two Ways of Looking at Coastal Elites

As the title implies, the immediate catalyst for this post is the recent election and its fallout, where suddenly the term "coastal elites" seemed to gain major currency. But the thoughts behind this post have been percolating for a whole.

Where Are These Alleged Coastal Elites, Anyway?

I live in Connecticut. Connecticut voted for the Democratic candidate for president in the past seven presidential elections, since 1992. Connecticut is one of five states where Democrats control the governorship and the legislature. If you mention "Connecticut" to people not from New England, most of their understanding of it (if they have any at all, I sure didn't before I moved here) seems to derive from Gilmore Girls--  a tv show about the granddaughter of rich people who goes to Yale.

But my apartment is in an old mill town that went bankrupt in the 1980s, and once had the highest rate of heroin usage per capita in the country. It's a lovely place, and I'm happy to live here, but when I ride the bus with people working shitty jobs at the grocery store, or walk from the bus stop to my apartment past dilapidated buildings, I don't feel very elite. There's a guy I talk to at the bus stop most mornings who spent some time in jail (I'm not sure what for) and goes on rants about how much he hates Donald Trump. I don't think he's a coastal elite promoting radical identity politics. (The county I live in actually went for Trump, though, 51-43, something I wonder how many people who live in it even actually know.)

This article on coastal elites suggests that "[i]f you care about poverty, relocate to West Virginia or Memphis." But there's plenty of poverty on the coast. Polarizing America into the "heartland" and the "coastal elites" is a gross oversimplification that has very little to do with my actual experience of living on the coast.

Yet, They Exist

However, as someone who grew up in the Midwest, I have definitely encountered a bias against the noncoastal parts of America while living in Connecticut. As I am an academic, I mostly find this attitude in the way that academics think about working in the rest of the country. Do you know what's a fate worse than unemployment? Having a tenure-track job in the fourth-largest city in Pennsylvania. And the way this is expressed is often in a sort of taken-for-granted way-- like everyone in audience agrees with you that having a job like that would just be dire.

And also in my experience, it's a bias born of a lack of real experience. Now there's definitely a subset of folks who came to Connecticut from the Midwest and have this attitude that they're glad to have escaped it, and though I disagree with them, I know their opinions are at least founded on experience. But I have heard people say they could not work somewhere other than Boston, New York City, or Los Angeles who I know have almost been to no states that don't share a border with New York.

I guess I find it particularly disappointing because most English academics are all about diversity and open-mindedness-- but being willing to live in West Virginia or South Dakota is apparently a bridge too far. Heck, there are some who apparently find living in the part of Connecticut I reside in a bridge too far, and exude resentment that they've been exiled to a whole two hours outside of New York City. If you can't represent yourself and your values to people who don't necessarily share them, and you're an educator, I sort of wonder at your commitment to, well, education. You should be able to do more than preach to the choir.

The 72nd-Best of One Hundred Possible Worlds

For the past couple weeks I've been obsessing over statistics and possible outcomes-- for obvious reasons. Donald Trump is the President of the United States, an outcome that some people attributed a 1% chance to. Now, I am a statistical novice (stats was my least favorite high school math class, except for geometry), but I do like numbers. Put something into an Excel spreadsheet, and I am fascinated

I've been reading FiveThirtyEight since this fall; I know it's been around since 2008, and I discovered it in 2012 (my wife: "he doesn't say it, but I'm pretty sure this guy's a Bayesian"), but it was the utter mess of the Republican primary, and the fact that I felt more invested in the Democratic primary than I had been, that shifted me into being a regular reader of the site. Yet Nate Silver was as wrong as many others, predicting a Clinton win that turned out to be mistaken.

As opposed to Nate Silver, Scott Adams predicted a Trump landslide win. So Scott Adams was clearly right and Nate Silver was clearly wrong.

Or was he? Nate Silver's final forecast was that Clinton had a 71% chance of being elected president. He wasn't predicting a Clinton win; he was predicting that if there are 100 possible president elections, Clinton wins 71 of them. Was he wrong? We could be residing in one of the 29 other worlds. How would we know? How is it possible to know that?

Scott Adams may have said Trump would win-- but he said that Trump would win in a landslide. I'm not exactly sure how big is a landslide is, but I am pretty sure that slightly losing the popular vote isn't one. Also, not to get too ad hominem here, but Silver's prediction was based on polling, and you could have faith in it based on past success-- Adams's claim to fame is writing the comic strip Dilbert. I enjoy the bits where they belittle Asok the intern as much as the next guy, but it hardly requires intellectual rigor. My instincts tell me that despite appearances, Silver was more right than Adams.

The thing that bothers me is that there's no way to be sure. To my eyes, it looks like the final popular vote margin was within the "80% chance of falling in range" section on the final FiveThirtyEight prediction. And, you know, if Silver believed an event he predicted as having 71% probability, that would mean he would be wrong about three of every ten times. This is the third presidential election Silver's predicted, and 71% * 3 = 2. So it seems he was due to get it wrong. I guess if he calls the next seven elections wrong, we'll have more room to doubt him.

It seems very possible to me that Nate Silver wasn't wrong in any meaningful sense. But who knows-- we could be living in one of those 29 other worlds, or we could be living in one of 99 worlds that Trump won. Or maybe the guy who said Clinton had a 99% chance of winning was right, and we're in the one world where Trump won. It seems unlikely... but surely that's what the very meaning of "unlikely" implies, that it can happen.

I'm just waiting for the Nate Silver Plan.*

So I guess this is what bothers me about statistics. We don't just say events will or won't transpire; we assign them probabilities, but we have no way of testing that those probabilities were right. We can only say that the event did or did not transpire. We're a long way off from psychohistory.

Presidential elections just aren't repeatable in the same way as many events we assign probabilities to. In All-Star Superman, Superman has a machine in the Fortress of Solitude where he can create virtual worlds to find out what they would be like. (He does it to find out what a world without Superman would be like.) But short of having one hundred of those on hand, and setting each one to run through November 8, 2016 again, we have no way of verifying these predictions.

Though, maybe, we're in one of those simulations. After all, what are the odds?

* Alternate caption: I guess Trump is just the Mule of Nate Silver's psychohistorical predictions.

Robert's Rules of Order, the Republican National Convention, and Donald Trump

So I've been eagerly following the results of both U.S. primary elections, the first time I've ever really done this. In the case of the Republicans, it's not because I feel invested in the future of our country, but because in all likelihood there will be some parliamentary shenanigans, and what is more exciting than that?

According to FiveThirtyEight, it's unlikely that Donald Trump, despite currently having the most delegates, will have the 1,237 required to secure the nomination in the first round of voting. That's because the rules of the Republican National Convention require a majority (i.e., more than 50%) and Trump only has a plurality (i.e., more than anyone else). As a result, there is a possibility that someone who is not Trump could end up winning the Republican nomination even if he has more delegates than anyone else.

So: people are angry about this. In the comments on this Newsmax article (I don't know what that is, I just found it while trying to figure out if the RNC used Robert's Rules of Order), someone opines, "It's outrageous that the top vote-getter (either in the popular vote or in a delegate count that reflects the vote), doesn't automatically get the nomination. There is no point in having an election if following the voter's preference is optional. A plurality always wins." Or as someone else puts somewhat more levelly in the comments on the FiveThirtyEight article I linked above, "The controversy is that no one would expect the delegates for a candidate with the most votes would ever switch to another candidate. For instance, suppose one candidate had 45% of the delegates and 11 other candidate had 5% each." According to these Internet commenters (and I think many out there agree with them), the recipient of the plurality of votes ought to be winner.

This is actually an issue I've faced myself, as I was Parliamentarian of my university's graduate student deliberative body during a three-way midterm election for Vice President. This group operated by Robert's Rules of Order; the RNC does not,* but I suspect the principle was the same. Say you have a three-way race, and no candidate receives a majority, which is what happened to us. Like this:

Now, you might look at that and think, "Candidate B has more votes than anyone else; they should win." But what that neglects is that Candidate B is not the will of the majority of the assembly: in fact, a majority of the assembly voted against Candidate B. So why should they be in charge?

Some would say you should have a run-off election where Candidate C is removed because they received the fewest portion of the votes, and then so everyone can re-vote for just Candidates A and B, and almost inevitably one of them will get the majority. But Brigadier General Robert is not down with that at all. The eleventh edition of Robert's Rules of Order, Newly Revised specifies

if any office remains unfilled after the first ballot, as may happen if there are more than two nominees, the balloting is repeated for that office as many times as necessary to obtain a majority vote for a single candidate. When repeated balloting for an office is necessary, individuals are never removed from candidacy on the next ballot unless they voluntarily withdraw-- which they are not obligated to do. The candidate in lowest place may turn out to be a "dark horse" on whom all factions may prefer to agree.

For example, say Candidate A prefers Star Trek and Candidate B prefers Star Wars, and all of Candidate A's supporters consider Star Wars cheesy children's entertainment with an overstated cultural importance and Candidate B's supporters think that Star Trek is self-important, overmoralized nonsense. But Candidate C is a Stargate SG-1 fan and no one in the room really has a strong opinion on Stargate SG-1 (because, who does). For Candidate A's supporters, C is a better option than B (otherwise lightsabers are going to become mandatory accessories at meetings), and for Candidate B's supporters, C is a better option than A (because otherwise, "live long and prosper" is going to replace the Pledge of Allegiance at meetings). Candidate C becomes an acceptable compromise candidate because they just want everyone else to remember SG-1 exists.

So: despite the fact that Candidate C did not receive a plurality in round one of voting, Candidate C turns out to be the candidate the majority are most comfortable with, and after some haggling, they are elected to the office of whatever weird deliberative body this example is about. (In the case of the three-way election I presided over, nothing this clear cut took place, because no one had really staked out clear policy positions. Everyone had got about a third of the vote in the first round of voting, and after the second, things had shifted a little, but not very much. One candidate dropped out at that point, though, and thus a majority vote finally emerged in the third round. But the way things were going, we could have been there all night.)

"Point of order!"

All this is to say that if Donald Trump does not obtain a majority of delegates, and then does not get elected as the Republican nominee, that does not mean that the outcome doesn't reflect the preferences of the voters, or that democracy has been circumvented. It means the majority of people voted against Donald Trump, and they compromised on a candidate that would make that preference come to pass.

* They apparently use the same rules as the U.S. House of Representatives (see here), which is like... terrible. I mean, seriously awful.

Kate Stewart's Choice: Doctor Who and the Crisis of the Refugees

I'm sure others have commented on it already, but Doctor Who's recent story ("The Zygon Invasion"/"The Zygon Inversion") about terrorists hiding in a group of refugees has turned out to be eerily timely.

(If you don't watch much Doctor Who, the 50th anniversary special saw an invasion of Earth by the shape-shifting Zygons thwarted through peace negotiations; these stories reveal that the deal was that Zygons would take human form and be redistributed in secret to various locations around the globe, including Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, of crossword puzzle fame. Some of the Zygons, however, resent the deal their leadership struck, and demand to be able to live in their true forms.)

I was surpsised by how brazen an ISIS analogy it all was, even before the tragic Paris attacks. Televised Doctor Who occasionally does political commentary, but it rarely goes this relevant and this controversial; usually we get nothing more than "Paying taxes is a bit annoying," or "Dictatorships are evil." But "The Zygon Invasion" opens with a hostage video that ends in an on-screen execution, talks about young folk being "radicalized," and even engages with the ethics of drone strikes. At the beginning of it, I was a little skeptical, but once I realized that writers Peter Harness and Steven Moffat were just going for it all the way, I decided I liked it more than I didn't. And then I decided I loved it: it's big and brave and kind of mad and the analogy doesn't always make sense, but it has so much to say and gives the Doctor and Clara and the recurring characters so much to do.

A lot of the post-Paris attention to ISIS has been on whether or not we should continue to accept refugees. It's not a big part of the episode (more of the focus is on how do you convince someone to de-radicalize, and what are legitimate uses of violence in carrying out social change), but Doctor Who does engage with this question: near the end, Kate Stewart (head of UNIT and thus representative of humanity) has the option of pressing a button that will do one of two things: set off a nuclear bomb in the heart of London, or release a toxic gas that will kill every Zygon on Earth. The Doctor explains the meaning of the choice (in a tour de force performance from Peter Capaldi):

This is a scale model of war. Every war ever fought, right there in front of you. Because it's always the same. When you fire that first shot, no matter how right you feel, you have no idea who's going to die! You don't know whose children are going to scream and burn! How many hearts will be broken! How many lives shattered! How much blood will spill until everybody does until what they were always going to have to do from the very beginning. Sit down and talk! Listen to me. Listen, I just, I just want you to think. Do you know what thinking is? It's just a fancy word for changing your mind.

The situation we've gotten in real life isn't exactly like this-- refusing refugees isn't going to start a war-- but as states weigh in on whether or not to allow the resettlement of Syrian refugees (my state is thankfully among those that have said "yes"), Kate Stewart's choice is our choice: we can get rid of all refugees out of a selfish and misguided desire to promote our own safety above all else. We won't be killing anyone in the sense of pressing a button that causes death... but how many lives that are already shattered will remain so if we don't help these people?

Truth...

Kate Stewart chooses not to press the button, but not out of principle: rather out of fear of the consequences for her own side (i.e., humanity, and especially Britain). She doesn't decide that violence is not the answer in general, but rather that this particular instance of violence is too risky.

...or consequences.

Those aren't quite the consequences of our choice. There's no chance that not admitting refugees will have a negative impact on our own safety. But, out of principle, we shouldn't press that button anyway. We should stop the children from screaming and burning, the hearts from being broken, the lives from being shattered, the blood from being spilled. Hopefully, unlike Kate Stewart, we can make the right choice out of principle and not fear.