A blog about math, philosophy, puzzles, politics, and more.
[Edit: I no longer stand by the conclusions of this post. For more, see "How much do you believe your results?"] In 2012, Nate Silver wrote about elastic and inelastic states. An elastic state is one with lots of swing voters. This means that if the national electorate shifted by one percentage point, you would … Continue reading Should FiveThirtyEight’s elasticity index have a wider spread?
EDIT: See also, FiveThirtyEight's article on the same topic. Off-year elections will be happening across the US this Tuesday, November 5th. Here are some races I'll be keeping an eye on: Probably the most important election is in Virginia, where control of the legislative branch (both the Senate and House of Delegates) is up for … Continue reading A few things to watch this Tuesday
(Also, how to deal with leverage points when doing linear regression) If you closely follow FiveThirtyEight's politics coverage, like I do, there are some mantras you hear repeatedly. One of the most common is: general election polls are meaningless until the election starts getting close. See for instance A Year Out, Ignore General Election Polls; … Continue reading General election polls *are* predictive one year out
Note: this is a follow-up to an earlier post in which I describe a hypothetical platform for matching donors to opposing campaigns and sending their money to charity instead. Click here to read the post (this post likely won't make sense if you haven't read that one). In response to my post about a platform … Continue reading Incentives in the election-charity platform
(Edit: this post is now part of a two-part series. If the idea I describe below sounds interesting, see here for further analysis!) Across the political spectrum, Americans agree that there is too much money in politics. In a 2015 New York Times/CBS News poll, 84% of Americans said money has "too much" influence on … Continue reading Getting money out of politics… and into charity
Unexpected Values 