Election Hangover: A Few Thoughts

The first few days after an election are my favorite. Polls and predictions step aside to make way for analysis. We finally have results to work with. In light of those results, here are some thoughts:

1. Nate Silver is not a genius. (Via Daniel Engber for Slate)

Nate Silver didn't nail it; the pollsters did. The vaunted Silver "picks"—the ones that scored a perfect record on Election Day—were derived from averaged state-wide data. According to the final tallies from FiveThirtyEight, Obama led by 1.3 points in Virginia, 3.6 in Ohio, 3.6 in Nevada, and 1.9 in Colorado. He won all those states, just like he won every other state in which he'd led in averaged, state-wide polls. That doesn't mean that Silver's magic model works. It means that polling works, assuming that its methodology is sound, and that it's done repeatedly. 

. . . So picking winners state by state was the easy part. Anyone who glossed the numbers would have made the same projections. But Silver's model promised more than that: He offered assessments of his confidence in each state's results. The fact that Obama led in Ohio polls made it obvious that he should be the favorite, but what if those Ohio polls were wrong? How much risk was there in trusting state-wide averages? This was Silver's nifty contribution: He assigned that risk a probability, by looking at some other factors, such as polling trends and local demographics. Take the example of Virginia, where Obama led by 1.3 percentage points. Picking him to win the state was a no-brainer since he was leading in the polls, but Silver used his secret sauce to calculate the chances that those polls were wrong. According to his calculations, the risk was 21 percent, meaning that Obama's odds to win the state were roughly 4-to-1. 

What do the day's returns tell us about the accuracy of Silver's model? Nothing. The fact that Obama won Virginia looks good for averaged polling—indeed, his margin appears to be a couple points, not far off from what was predicted—but we'll never know about that other part. Did Obama really have a 79 percent chance of winning? To get a sense of that, we'd need to run yesterday's election like a lab experiment, doing it 10,000 times to see how often Obama wins. Since that can't happen, we're left to scratch our heads. 

Silver lovers aren't waiting for these comparisons. They're riding high on victory, and giving credit to the bearer of good news. In doing so, they’ve made the same mistake that Silver's critics made last week: They've confused his projected odds with hard-and-fast predictions, and underestimated the accuracy of polling. The fact that Obama won doesn't make Nate Silver right, any more than a Romney win would have made him wrong.

2. The electoral college is not the devil.

Funny how no Republicans were saying this in 2000. Via Tara Ross for the Heritage Foundation:

The Electoral College was considered to fit perfectly within this republican, federalist government that had been created. The system would allow majorities to rule, but only while they were reasonable, broad-based, and not tyrannical. The election process was seen as a clever solution to the seemingly unsolvable problem facing the Convention -- finding a fair method of selecting the Executive for a nation composed of both large and small states that have ceded some, but not all, of their sovereignty to a central government. "`[T]he genius of the present [Electoral College] system,'" a 1970 Senate report concluded, "`is the genius of a popular democracy organized on the federal principle.'"

3. This is why the GOP lost.

In light of last night's electoral outcome, allow me to briefly summarize parts of Mike Lofgren's The Party is Over.

1. Tactics: War Minus the Shooting

"The Republican Party has used objection, obstruction, and filibustering not only to block the necessary processes of government but also in order to make ordinary Americans deeply cynical about Washington. Republicans perpetually run against government and come out on top. But, in the process, they are undermining the foundations of self-rule in a representative democracy."

2. All Wrapped Up in the Constitution

"Like biblical literalists, Republicans assert that the Constitution is divinely inspired and inerrant. But also like biblical literalists, they are strangely selective about those portions of their favorite document that they care to heed , and they favor rewriting it when it stands in the way of their political agenda."

3. Taxes and the Rich

"The GOP cares, over and above every other item on its political agenda, about the rich contributors who keep them in office. This is why tax increases on the wealthy have become and absolute Republican taboo."

4. Worshipping at the Altar of Mars

"The GOP loves war more than it supposedly hates deficits." 

5. Media Complicity (related)

"Despite the widely believed myth of its liberalism, over the last thirty years the media landscape has become increasingly wired to favor Republicans. The press's current combination of fake objectivity and campaign fetishization has been carefully exploited by Republican strategists for political advantage."

6. Give Me That Old-Time Religion

"The religious right provides the foot soldiers for the GOP. This fact has profound implications for the rest of the Republicans' ideological agenda."

7. No Eggheads Wanted

"Consistent both with its strong base of support among fundamentalists and with its authoritarian belief structure, the GOP is increasingly anti-intellectual and anti-science.

Early Morning Thoughts On Nate Silver

I've been up since 4:45AM this morning. My dog got into a bag of Oreos the other day and is battling some Bridesmaids à la Melissa McCarthy bowel movements. The bad news? The whole 4:45AM thing. The good news? I'm pretty sure I was the twelfth person to read this.

Mr. Silver puts Pres. Obama's chances of re-election at 92%, up from 86% yesterday--a move that's sure to stoke the fire of those who insist on his liberal hackery.

But is it hackery? No. Is it mathematical MAGIC?! No. Mr. Silver is simply reading the writing on the wall, and in nothing doth man offend fellow man, or against none is his wrath kindled, save those who confess not media bias in all things, and obey not his partisan leanings.

Yet the attention/wrath/adoration that Silver has elicited this election cycle points to a worrisome trend in political science, while I'll detail later.

Allow me to "pull a Silver" and aggregate some news opinions leading to my own personal analysis. First, from fellow wonk Ezra Klein:

Come to think of it, a lot of the odder critiques of Silver have been coming out of Politico. But that makes a kind of sense. Silver’s work poses a threat to more traditional — and, in particular, to more excitable — forms of political punditry and horse-race journalism. 

If you had to distill the work of a political pundit down to a single question, you’d have to pick the perennial “who will win the election?” During election years, that’s the question at the base of most careers in punditry, almost all cable news appearances, and most A1 news articles. Traditionally, we’ve answered that question by drawing on some combination of experience, intuition, reporting and polls. Now Silver — and Silver’s imitators and political scientists — are taking that question away from us. It would be shocking if the profession didn’t try and defend itself.

More recently, we in the media — and particularly we in the media at Politico — have tried to grab an edge in the race for Web traffic by hyping our election stories far beyond their actual importance. The latest gaffe is always a possible turning point, the momentum is always swinging wildly, the race is endlessly up in the air. It thus presents a bit of a problem for us if our readers then turn to sites like Silver’s and find that none of this actually appears to be true and a clear-eyed look at the data shows a fairly stable race over long periods of time. 

My guess is Silver and his successors will win this one, if only because, for all the very real shortcomings of models, election forecasters have better incentives than homepage editors. For instance, note that all these attacks on Silver take, as their starting point, Silver’s continuously updated prediction for the presidential election, which includes point estimates for the popular vote and electoral college, and his predictions for the Senate races. Those predictions let readers check Silver’s track record and they force Silver, if he wants to keep his readers’ trust, to make his model as accurate as he can. That’s a good incentive structure — certainly a better one than much of the rest of the media has — and my guess is his results, over time, will prove it.

And a right-leaning op-ed in yesterday's Washington Post via Michael Gerson:

The current mania for measurement is a pale reflection of modern political science. Crack open most political science journals and you’ll find a profusion of numbers and formulas more suited to the study of physics. In my old field of speechwriting, political scientists sometimes do content analysis by counting the recurrence of certain words — as though leadership could be decoded by totaling the number of times Franklin Roosevelt said “feah” or George W. Bush said “freedom.” 

This trend in social science, according to Yuval Levin of National Affairs, is “driven by a deep yearning — fed by a kind of envy of modern natural science and its power — for the precision of mathematics in a field of study whose subject can yield no such certainty.” The modern belief that only science yields truth results in the application of scientific methods beyond their proper bounds, and the dismissal of other types of knowledge, including ethical knowledge. Political science seems particularly susceptible to precision envy. 

Politics can be studied by methods informed by science. But it remains a division of the humanities. It is mainly the realm of ethics — the study of justice, human nature, moral philosophy and the common good. Those who emphasize “objective” political facts at the expense of “subjective” values have strained out the soul and significance of politics. It is an approach, in the words of G.K. Chesterton, “that stores the sand and lets the gold go free.” 

Over the past decade, there has been a revolt among political scientists against a mathematical methodology that excludes substantive political debates about justice and equality. A similar revolution is increasingly needed in political commentary. The problem with the current fashion for polls and statistics is that it changes what it purports to study. Instead of making political analysis more “objective,” it has driven the entire political class — pundits, reporters, campaigns, the public — toward an obsessive emphasis on data and technique. Quantification has also resulted in miniaturization. In politics, unlike physics, you can only measure what matters least. 

And so, at the election’s close, we talk of Silver’s statistical model and the likely turnout in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, and relatively little about poverty, social mobility or unsustainable debt. The nearer this campaign has come to its end, the more devoid of substance it has become. This is not the advance of scientific rigor. It is a sad and sterile emptiness at the heart of a noble enterprise.

***

Polls are an utter waste of time. I'm inclined to like Nate Silver for the sheer fact that he aggregates and condenses dozens of them into one coherent, detailed analysis--a useful heuristic that saves me time, energy, and hair-pulling.

Yet I also side with Gerson in his frustrations with modern political science methodology. It's not just a matter of there being black swans that we can't predict. It's a matter of trying to quantify the unquantifiable--human behavior--and having that distract from issues far more relevant. Quantification has indeed resulted in miniaturization. "In politics, unlike physics, you can only measure what matters least."

Back to Klein:

If Silver’s model is systematically biased, there’s a market opportunity for anyone who wants to build a better model. That person would stand to gain hugely if they outpredicted punditry’s reigning forecaster (not to mention all the betting markets and all the other forecasters). The math behind what Silver is doing isn’t that complicated and the polls are easily available.

Incapable or unwilling to do this, Gerson seeks instead to trivialize Silver's work. It's a cheap trick, but Gerson makes good points in the process.

Anyway. In only a few short hours this will all be over (ALHAMDULILLAH) and every additional word I write here will be no more relevant than the one that preceded it (that is to say: not at all). In closing, here is my prediction for the electoral map. I suspect I'll be wrong on New Hampshire, and Florida is a complete toss-up. Wouldn't be surprised if we saw a recount there, but I think Pres. Obama will win by more than 30+ points in the electoral college, so this won't be a 2000 repeat by any means.

Postscript

Additional thoughts on Gerson. Not like you care. But for what it's worth, this came up during a FB conversation with Ryan Decker. I think he makes an important point about Gerson's argument.

I think Gerson's real complaint is that he wants political science to limit itself to political philosophy (after all, that would make it easier for innumerate pundits like him to compete). Philosophy has its place, of course, but there are a lot of highly policy-relevant questions that are best answered with good quantitative analysis. What matters is choosing the right tool for each job, then using it correctly. Demanding that the discipline limit itself to tasks for which quantitative tools are inappropriate is demanding that the discipline severely limit its relevance. 

What I think Gerson is missing is that the move towards quantitative analysis in poli sci is not driven by illusions of hard science. I've known a few political scientists (and quite a few other social scientists), and none of them have ever indicated that they think they're a hard science or that running a regression will make them one. The urge to use quantitative tools is driven by the simple fact that a lot of questions are best answered by them, and poli sci people saw that if they didn't tool up someone else would get to pursue those questions. 

What I'm saying is that Gerson is preaching to the choir. He built a straw man about social scientists thinking they are physicists, then he knocked it down--all as a way of feeling better about his innumeracy

In my experience with political scientists, what Decker says is true. They aren't striving to turn a non-science into a science, they don't seek legitimacy in numbers.

Unfortunately, that very claim is at the heart of Gerson's argument, which is why the rest of it doesn't really hold water. There are snippets of tangentially related truth, like I alluded to above in the "yet" paragraph, but after my conversation with Ryan I felt the need to  qualify them. Honestly, I should probably qualify the "yet" paragraph even more, but the heart of this post is about Nate Silver, not political science methodologies. I'll have to save that discussion for a future post!

Try to contain your excitement.

Brutalful

We ate all this during the run and THEN some. Mexican for dinner the night before, oatmeal in the morning, bagels and cream cheese at Phantom Ranch . . and still lost weight. 

Laying out our gear the night before. My dad came prepared for EVERYTHING. He pretty much would've had the supplies to give me surgery on the trail. 

This sign admonishes you not to hike from the rim to the river and back in one day (about 18 miles). Psch. 

After five solid miles of downhill, there's only one thing worse than seeing ALL THIS downhill to go. And that is knowing that you'll have to climb it 36 miles later.

About eight miles in! Sun finally up.

Bridge over the Colorado River. This was taken right after we saw a man in a BATMAN costume hiking up the South Rim. I guess it's a Halloween tradition for some people to do a rim hike in costume!

Ten miles of rolling terrain before the ass-kicking ascent up the North Rim. This is where we met an 18-year old kid named David who was prepping for the same run we were doing. He and his dad had a van parked at the top of the North Rim--they gave us ice-cold sodas once we got up there! 

Right above Roaring Springs, about to hang a left to head up the trail to the North Rim. 

The trail up the North Rim got pretty gnarly. I listened to Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir" on the way up which perfectly captured the majesty of the canyon. Randomly, the next song was Debussy's "Claire de Lune" . . . which also perfectly captured the majesty of the canyon. Led Zeppelin and Debussy. Who knew?

Nearing the top of the North Rim! FINALLY. You can see the canyon we came up and how it snakes off to the right. Oy. This is about where the song "Don't Fence Me In" came on my iPod.

I reserve the right to a nasty 80's combover hair after 36 miles.

Weakest fist-pump ever, but who cares? DONE.

We rolled into our Best Western at around midnight--physically exhausted, but not quite sleepy. Bodies are weird. After eating everything left in our packs (and some serious loopiness from Dad!), we fell asleep at around 1:30. Only slept a little while though. It's hard to rest when you're so sore!

The next morning we hobbled over to the motel's surprisingly awesome breakfast buffet, spent a few minutes in the jacuzzi, and lifted weights in the exercise room to released lactic acid. Then I drove ten hours home.

Equal parts brutal and beautiful--brutalful!--just about sums it up. We may have to make this a yearly tradition. Or every other year. Or never again.

The Grand Canyon: Rim to Rim to Rim

A little more than two years ago, I wrote a post about how crazy my dad was. We'd just had a conversation that went like this:

"Dad, are you feeling good and ready for your ultramarathon tomorrow?"

"Meh. Not really. But I'm signed up, so I guess I'll do it."

Welp, I am truly my father's daughter. Things came full circle when, last week, my mother asked me the same question, and I replied in the same way. The longest training run I'd done in preparation had only been thirteen miles long. I had no idea  what I was in for in terms of elevation gain and loss. I'd be running with trekking poles and a 10-lb daypack...had I trained with either of those things? NOPE. 

Yet somehow, at 4:30AM last Saturday, I found myself waking up to run 46 miles in the Grand Canyon with my dad.

Had I known what a mother this run would be, I honestly would not have agreed to do it. There are two things that make this run brutal: First, 11,000 feet of elevation gain. That's pretty ridiculous in and of itself, but on paper it didn't seem, like, crazy. My first ultra was four miles longer with 9,000 feet of elevation gain, but it also had an average altitude of 10,000 feet. This ultra crammed more elevation gain into fewer miles, but hey! Lower altitude! That washes everything out, right? WRONG.

Here is what an elevation map of most ultras looks like. Mile 1 at far left, mile 50 at far right.

You gain a little, you lose a little. You gain a little more, you lose a little more. It's a gradual build.

Here is what an elevation map of the Grand Canyon rim-to-rim-to-rim ultra looks like:

BOOM! Two huge  sections of elevation loss and another two huge  sections of elevation gain. Do you have any idea how hard that is on your quads, calves, and knees?! Not only that, but the miles at which those sections occur are mentally  tough. You gain 5,000 feet at miles 18-23 (for marathoners, this is the zone where most people "hit the wall"), and 6,000 feet on the homestretch (miles 35-46).

So yeah. It was pretty much Thrash City. I became well-acquainted with the Four Levels of Post-Ultra Gimpiness:

1. Frankenstein: Knees don't bend at all, arms out for stability 

2. Zombie: Stiff and robotic, but hey! Knees bend a little!

3. Wedgie Walk: Pretty self-explanatory.

4. Normal

As of yesterday, I'm officially back to normal. And quickly gaining weight being sedentary, so I better get my butt back on the trails. I'll write more about the actual run tomorrow (with pictures). Man, that Grand Canyon is something.

Top of the South Rim, near the start of the Bright Angel Trail.