FiveThirtyEight.com: Regressions for Politics

Number two on my list (previous post) of technological innovations to political discourse and campaigning this year is regression modeling of polls. The first one that I saw doing something like this, though far more simplistically is realclearpolitics.com (RCP). Basically what they did is took an average of all the polls, without assigning any kind of weighting. This was good to give us a nice and easy quick look at where the polls stood for the election, and washing out, for the most part, the effects of left- or right-lean of polls.

I would check RCP during the primary season occasionally, just to get the sense of where things stood, but they often didn't get the right trends. Around the middle of the primary season, I came across the website fivethirtyeight.com.  At first, I was very apprehensive about the model. My initial reaction was that there would be a propagation of errors that basically rendered the results useless. But the genius of the regression model, wasn't just the polling but the way these polls were weighted, both with lean and with recency.

If you'd like to check out the FiveThirtyEight FAQ, please do so; I will not repeat work that is already excellently explained even if you're not mathematically inclined. I think many of us who were watching this campaign intently, and liked the numbers aspect, really came on board around the time of the North Carolina and Indiana primaries. It was at that point that I put 538 on my bookmarks and checked it daily. You will also notice that I now use the 538 widget on my right rail. 

A note about FiveThirtyEight.com is that the statistician in question is Nate Silver, of the baseball stats site, BaseballProspectus.com. Most of you know that I also have a baseball-related blog, Sabermetrati.blogspot.com, and am a big fan of Nate Silver's work on BP, which I reference regularly. I did not realize that it was the same Nate Silver until around early June, and it definitely lended more credence to his fine work on FiveThirtyEight.

My favorite part of 538 is the win percentage. I have been following that number since Obama officially won the nomination. It now stands at 94% chance of Obama winning the election, with a peak about a week ago of 98%.

Tuesday will prove the accuracy of Nate Silver's model; it should be interesting.

Welcome to My Blog!

And I'm sure I mean that literally, considering that the average readership of a blog is 1!

Despite that, I will try to post weekly, but if topics come up that are of interest and immediacy, I will at least attempt a quick note.

Who am I and why should you bother to read my blog? I can answer the first, and give inducements to the second, but ultimately you will decide whether your time is well spent here. Hopefully there will be lively discussions and a minimum of A**holes.

Answering the first question:
I am Dave Tainer, Director of Information Systems at GMHC, a New York City-based Non-Profit dedicated to the national fight against AIDS. In my role, I support the great staff at GMHC by providing them with the tools and the technology to do the best possible job. I offer strategic technological vision for the organization in its fight. Most importantly, I offer technological solutions to the myriad projects in organizing, testing, administering, counselling and record-keeping that are necessary on a day-day basis.

I've been involved in technology, directly or indirectly, since the dawn of the personal PC era, working for the government (Dept. of Energy, FEMA, both at Argonne National Labs), for-profit businesses, and teaching in the computer science department as adjunct faculty at DePaul University. Because I've worked in many different areas of IT (networking, programming, project management, strategy, vision, management, operational), I have a well-rounded view of all that technology can do, as well as what it can't.

I am also very interested in politics and can therefore speak of how technology is affecting our political culture and our political process. What has really sparked me to start this blog is the latest tech-related political flaps, namely, the following:

• Karl Rove's and the RNC's "lost" emails (hardware/software technology)
  
• the "1984" Hillary/Obama ad (viral video)
• The Giuliani campaign Website SQL flaw (Web/Internet)
• Voting Machines (hardware/software)
  

These all made me think that technology and politics are fast becoming like technology and business, heavily intertwined and inseparable. This is already ushering in a change in how campaigns are executed, financed, and viewed culturally. I will try to treat these topics in a journalistic fashion, that is, to tell the truth without distortion of my personal view of things. For the record, I'm socially liberal, but fiscally conservative, which, in these days, the loudmouths of the right refer to as "radicals". In any case, the blogosphere will act as my ethics board!

Let's hope this is the beginning of long friendship (just hope it's not with myself only)!