Gadgetory

hello and welcome to this election day special of inside scoop as if you couldn't tell from the stickers im sue me Dawson with me is daniel Terdiman senior writer for cnet also sporting a sticker well done you voted so we're going to talk today about Nate Silver who has a blog fivethirtyeight blog which is also featured on the New York Times site tell us about nate silver and what he does so Nate he's been doing this since 2008 before he worked for the New York Times what he does is he essentially takes all the available polling that's out there and he aggregates it and comes uses a pretty sophisticated you know algorithm to wait the polls and figure out which ones are kind of you know have have more relevance or more accurate and then sort of jams it all together and thanks formula yeah and then what he does this is so the most important part of what he does is he runs a hundred thousand daily simulations of the election based on all his data and then spits out probabilities of what's going to happen okay and he takes polls from I would imagine the the gamut from left to right from liberal think tanks too conservative outlets right right well yeah he's like I said it takes any available pulling but he he he's a SAS Titian and he takes each pole and kind of assigns it a weight based on its recency based on that polling firms historical accuracy you know and then you know throws in things like you know what the the demographics demographics are in a particular state and so you can't say that one poll is automatically you know weighted the same as another poll and he's kind of built the system around figuring out the the sort of variance isn't mad and he's proven in the past to be pretty accurate okay so he's got a good track record doesn't and what does he predict for this election well because we're all too impatient to wait till the end of the day are an election day last I checked he was predicting ninety-one percent chance that that President Obama would be reelected with about 313 electoral votes and you need 270 electoral votes to win so but the the thing that's gotten him a lot of attention is that you know a couple of weeks ago when you remember that after the first presidential debate President Obama's poll poll numbers sort of drop governor Romney's numbers start to go up and a lot of the polling was actually showing Governor Romney ahead or you know very close and so the sort of the the media narrative at that point was this race is too close to call there's no way to tell maybe even Romney's ahead because Obama had been ahead all the way along suddenly Romney might have been ahead all through that nate silver at five thirty eight was saying no my numbers still show that that obama's is safely ahead and the reason is it boils down to the way that our presidential elections work is it's actually not a national election it's 50 state elections plus the District of Columbia that's how the electoral college works and he has shown that Obama has been ahead in Ohio all along and Ohio is the state that's going to make the difference this year elbows down to a high almost at Ohio and so into a lesser degree Florida not Florida is not sort of key this this year okay yeah he has this thing called the tipping point States it's a graph and you know it shows which state is most likely to be the the tipping point in the election in ohio is like an order of magnitude above any other state so does that explain what you just said that that then explains why we see all these other polls that are saying you know it's a dead heat it's forty seven percent of forty-eight percent is so closely tied and it's too close to call right and the reason that those polls are those narrative is happen is because those people are focusing really on a national polling only and are not looking at the State polling ok does this represent sort of a shift away from traditional polls the attention that nate silver is getting over the past four years now that the last two elections and away from you know the gallup polls a pew research center poles that sort of i think i think what it does is it is it changes the the narrative so you can't focus on any one poll and it used to be that Gallup was the standard write a new gallup you know this candidates ahead and in the gallup poll therefore that's probably what's going to happen now I think what nate silver and other people and it should be noted he's not the only one who has a sort of an aggregator model with what they're trying to say is you can't focus on any one poll because anyone pole can be an outlier and so the sort of the the theory there is if five polls say this and one poll says this even if it's gallop you can't necessarily trust it you got it you kind of kind of look at where the other ones are all grouping together okay but I think at the same time I think it's actually put more attention on polling I think people pay more attention to the idea of pulling and I think it's kind of exciting it's a horse race kind of thing yeah we're definitely glued to their computers refresh refresh absolutely Daniel tournament thank you so much and if you haven't done so already go get your sticker for inside scoop I'm stupid ass thanks for watching