it’s really easy to build bad models. A model is supposed to describe something in the real world, and if you lose sight of the real world and it fails to describe the real world, then it’s the model’s fault and your fault for building the model, and not the real world’s fault. And that’s a lesson that people, I think, have a lot of … [ Read more ]
Author: Nate Silver | Source: The New York Times | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society
In short, it appears as though educational levels are the critical factor in predicting shifts in the vote between 2012 and 2016. You can come to that conclusion with a relatively simple analysis, like the one I’ve conducted above, or by using fancier methods. In a regression analysis at the county level, for instance, lower-income counties were no more likely to shift to Trump once … [ Read more ]
Author: Nate Silver | Source: FiveThirtyEight (November 22, 2016) | Subjects: Excerpts, Politics & Public Policy, Trump