Montana: Where Nate Silver got it wrong in Election 2012

Last updated on: November 8, 2012 at 12:29 am by Justin Whitaker

Montana: Where Nate Silver got it wrong in Election 2012 2012-11-08T00:29:47-07:00 Justin Whitaker

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Nate Silver’s Montana Senate forecast from the NY Times

I almost minored in Political Science in my university days. I was president of my Philosophy Society for a while, and my local Golden Key International Honour Society. But other than that, I am, like most of you, a novice in the strange world of politics.

Yet, again like many of you, I watched this year’s election coverage with a certain level of neurosis and/or addiction. Early on, thankfully, I discovered Nate Silver’s prophetic blog fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com. Soon I was checking it twice a day. Simply put, it’s brilliant. If you haven’t discovered it yet, I’m sorry. It’s a bit late now.

But you can still buy his book.

The blog focused on the Presidential election, the title coming from the Electoral College’s 538 members. But it did also look at state-by-state Senate elections. His Presidential forecast is uncanny. Scary even. So scary that a website called http://isnatesilverawitch.com/ has been devoted to understanding his (supernatural?) powers.

The wonderful thing is that Nate didn’t hold much back. He openly discussed his feelings about various polls, gave greater “weight” to the ones that had better methodologies, and overall demystified much of the electoral process. In fact, for the last 2 weeks at least I have been utterly mystified that most of the media kept talking about “Romney momentum” and “too close to call” when Nate Silver had clearly shown that Romney’s “momentum” ended about a week after it started (beginning just after the first debate, Oct 5, and ending Oct 12), and that after Oct 20, Romney never had a better than 1 in 3 chance of winning. By November 5, Romneys chances were less than 1 in 10.

Apparently this caused a lot of ruckus amongst the pundits.

With my current cold and the fact that I’m in England, I couldn’t stay up to see the late night state-by-state numbers roll in as I might have back in Montana. But, with Nate’s careful number-crunching, I went to sleep confident that we would have 4 more years of Obama.

What I wasn’t so sure about was my home state’s Senate race, between incumbent Democrat Jon Tester and Republican Denny Rehberg (a long-time Representative). My parents, both relatively newly retired, have been stumping for Tester for weeks now, going door-to-door, cooking meals, and making phone calls. And I made sure to get an absentee ballot in to support him, knowing well that it wouldn’t mean much in the Presidential election.

Based on my parents’ data, and the polls (in the image), Rehberg had been ahead early on, but Tester was coming back and had, in the last week or so, overtaken the challenger in 4 out of 5 polls (with the 5th being a tie). In fact, Rehberg hadn’t won a poll since the Mason-Dixon poll on September 19. And Mason-Dixon, if you serf around Nate Silver’s site, seems to have a habit of giving strong advantages to Republicans (their last poll in Florida gave Romney a 6 point advantage, for instance).

So why hadn’t Nate suggested that Tester was more likely to win?

This is the Nate Silver blog post I want to see. I’m not sure if he was off in any of the other Senate races. But I would love a frank discussion of why he was wrong here.

Montana Senate results – NY Times

As you can see, Romney won handily, as Nate predicted. And Montana, if you look at the results, might be an understandably strange place. The rural-urban divide exists, sort of. Some of Obama’s strongest counties were Big Horn and Deer Lodge counties, each with under 5000 votes and, obviously, no great number of college students. On the other side we do have counties called Petroleum County and Carbon County (so much for a the liberal ‘green’ vote). Gallatin County, home of one of our two major universities, went to Romney, 51% to 46%. Obama only won two “urban” areas: ultra-hippy-liberal (my college town) Missoula and the Irish-Catholic-drunk-mining town (the town that most people in Helena, even the drunk Irish Catholics, refer to as “Butt”) Butte (Silver Bow County).

So why would Montanans, who voted overwhelmingly for Romney, support a Democrat for Senate? Patricia Cohen of the NY Times puts it fairly well:

When he won a Senate seat in 2006, Jon Tester, a Democrat and organic farmer, squeaked past his Republican competitor in this mostly Republican state in one of the closest races in the country.

He learned Wednesday morning that he had done it again, defeating Denny Rehberg, a Republican who currently holds the state’s only House seat.

Mr. Tester is a distinctly Montana brand of Democrat, and as such is often at odds with the mainstream of the national party. He is against same-sex marriage — though he stops short of calling for a constitutional ban — and favors strengthening gun rights.

Mr. Rehberg, who aligned himself with Tea Party values after his sixth re-election, in 2010, highlighted aisle-crossing moments this time. Thus, in a twist, the Montana Republican Party recently ran televised ads touting Mr. Rehberg’s votes against the budget plan proposed by Representative Paul D. Ryan, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, presumably to attract independent — and even Democratic — voters.

Simply put: Montana is weird. An anti-Gay marriage Democrat against an anti-Paul Ryan Republican. And that goes for all of our elected officials. Our last Governor (a Democrat) had a Republican running mate. That same Governor, if I remember correctly, admitted to enjoying a beer or two, while driving, around his farm – yet still finally, in 2005, made drinking while driving illegal in Montana.

Yes, you may remember Montana as the state that “didn’t have a speed limit” (the limit was in fact “reasonable and prudent,” whatever that means) and at the same time it was legal to have a beer while driving. Of course to drive at an unreasonable speed was still illegal, as was driving while drunk, but you can see where people might see Montana (even recently) as the “Wild West.”

So perhaps all of this weirdness made Nate’s head spin a bit too much. But our history of electing eccentric Democrats should have tipped him off – that and the polling…

But, as I said, I’m a novice here and Nate Silver is the undisputed heavyweight. I’m happy I discovered him well before the election and slept soundly as a result. But I’m very curious about where and why he went wrong, specifically in Montana. It would seem to be somewhere in his formula for the “State Fundamentals” (which have Rehberg up 8.5%) but just where, and how, is a mystery.

Activism

Politics

Previous Post

November 5, 2012

Buddhists in the News and News for Buddhists

Next Post

November 11, 2012 Toward a (Good) Buddhist Fundamentalism

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category Academia Activism American Buddhism Art Book review Buddhism Buddhism Today Buddhist Ethics Burma/Myanmar China Christianity Commodification Environment Gender Happiness Health Humor India Interfaith Islam Japanese Buddhism Kant Media / News Meditation mindfulness Photography Poetry Politics quicktakes Running Teaching Technology Thailand Theism/Atheism Theravada Tibet Tibetan Buddhism Travels Uncategorized Unitarian Universalism video Western Philosophy Zen

Select a Month June 2021 January 2021 November 2020 August 2020 July 2020 March 2020 January 2020 October 2019 August 2019 June 2019 May 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 December 2005 November 2005 October 2005 September 2005 November 2004 September 2004 August 2004

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz