Favorites November 7th 2024
This chart is just wild to me. Some other interesting ones are this map of vote shift by district in NYC (cached), where Manhattanites voted for Harris to protect minorities, while those same minority communities shifted towards Trump. Harris won more of the white vote (cached) (43%) than Clinton 2016(37%), Biden 2020 (41%) or Obama 2012 (39%).
Nate Silver's topline was that it was a 50% chance of either outcome, but the #1 and #2 most likely outcomes were essentially either Trump sweeps the swing states or Harris does. I used this exact chart to make play-money bets on Manifold and it paid off pretty well, because others saw "50/50" and translated that into "270/268" but that's not what it meant. When you hear that it's a 50/50 coin toss, you shouldn't expect that the coin will land on it's edge.
I've mostly switched to using Claude instead of ChatGPT unless I need it to run python inline.
Great idea to put the number of solar panels there on the chart, but it's electricity, so it doesn't include transport fuel use. But still really cool. We need to get more people above the one panel line.
It's been a tough year for incumbents everywhere, but our electoral system means this results in a massive shift in policy.
Longer Reads
• Short thread from a Data for Progress analyst on the election outcome. Here's the full article. Title is the TL;DR: "It's not about Turnout"
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Nice short quiz on how good your base rate knowledge is on previous world election outcomes. (src)(cached)
– 47 percent of voters thought Harris was too progressive, only 32 percent thought Trump was too conservative. (src)(cached)
– Regan's prophecy has come true, latino men were majority republicans. Less polarization along racial lines is probably good (cached). (src)(cached)
– The EU is going to have to defend Ukraine with Trump in office. Hopefully we don't give up Taiwan (cached) as well. (src)(cached)
– The generation with the most lead poisoning voted the most Republican. (src)(cached)
– Yglesias argues that the problem was: "Saying that his criminality and abuses are a national emergency that must be stopped at all costs, but acting like they’re actually a huge opportunity to shoot the moon." (src)(cached)
– That one French guy who was making big bets on Trump turns out to have done so because he commissioned his own private polls using a different methodology. Seems like a sign that prediction markets have a future. (src)(cached)
– A six point shift from the previous election against democrats is super bad, but it shows a good ground game that they kept it to only a 3 point shift in swing states. (src)(cached)
– Stancil's theory of media ecosystems still seems correct, people who voted for Trump were much more likely to be misinformed about basic facts (src)(cached)