From: John Conover <john@email.johncon.com>
Subject: Re: Bush/Kerry optimal wagers
Date: 1 Nov 2004 01:04:32 -0000
There are two days to the election, and although the numbers on the
popular vote between Bush and Kerry have closed, the probability of
Bush winning has not changed-in fact, it is slightly better, (the
reason is that there is less time for the fractal to change.)
There is about a 2% difference between Bush and Kerry in the popular
vote, or about 1% if its regarded as a zero-sum game, (in the lay
sense, ignoring the formalization of utility in zero-sum games; what
one wins, the other loses.) With 2 days left, the fractal could be
moved by about sqrt (2) = 1.414%, and the standard deviation
corresponding to 1 / 1.414 = 0.707 is about a 76% chance of Bush
winning.
However, (and its a big however,) the 18-29 year old vote could sway
the election in Kerry's favor-if there is adequate turn out; they are
not counted in any of the polls. Fortunately, this age demographic is
Internet savvy, and an assessment can be made from their 'blogs.
The rel(1) program at http://www.johncon.com/nformatix/ was originally
developed to monitor "BizWire," and other press release agencies for
equity related information, and feed it-nearly real time-to
tsinvest(1) to give it a "heads up."
After seeding wgetrel(1) with a quick search of Google, (wgetrel(1)
will "read" the HTML search presentation from Google,) and letting it
run for several days-searching the Internet for political 'blogs-about
65% of the 'blogger posters favor Kerry. (All I did was to pick out a
thousand favorable Bush messages and messages from a thousand Kerry
supporters, strip the phrases from the 'blogs postings, and feed it
back to rel(1) as a series of n-grams, in an iterative search
technique.)
There will probably be about a hundred million voters turn out on
November 2, and if 2,000,000 / 0.65 = 3 million of them are in the
18-29 year old demographic, it would nullify Bush's lead.
John
BTW, if the younger demographic voters determine the election this
year, it is very feasible that there could be a third party with
enough resources to be a threat to the Democrats and Republicans in
2008. A lot of the n-grams indicated no favor of the Republicans or
Democrats, only a lesser-of-two-evils on some single specific issue.
(A viable third party may not be in the best long-term interest do to
Kenneth Arrow's so-called "Impossibility Theorem," BTW, the ranking of
priorities is intransitive between 3, or more, ideologies, and there
can never be a mechanism by which cooperation/compromise can be
achieved.)
It is probably a virtual certainty that there will be voting legal
challenges. Using Bush to win the electoral vote with 55%, and the
popular vote by 60%, the chances for Bush to win the electoral vote,
and not the popular, is 0.55 * 0.4 = 0.22. Likewise for Kerry, it is
0.45 * 0.4 = 0.18. Taken together, 0.22 + 0.18 = 40%, which is the
chance that whoever wins either the popular or electoral vote will not
win the other.
--
John Conover, john@email.johncon.com, http://www.johncon.com/