• RION [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    13 days ago

    I see what you’re getting at and it aligns with other things that I’ve heard–namely, that a swing state blowout to either side is more likely than 4-3 or 5-2. However, I still don’t think it’s accurate to says that these probabilities are dependent on each other. Like I said, they’re not dependent on each other, they’re dependent on the same thing.

    Republicans are up in every race, they have a very high chance of performing about the same across the board because people tend to vote for a party, not random candidates, therefore you’re underestimating how likely they are to sweep.

    Aren’t these factors already baked in to the individual races, though? Like, surely part of tuning the model is looking at polling performance in other races and adjusting based on how that will affect the race in question.

    • FunkyStuff [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      13 days ago

      Like I said, they’re not dependent on each other, they’re dependent on the same thing.

      I hate to sound like big-yud but Bayes’ theorem is really all you need here: in statistics those 2 things have the same effect on the probabilities. I agree with you that there isn’t a causal relationship between the outcomes in each race and the causal relationship is to the voter preferences upstream in the chain of causality, but P(Rs winning House|Rs win presidency) > P(Rs winning presidency) regardless of what causes what.