Reply #48: I hope "FIN" means that TIA is about to give this up

[OnTheOtherHand]

although I am not very optimistic.

I think it's meaningless to say that "the Final Exit Poll weightings of 43/37% Bush/Gore are impossible" (I mean, what? the computers blow up or something?), but I'm happy to stipulate that 43% of 2004 voters didn't vote for Bush in 2000.

As I explained at length months ago, my vote share assumptions are grounded in actual data from a 2000-2004 panel study. They reflect actual people's actual reports in 2000 of whom they had just voted for, as well as their actual reports in 2004 of whom they had voted for in 2000 as well as in 2004. Of course I don't think that the people in this panel are representative of the people in the exit poll. Given panel attrition, I would expect the people who made it through the panel to be more politically aware overall than the exit poll participants, and therefore somewhat less likely either to misreport their past votes or to defect from their 2000 choice. But I could be wrong. (EDIT: Of course another thing about the panel is that the respondents presumably overreported having voted at all. I haven't sorted out yet how that might affect my estimates -- e.g., whether maybe I should postulate less Gore'00->Bush'04 and more DidNotVote'00->Bush'04 -- but it certainly doesn't make the exit poll vote'00 question any more useful as proof of fraud.) Regardless, very little in my scenario is just made up.

TIA claims both that false recall doesn't matter, and that it contradicts the final weightings for me to say that 14+% of Gore voters defected. This seems to be invincible confusion on his part. If 14.6% (or whatever) of actual Gore 2000 voters voted for Bush, but many of them in 2004 report being Bush 2000 voters, then obviously (isn't it obvious? why isn't it obvious?) they won't show up in the exit poll as having been Gore 2000 voters, whether or not the exit poll is weighted to 2004 results.

Since there is no likelihood that TIA will understand this, say, the twentieth time I explain it as opposed to the nineteenth, I encourage anyone who has questions about it to PM me. Otherwise, I will assume that it is just the sort of thing that either one gets, one doesn't, or one doesn't care about either way.

Historically, a 48.5% approval rating appears good enough to win by more or less the margin that Bush won by. (This particular plot uses last available Gallup approval ratings; I've tried alternative specifications, haven't seen much difference.)


Since TIA presents no evidence about registration figures, there's nothing to refute there.

Then comes what TIA apparently regards as his definitive smackdown:

Finally, are we to believe your claim that Bush won by a 3
million vote margin? Because that is EXACTLY WHAT YOUR
IMPLAUSIBLE SCENARIO SUGGESTS. 

In other words, are you in fact telling us FRAUD WAS NOT
COMMITTED IN THE ELECTION? Because that is what your scenario
shows.  Difficult to imagine.

The challenge has not been met.
The Bush win scenario is IMPLAUSIBLE. 
It doesn't pass the smell test.

Short TIA: "I JUST DON'T BELIEVE that Bush won by 3 million votes." Umm, OK. That would have been a much shorter OP. Even shorter would have been, "I'm not LISTening! You can't MAKE me!"