Mr. Bayes Goes to Washington

摘要

One day before the 2012 U.S. presidential election, former Reagan speech-writer Peggy Noonan wrote that "nobody knows anything" about who would win, asserting that Republican candidate Mitt Romney's supporters had the greater passion and enthusiasm (7). From a similarly data-free remove, columnist George Will predicted a Romney electoral landslide. MSNBC's Joe Scarborough said "it could go either way ... anybody that thinks that this race is anything but a tossup right now... should be kept away from typewriters, computers, laptops, and microphones, because they're jokes." (2)