What Makes Great Presidents and Good Models?

It depends on predictors, correlation—oh, and your opinion

If the title of this post made you think you’d be reading about Abraham Lincoln and Tyra Banks, you’re only half right.

A few weeks ago, statistician and journalist Nate Silver published an interesting post on how U.S. presidents are ranked by historians. Silver showed that the percentage of electoral votes that a U.S. president receives during his second-term election serves as a rough predictor of his average ranking of greatness.

Here’s the model he came up with (in figure 1), which I’ve duplicated in Minitab using the scatterplot with regression and groups (Graph > Scatterplot).

Figure 1: Model for percentage of second-term electoral votes for U.S. presidents

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Comments

Sanskrit-istics

My own opinion: in more than 40 years work experience I've been fortunate enough to meet ONE - just one - Statistician who speaks of Life events. All others, starting with Mr. Laplace and his ascendants, are obsessed with gambling figures. The Gallup's methodology is surely a great step forward in predicting outputs: but how is it that the officlal prediction of Italy's election outcome is based on surveying a 650 inhabitants nowhere village located between the Tirrenian Sea and the Alps? Italy's potential electors are 10 to the 5th as much. Let's therefore be more careful with charts, please, let's not make them another bible: as they say, effective charting is between the ears, not between the hands. Thank you.