Two Ways of Thinking About Election Predictions and What They Tell Us About 2018

To understand the differences between quantitative, data-driven predictions and those made from traditional, data-influenced handicapping, one should direct their attention to the names of two websites: Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics, and my blog, The Crosstab. One is a reference to the soothsayer, a fortune-teller who stares into their glass ball and derives the fate of an event by evaluating some known and unknown factors. The other is a reference to the contingency table, a common tool in survey research that breaks down responses to a question by subsets of responses to another. The names of mine and this website are coincidentally descriptive of the ways in which our predictive methods differ.

In forecasting outcomes there are both harms and benefits to these two approaches. This piece evaluates those differences in the context of the 2018 midterm elections and delivers some much-needed attention to that which is common, not just contrasting, between the two. CONT.

G. Elliott Morris, Sabato’s Crystal Ball