The midterm elections in the United States are today. Who’s leading, and who’s going to win? This is prime season for FiveThirtyEight, The Economist, and others to use their own election prediction systems to try to answer those questions. They build statistical models, drawing heavily on polls and other information, to simulate the possible outcomes. …
Given their potential to impact behavior and be misinterpreted, it’s important to understand how pervasive these predictions are in people’s media diets. To do that, I looked at some data from Comscore. Comscore maintains a panel of more than 1.3 million people who consent to having their internet activity measured. Using this panel data, which tracks desktop browsing behavior, we can estimate just how many people visited FiveThirtyEight’s and The Economist’s forecasts in 2020. CONTINUED
Nicholas Diakopoulos (Northwestern), Nieman Lab
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