This has been a rough year for pollsters and pundits, with prediction after prediction going painfully awry. Even those supposedly unflappable data journalists have found themselves stepping in it. But it’s not just the journalists and pollsters. Since I’m a professor of statistics as well as a blogger who often […] Read more »
How Obama will lift Clinton to victory, barely
At the American Political Science Association (APSA) meetings last week in Philadelphia, Charles Tien and I released our presidential election forecast, as did other political science forecasters. We called a narrow win for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, with 51 percent of the popular vote share (the Democratic and Republican total). […] Read more »
Presidential candidates are ideologically extreme. And they pretty much get away with it.
Most political observers are familiar with this basic logic: to win elections, you run to the middle. There, in the ideological center, is where the swing voters are. But, somehow, this doesn’t seem to happen. Candidates often appear to have views that are out of step with average voters. So […] Read more »
Whom to Vote For? Employees Tend to Follow Their Leader
… The results of a new academic study looking at the power of chief executives over the politics of their employees is stunning and perhaps unsettling. Three business professors set out to examine “how the political preferences of C.E.O.s affect their employees’ campaign contributions and electoral choices.” The results of […] Read more »
Why Clinton supporters shouldn’t panic
… This race was always going to tighten, as I have been telling audiences for my election talks for the past month. Those who point to 1964 or 1972 as electoral precedents in which an ideologically extreme candidate got crushed are misreading history. As Andrew Gelman points out, the results […] Read more »
Election forecasters try to bring some order to a chaotic political year
For those who wish this long and often dismal presidential campaign were over, help is already here. To the rescue have come the forecasters — political scientists with prediction models that have already called the election, in some cases many months ago. Their work will soon be published collectively in […] Read more »