Obama campaign manager Jim Messina spoke with Mike Allen at POLITICO’s Playbook Breakfast spoke about critical the use of cell phones are in the future of polling. Read more »
Crowds Are This Election’s Real Winners
Forget about Obama versus Romney. The real contest in the 2012 election was about analytics. … In the latest skirmish, the quants won. They predicted the election outcome far more accurately than the pundits did. Therein lies a lesson for executives and policy makers alike: Wisdom and intuition may actually […] Read more »
The 2012 Election Was Good for Political Science
In late September, I was involved in an email exchange in which a historian stated that “Someone should do a piece cataloging down all the poli sci consensi being undone this season.” Now I can write with some confidence that the findings of the political science canon were largely confirmed […] Read more »
Gallup Blew Its Presidential Polls, but Why?
Last week’s presidential election has widely been seen as a victory for pollsters who, on balance, saw President Obama as the favorite before Election Day. But that wasn’t the case for the esteemed Gallup Organization. Its polling showed Republican Mitt Romney with a significant lead among likely voters 10 days […] Read more »
Applause for the Numbers Machine
The biggest winners on Election Day weren’t politicians; they were numbers folks. Computer scientists, behavioral scientists, statisticians and everyone who works with data should be proud. They told us who was going to win, but they also helped to make many of those victories happen. Three groups of geeks deserve […] Read more »
Votamatic: Evaluating the Forecasting Model
Since June, I’ve been updating the site with election forecasts and estimates of state-level voter preferences based on a statistical model that combines historical election data with the results of hundreds of state-level opinion polls. … With the election results (mostly) tallied, it’s possible to do a detailed retrospective evaluation […] Read more »