It has been three weeks since Democrats gathered for their convention, and Hillary Clinton still holds a large and consistent lead in national and battleground state polls. Her national lead over Donald J. Trump of seven to eight percentage points could slip a bit over the next few weeks. But […] Read more »
New August Electoral College Ratings
The two major party conventions are now behind us and the consequent bounces have had time to settle giving us a presidential race that isn’t over, but one that is fully developed. Many observers have noted that in the last six decades of modern presidential polling, the candidate with the […] Read more »
Do not confuse voter intention and probability of victory
On Tuesday the Monkey Cage at the Washington Post published an article, “Do betting markets outperform election polls? Hardly.” The article suffers from two common confusions around both prediction markets and forecasting in general. CONT. David Rothschild (Microsoft Research), PredictWise Read more »
Forecasting the 2016 Presidential Election: Will Time for Change Mean Time for Trump?
The Time for Change forecasting model has correctly predicted the winner of the national popular vote in every presidential election since 1988. This model is based on three predictors — the incumbent president’s approval rating at midyear (late June or early July) in the Gallup Poll, the growth rate of […] Read more »
Do betting markets outperform election polls? Hardly.
Can we trust the polls? That’s a real question these days. Pollsters have been trying — and not always successfully — to adapt their methodologies to keep up with cultural and technological change. … Some in the prediction business have wondered if we’re moving toward a “post-polling world.” Would prediction […] Read more »
Unskewing the unskewers: A look at the new theories for why Trump is actually winning
Here on Planet Earth, the best understanding of the state of the presidential race is that Hillary Clinton has a solid-but-not-insurmountable lead. Recent polls — statistically measured surveys of thousands of American voters — have shown Clinton up by anywhere from 1 to 15 points over the course of the […] Read more »