Last night, Bernie Sanders pulled off a stunning upset in Michigan that almost no one expected — after all, he had been trailing by more than 20 points in much of the polling mere days before. Why were the polls so wrong? CONT. Jeff Stein, Vox Read more »
Why The Polls Missed Bernie Sanders’s Michigan Upset
If Bernie Sanders were to defeat Hillary Clinton in Michigan’s Democratic primary, it would be “among the greatest polling errors in primary history,” our editor in chief, Nate Silver, wrote Tuesday evening when results started to come in. Sanders pulled it off, and now we’re left wondering how it happened. […] Read more »
State of election markets
Donald Trump dropped from almost certain to highly likely this week on the strength of (1) Mitt Romney openly pushing to a brokered convention and (2) his surprising loss in Maine (coupled with closer than expected wins in Kentucky and Louisiana). CONT. David Rothschild, PredictWise Read more »
‘Magic’ Terre Haute
Election news is awash in unreliable polling and pundit guesswork. But what if there were a better way to divine the will of the electorate? What if there was a “Magic Town” that dependably reflected the mood and preferences of the country as a whole? It’s a notion that has […] Read more »
The psychology of predictions
The 2016 election season is awash in bad political prognostications…just like every other election season. But if pundits are always so wrong, why do we keep listening? And more importantly, why do the media keep airing them? Philip Tetlock is a professor of psychology and management at the University of […] Read more »
To Know Who’s Leading in the Voting, Just Ask Google
I’m always looking for new methods for predicting elections. And in this election cycle, Google might be on to something. It now releases sufficiently fine-grained data that it is possible to track in real time the number of searches for each candidate, zeroing in only on those searches that come […] Read more »