One issue that animated some conversation during the 2014 campaign was not just whether the election could be forecasted accurately — it was — but how we should do it. Three of the forecasting models at media organizations — ours at Election Lab, The Upshot’s and 538′s — relied on […] Read more »
An initial assessment of Election Lab’s House forecasts
… Our final Election Lab forecast was for the Republicans to win 243 seats with a 90 percent confidence interval of 236 to 251 seats. Our forecast proved reasonably accurate. What about the individual House elections? There are 429 races for which the results are finalized, and our model correctly […] Read more »
One Reason the Democrats Lost So Big in Midterms: Exceptionally Low Voter Turnout
When turnout falls, Democrats perform worse in elections. That general pattern is well known. In making their forecasts, pollsters try to estimate what that turnout will be on the basis of previous elections. This year, pre-election opinion polls were off by the largest amount seen in over 20 years. Could […] Read more »
Who else had a bad night? Pollsters
The polls were wrong. And so were the predictions about how the polls would be wrong. Instead of being biased against Democrats, who still hoped they could overcome modest deficits in a number of states, the surveys of the 2014 Senate landscape turned out to have significantly underestimated Republicans. CONT. […] Read more »
What the Forecasts Got Right, and Wrong
The results of the midterm elections are in, leaving Republicans with at least 52 Senate seats, along with the likely addition of Alaska, where Dan Sullivan holds a four-point lead. … The results were not unexpected. The set of Senate seats up for election in this cycle favored Republicans. Polling […] Read more »
Voters Know Themselves Better Than the Pollsters Do
Yesterday’s elections provide further ammunition for the idea that we should pay less attention to polls of voters’ intentions, and more to polls asking them who they think will win. … Our analysis suggests that surveys of voters’ expectations were, once again, more accurate than the standard survey of voters’ […] Read more »