… For at least the past three election cycles, some bloggers have predicted the winner of the presidential election in each state with an accuracy that seemed to border on wizardry. Their secret? Aggregating dozens of national and state polls conducted throughout the election campaign, and applying statistics. Much attention […] Read more »
Why The Signal won the election forecasting game
There are two questions to ask when evaluating a political prediction, whether it’s from Nate Silver, a pollster, an academic or your favorite Yahoo News predictions blog: A) How useful was the prediction the day before the election? B) How useful was the prediction the day after the election? [cont.] […] Read more »
Predictable in retrospect: The dangers of hindsight bias in election postmortems
The media has undergone a strange change of mindset. Immediately before last Tuesday’s election, many reporters and commentators ignored or dismissed the consensus among forecasters and betting markets that President Obama was very likely to defeat Mitt Romney and acted instead as if the candidates were neck and neck or […] Read more »
Who got it right in 2012
Post-election, the discussion of “who got it right” has pretty much begun and ended with Nate Silver. I’m a fan of Silver’s, but some other names deserve to appear on the honor roll. So here’s who I trust more now that the election is over. [cont.] Ezra Klein, Washington Post Read more »
A Victory for the Pollsters and the Forecasters
Now that the Florida authorities have finally confirmed that President Obama defeated Mitt Romney in the Sunshine State by a margin of 50.0 per cent to 49.1 per cent, we have all the results and data we need to talk about what happened in the 2012 election, and who got […] Read more »
The Statisticians on the Bus
One of the strangest things about the final days of the 2012 presidential campaign was that the battle between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney became something of a sideshow, at least in the greenrooms of Manhattan and Washington, D.C., and on the Acela trains that shuttled the crème de la […] Read more »