… At this point, five days before the election, you are better off looking at the polls – state and national – which are probably going to be more accurate than structural models devised several months ago in predicting the winner (even if they are going to be far less […] Read more »
A Different Poll Question: Who Do You Think Will Win?
In the tight 2004 campaign, the polls that asked Americans which candidate they supported — all the way up to the exit polls — told a confusing story about whether President George W. Bush or Senator John Kerry would win. But another kind of polling question, which received far less […] Read more »
Forecasting Elections: Voter Intentions versus Expectations
Most pollsters base their election projections off questions of voter intentions, which ask “If the election were held today, who would you vote for?” By contrast, we probe the value of questions probing voters’ expectations, which typically ask: “Regardless of who you plan to vote for, who do you think […] Read more »
How Will The Undecideds Break? Another Take
There’s been a lot of speculation recently about how the remaining undecided voters will break over the next few days. … Even with the sampling noise in our data and other associated uncertainties (is the model appropriately capturing all the drivers of choice? Who will really turn out and vote?), […] Read more »
Pundits versus probabilities
… The most well-known quantitative analyst of politics is Nate Silver, whose FiveThirtyEight blog now appears on the New York Times website. … Unfortunately, Silver has become the target of a vitriolic backlash from innumerate pundits whose market dominance is under threat as well as ill-informed conservative commentators who think […] Read more »
The Night A Computer Predicted The Next President
Some milestone moments in journalism converged 60 years ago on election night in the run between Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower and Democratic Illinois Gov. Adlai Stevenson. It was the first coast-to-coast television broadcast of a presidential election. Walter Cronkite anchored his first election night broadcast for CBS. And it was […] Read more »