“In the short run, the market is a voting machine, but in the long run it is a weighing machine,” Benjamin Graham, the guru of value investing, once wrote about the stock market. His words seem to apply as well to prediction markets like Intrade, which set probabilities on the […] Read more »
September Polls and November Outcomes
Jay DeSart and I have done some work over the years on using September state-wide trial-heat polls to predict presidential election outcomes in the states. … Jay has been good enough to update our model and provide forecasts for the 2012 election. Here’s what it looks like: [cont.] Tom Holbrook, […] Read more »
Nate Silver: The polls aren’t wrong
We are drowning in polls and predictions. Whether it’s politics, sports, economics or even the weather, there’s more information and data than ever. But how much of it is white noise? How many of these predictions have rigor and mathematics behind them, and how many mask uncertainty or ideology behind […] Read more »
Romney or Obama? Political scientists make their predictions
Are you ready to call the election? Mitt Romney certainly isn’t, nor for that matter is President Obama. But a few hardy academics have done so. Out now are a baker’s dozen forecasts produced by political scientists that predict the outcome in November. Polls give Obama the advantage, nationally and […] Read more »
FiveThirtyEight Forecast: G.O.P. Senate Hopes Slipping
Democrats are now favored to retain control of the Senate when the new Congress convenes in January, according to the FiveThirtyEight forecast, breaking a summer stalemate during which control of the chamber appeared about equally likely to go either way. … The only thing that seems completely assured is that […] Read more »
Forecasting U.S. House Elections: Democrats Gain 1 Additional Seat
… We developed a model that includes two types of fundamentals: 1) national factors like the economy that affect every race to some extent, and 2) district-level factors like whether an incumbent is running for reelection. We then ran this model for all House elections from 1952 through 2010, and […] Read more »