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Daily Electoral Predictions
Robin Berjon writes "
If you are both a political junkie and a statistics addict, I highly recommend Electoral Vote Predictor 2004, a site that gathers a collates polls taken in individual US states according to a well-documented method and uses that to generate a daily map and victory prediction, alongside a short and insightful analysis of the current trend. The site also includes a wealth of information for past maps, detailed tables, tools, links, the Senate elections, and much more. It also has a convenient RSS feed so you can get your daily fix."
How I wish the US presidency was determined by popular vote and not some archaic electoral system.
...the Supreme Court? I can't find anything on that site that tells me who they're planning on appointing.
FIRST DEMOCRATIC POST!
I've dirtied my hands writing poetry, for the sake of seduction; that is, for the sake of a useful cause. --Dostoevsky
How much longer until this is fixed, and I can exclude this stuff from my front page?
Is there a way to block politics stories from the home page? I checked "Politics" in my home page preferences under "Exclude Stories from the Homepage" so that they wouldn't show up but I still see them. Games stories also still show up even though I have them selected to not show up as well. Is this a bug or is there some other setting I need to turn on or off?
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Agreed ... this and those asanine "Ask Slashdot" questions... oh, for the days when excluding topics worked!
I have been to this site several times before. And while I certainly think it is great from the standpoint that the information presented is (as far as I can tell) totally void of bias, the source of the information isn't quite so grand.
While polls certainly give a reasonable idea of how votes would fall, it's well-known that poll numbers can be fairly easily slanted.
All things considered, I enjoy reading it every morning.
Proudly supporting the Libertarian Party.
Unfortunately, given /. tendencies...we'll probably bring them down shortly, ensuring that no one has access to their information.
politics is like vegetables: just shut up and accept your daily allotment -- it's good for you! remember how your mom wouldn't let you leave the table until you finished your brocolli? well, now that you're all grown up you can't read slashdot without having the politics section show up in your face.
The site uses the latest poll available, even when that means using a biased survey or Likely-Voter samplings, so take the site with a grain of salt.
One that I've been frequenting, thought I don't agree with his political beliefs, is electionprojection.com Lot's of state by state information.
Yes, and it's up to the states to choose the electors.
It's not too late for Deep Blue states to have their legislatures direct the electors to re-elect Dubya by Popular Acclaim. Skip the cost of the election. After all, our Republican Party leaders know what's Right for us.
Nice link.
I also like Rasmussen Reports.
of information that uses sound methods.
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/
Here is a good site for betting odds on upcoming state and federal elections. Although the odds change over the course of the campaigns, they claim to have a pretty high rate of eventual accuracy.
http://www.campaignline.com/oddsmaker/
This election will stand out as one in which the statistics were nearly useless. For all practical purposes the two candidates are tied. This means that a very small random event could tilt the balance towards either candidate. Say, a simple slip of the tongue near election day and the candidate takes the day.
Furhtermore enough things have gone wrong with the current incumbent (no WMDs found, bin Laden still on the lam, Iraq is a quagmire, the ballooning deficit) that a sudden shift in favor of Kerry could well take place. Don't believe me? Look at the election polls for Carter-Reagan. Then just like now, things were not going well for the incumbent (inflation, Iran hostages, Nicaragua contras) but the polls had Reagan and Carter tied until just a few weeks before the election, when the gipper gave a masterful performance during one of the debates. Reagan ended up wining the electoral college with ease.
Also checkout this site which displays an electoral map/vote projection based on contract prices scraped from TradeSports.com/InTrade.
TradeSports.com is an online gaming site which sells contracts for all sorts of assertions: from sports betting, to political election outcomes. Some of the most actively traded contracts on TradeSports.com are related to the U.S. Presidential Election.
The site above scrapes the average bid price data from each of the state-by-state contracts for the assertion "George W. Bush to win the November 2004 Election."
A winning contract pays $USD 10, and a point costs $0.10. Thus, it can be assumed that a bid price > 50 indicates that the TradeSports.com market believes George W. Bush will win the election in that state, while a bid price below 50 indicates a win for John Kerry.
If you don't like the default rulesets (Bid prices between 45-55 unprojected; projection made with the bid price rather than the ask price; etc), the site allows you to configure your own parameters.
The state-by-state contracts trade rather thinly -- usually, only a few hundred dollars a day -- so take day-to-day movements with a grain of salt. The total size of the market is quite large, however -- totalling just under $1 million when all the states are combined. The site currently projects a win for George W. Bush, with 284 electoral votes.
- James
Pretty much all the polls we see are of "likely voters", a group which is made up mostly (or entirely) on the people who voted in the last election. This may be a useful measure in the average election, but not this one.
The 2004 election will have a much, much higher turnout than 2000. In 2000, it didn't seem to matter a whole lot who got elected. In 2004, most everyone knows someone who has lost their job and/or knows someone in Iraq. A lot of people are still genuinely angry about Florida's lack of concern for voting rights or even following their own laws. At the same time, Bush hasn't given his more casual supporters a reason to come vote for him -- the best they've managed to do is spread a bunch of half-truth (or outright lying) reasons why they *shouldn't* vote for Kerry.
More new voters have already registered for this election than any other since 1992. That should tell you something, and logically it doesn't seem like good news for Bush if these polls are showing a close race...
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Likely voter polls are already highly subjective. Each polling outfit has their own method of determining likely voters, usually based on historical trends. Democrats will tell you that their base is more likely to vote this year than in elections past, due to their extreme dislike of George W. Bush.
How would you weight the likely voter polls higher? What weight would you use? Any method in which you weight certain types of polls higher seems highly subjective to my mind. I'd prefer a main projection based on the latest polling, with separate projections which break out adults/registered/likely. 14, 30 and 90-day trend lines would also be sweet.
- James
Now instead of only affecting the electorial votes of a mythical state called Lincoln, it can effect the whole country. So rather than only create enough votes for the party in favor to win the state, I just create enough votes to throw the election for the whole country.
That said - there are allegations that this has happened in the past in two states so that a certain young senator could be elected president. The only difference is that the big bad nominee for the other party decided to wait his turn to come, rather than going to the supreme court to try to get the election overturned
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
FIrst off Ohio is still blue even though Kerry's ratings have gone down after the RNC.
Second Virginia is not a toss up state and is heavily bush the last time I looked Bush was ahead by almost 9 points!
So who knows.
http://saveie6.com/
but has anyone got any statistics on average schooling levels in each state? It would be fun to see if the more educated crew votes more for one side than the other.
The system is not archaic, in the sense that it does not serve the function which it was created to do. For better or worse, the founders decided that the unity of the country was a higher priority than strict popular power, and so a deal was struck that gave small states proportionately more power. Obviously, it raises the possibility of a candidate winning while losing the popular vote (or at least the votes of the most populous states), otherwise the founders would have specified popular elections (or electors numbered in proportion to state population, which is not the same thing, but is closer in spirit).
The system last time did in my opinion do one thing that is extremely important in an electoral system: produce a clearly legally legitimate winner. Maybe there was skullduggery in FL, but the way the system works is that it is the electoral college that matters. Once the elector casts his vote, that's it. If the criterion was constitutionally that a plurality had to be won in FL, we'd still be arguing over the legitimacy of the Bush presidency.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Does it take into account voters whose vote is easily swayed by surveys such as these?
I hear you. I saw that big red streak through the deep south, too. Yee-haw! Bush for four more!
The race is complicated by Louisiana's quaint view that politics should be kept out of politics, so the Senate election is nonpartisan. Rep. Chris John, Rep. David Vitter, state treasurer John Kennedy, and some minor candidates are all running without party affiliation in the Nov. 2 election. If no candidate gets 50%, there will be a runoff election a few weeks later. Insiders think it will be Chris John vs. David Vitter in a runoff. Runoffs are generally on a Saturday, giving more working class people a chance to vote. Once the race coalesces to one Democrat vs. one Republican, the Democrats have a good chance to hold the seat.
politics != partisan.
The "primary" in Louisiana is not a matter of running without party affiliation. It is a matter of not supporting the two-party system. All candidates run on their own merits, and the two highest scoring candidates go on to the runoff. Even if they are from the same party (which happens as often as not). Exception: if one candidate in the primary gets >50% of the vote, there is no runoff.
So, while this assumes that there will be a Democrat and a Republican in the runoff, that is by no means certain. I have voted in runoffs where the choices were two Republicans, two Democrats, one of either and one other unaffiliated, and occasionally one each Republican and Democrat.
My own opinion is that there will be one of each this time. Next time, who knows?
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Interactive map here. Flash based, it lets you change between different scenerios and see how the outcome would differ if certain states go one way or the other.
--Residential Interior Design
Right. Because the kids in NYC are so erudite and sophisticated, while the South and the West are raising a bumch of hoodlums.
Oh, wait...
Yeah, because I know I look at a guy challenges Chris Matthews to a duel after giving a speech that proves the value of Snopes.com and think "reasonable voice of moderation".
http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/i nfo-battleground04-frameset.html
Just thought I'd chime in with the WSJ map - they only update a few times a month but it's fairly in-depth.
Is 270 simply more than half of the EVs? If a viable 3rd candidate gets 100 EVs, does the presidency still go to whoever gets the most EVs even if it isn't a majority?
Princeton Professor Sam Wang's Electoral College Meta-Analysis
Ed Fitzgerald's Electoral College Survey (updated on his blog)
Here is the Iowa Electronic Market's prediction graph of Bush vs. Kerry.
If nobody gets more than half the electoral votes cast (270) the house of representatives decides, one vote per state, out of the top three electoral-vote winners.
This site says the House still needs 26 states to elect a President. Does that mean if the House votes 20, 10, 10, they have to keep voting until 6 switch to the 20 for a majority?
Yes. There has to be a majority for the house to pick a president, and if they fail to before the previous president's term ends (they have from noon on Jan 3, when their term and session begin, to noon on Jan 20, when the new presidential term begins), normal presidential succession decides who will be acting president until they work it out.
It's one reason that it's extremely difficult to sustain a viable 3rd party in the US -- since most states give all their Electoral College votes to the winner of the state.
Hence:
a) It's extremely hard for a 3rd party to gain a significant # of Electoral votes. (e.g., Perot, who did reasonably well ~10-15% pop vote IIRC, but no EV.)
b) When a 3rd party does well, the election is decided in the House -- which essentially takes it one step further from the direct election.
Personally, I'd love to see states go to proportional electoral votes -- e.g. a state with 3 votes and a 55/45 split gives 2 to the majority winner, but still gives 1 to the loser. All of a sudden, more states get attention.
And I'd love to see an instant-runoff system in the electoral college. So I could vote for candidates in order of preference and support a third or fourth major party!
Let's face it. Many people in the country are completely turned off of politics. The presidential election gets more voters, but I have the sense among many of my friends (including some who don't vote) that the last few elections haven't had many truly exciting candidates.
I realize that. If all the states would give EVs proportionally, and 3rd parties could get some representatives in the House, it would be a start. Of course the system is broken since the House votes by State. Unless the 3rd party has more representatives in a state than either of the other parties, it is powerless.
This graph has just been bouncing wildly, like people haven't already decided who they will (or won't) vote for. I'm sure that in the end most of them will just let the media decide, then rush to the polls to pass on that decision, to give them a sense of community. Maybe vote for Bush because the president said they should.
http://www.electoral-vote.com/info/graph.html
Yes, EC has several effects, and one of them is the firewall effect that you mention. A corrupt machine (Chicago 1960 as you mention) can tilt just one state.
... Daley's machine in Chicago could offset votes from downstate. I've lived in both downstate Illinois and in a Chicago suburb (a long time after 1960 though!) and they might as well be different states.
More than that, though. Consider a swing state that is very evenly contested. That's the kind of state where vote fraud is most valuable. But that's also a state where both parties have plenty of resources to bring out pollwatchers, media coverage, lawyers and judges.
In a state where Party X has all the resources and Party Y has few resources, Party X is gonna get the electoral votes from that state anyways, even in an honest election.
Imagine how much corruption there would be in areas like New York City which are dominated by one party, if the corruption in NYC could swing a national election.
All this doesn't apply as strongly to states like Illinois with a large urban machine that votes differently from the surrounding rural areas
I can get the Carter-Bush parallel, where Carter was floundering and ineffective. Bush definitely has that problem in Iraq. He might have that problem with the domestic economy, too; or he might not.
But I don't buy the Reagan-Kerry parallel. Reagan had strong committed beliefs and stood up for them. Kerry's not like that at all. Dean is more like Reagan in that regard, and Dean is out.
Reagan and Clinton shared an extraordinary ability to convince millions of swing voters that with them in power, the government would be on their side. No major candidate this year can do that.
I'm also thinking of a 1972 comparison, with Bush comparable to Nixon (unpopular domestically, also presiding over an unpopular foreign war), but Kerry isn't comparable to George McGovern either.
I think I'd have to say "replay of 2000". But this time, the Democrats are going for the big turn-out. I predict that Bush will get as many popular votes as he got last time, and Kerry will get about 5% more votes than Gore got last time, which will be enough to win.
(My bias? I'm voting for Michael Badnarik).
No-one could seriously think that Zell Miller expresses the views of Democrats. He's an old segregationist outraged that the democrats have abandoned racism.
I find it rather curious that the states with the highest support for Ralph Nader are Idaho and Montana, both at 6%. Does anybody have any insight as to why he is (relativly) popular in this corner of the country?
Ideology is for ideots.
I hear you. I saw that big red streak through the deep south, too. Yee-haw! Bush for four more!
Dude, I've met and worked with the red-state "Yee-haw" crowd, and I grew up with and live within the blue-state over-educated pinhead crowd. Although one group may statistically have more years of book-learnin', it is clear to me that neither has a lock on wisdom, and I'd far rather have our leaders elected by the very wise than the highly-schooled.
Don't be an "Urban Supremacist" and slam entire swaths of people in places you've never been. It's bigoted and small-minded.
Looking at the numbers, there are a few states that they say are "exactly tied." That's probably not going to happen, but it seems there's still a chance that somebody might not get the required majority of the electoral votes this time around.
Does everybody know who their member of Congress is?