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."

Comments

Electionprojection.com

[bcarl314]

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.

Re:We need popular votes to count!

[KilobyteKnight]

You must live in a highly populated state. Those of us in less populous areas appreciate the two baseline electoral votes we get -- just like the big states!

Most people have forgotten, or never learned, the reason for the electorial college. In the US, the states select the president, not the people.

Rasmussen Reports is another great source

[bareman]

of information that uses sound methods.

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/

Re:We need popular votes to count!

[swillden]

I'd say many of us know the reason, but the reason is about two centuries out of date. The fairest way to have your vote count (and if the state is solid red or blue, it won't) is to have national instant run-off voting.

If you're going to change the voting system, why replace a broken system with a semi-broken system? IRV is better than plurality but has plenty of problems of its own. Condorcet voting is a much better choice.

Right now we have tyranny of small states.

This is a understandable, and common, error, but it's still wrong. The EC has two conflicting effects. The most obvious is that it gives residents of low-population states a slightly larger fraction of an electoral vote than residents of populous states. The other arises from the fact that most states deliver their votes in a bloc. This means that large states are much more likely than small states to swing an election. We saw evidence of this in 2000; even though Florida wasn't the only close state, it was the only one that mattered because Florida has a large population and lots of electoral votes.

Several mathematicians over the last few decades have performed a rigorous analysis of the relative effects of these facets of the EC, based on a simple measurement of the power of a single vote: What is the probability that a given vote will swing the entire election? The result is that a voter in a larger state has more power to decide the presidential election than a voter in a small state, because the advantage of a big bloc of electoral votes outweighs the advantage of fewer voters per electoral vote.

It's also worth noting that a more detailed analysis which takes into account the current political structure of the nation was done recently, and it found that, currently, the EC doesn't favor either party and that the EC will currently only return a result different from a popular vote when the electorate is very evenly divided. In those cases, a single new story, or even just some bad weather, might change the outcome in any case. In other words, the EC might "change" the outcome when the difference in the popular vote is statistical noise anyway.