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Stanford Predicts The Presidential Election
Can Sar writes "Today is the official launch of Stanford Predicts, a non partisan group trying to predict the 2004 Presidential Election. This project is led by and based on research by Professor Samuel S. Chiu of the Department of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University. Stanford Predicts is solely interested in predicting the likelihood of either candidate winning, for purely scientific purposes. While the formulas themselves were developed in previous years by Professor Chiu all data analysis is being done by undergraduate students. Stanford Predicts will be continuously updated with new predictions until election day. Please check out Stanford Predicts for more information."
According to the site, there is a 76.4% chance Bush will win the required states. It does not state (or even imply) that Bush will get 76.4% of the vote. Basically, it's saying it's approximately 3:1 odds bush will win, but that is far from predicting Bush will win 3x as many votes as Kerry.
I've been following along the election with www.electoral-vote.com, and while it's good to have predictors, I wonder how much impact these have on the outcome, do sites like this have a detremental effect on the election by creating a self fulfilling prophecy? Have there been studies on this effect, say a voter sees that bush has a 72%chance of winning, and decides that the country can't be wrong and goes along with it.
Anyway, I like electoral-vote's way of going about it better, shouwing actual state polls and the number of electorial votes each candidate has rather than a straight up prediction of the outcome in a percentage. Lets you see how close the race is as far as votes and what your effect based on your state can be, it's a lot more empowering when you see your state is very close and has a lot of electorial votes, and how close the candidates are.
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Besides the UMN site already mentioned above, I highly recommend everyone regularly visit RealClear Politics (whose rolling averages have become a de facto barometer for journalists), The Horserace Blog (Jay Cost crunches the numbers in a way that puts the mainstream press' attempts to shame, and explains every step of his analyses), and Daly Thoughts (the best single state-by-state analysis of poll trends).