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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."
American University Professor Allan J. Lichtman, author of Keys to the White House uses a 13 key system to predict the Presidential winner (popular vote), and right now, the keys system favors Bush (9 to 4). Gore won his analysis in 2000 and the popular vote, but not the Presidency. It's possible something similar could happen again.
Wasn't it a public knowledge that the election will take place? It was all over the news.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
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.
This guy has the same sort of daily predictions. Funny his prediction for today is the opposite that Stanford predicts. I sent him an excel file demonstrating the use of error estimates and probabilities to get a better prediction, but haven't heard back. Though even with that the prediction would still be in Kerry's favor, so I'm not sure what all Stanford is and isn't taking into account. He apparently gets a lot of crap in his email from opponents.
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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I couldn't find info on which polls they used. Of course, some pollsters do a better job than others, and some even engage in push polling?*
So, it seems to me that feeding a different subset of polls will garner different results, and that the equilibruim is very stable -- change the Ohio or Florida poll by two percentage points toward Kerry and I'd bet the odds go from 3:1 to 1:1 pretty damned quickly. Likewise, fudge the CO, NH, and MN results toward Bush 2 points, and it might go from 3:1 to 5:1.
Surely they could do a better job about releasing their data and their polling selection methodology...
* baiting an answer. For example: Would you vote for George Bush even though he lied about WMDs and his wife once killed a man? Clearly not a good idea if one seeks accurate polling, but it's done all the time nevertheless. Just ask wiki about Sen. McCain's black baby born out of wedlock.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
Bush with 76.4% and Kerry with 21.0%?
l ection,_1988), and that was considered a landslide. Reagan beat Mondale 59-40 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._presidential_el ection,_1984), which is an even bigger landslide, but George W. Bush is no Ronald Reagan, and it's not the 80's.
I'm a Bush supporter and I cannot believe that'd he win by such a margin...
But, as expected, Kerry wins the West and East coast states while Bush wins in "flyover" states. I expect a GWB victory this November -- but I think it'll be more along the lines of 57% to 40% in terms of the popular vote with the third parties picking up the rest of the slack.
1. The site is predicting that Bush has a 76.4% chance of winning, not that he'd win with 76.4% of the vote.
2. 57 to 40? Are you on crack? Bush beat Dukakis 53-46 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._presidential_e
Sounds like my old sig, "Re-elect George W Bush because nothing is as amusing as angry liberals."
And it's true, for mouth-foaming incoherent rage, just wait till Bush wins. If Kerry wins, Bush supporters will be disappointed and concerned, but most of them won't be complaining about impeachment or disenfranchisement or how the election was rigged, blah, blah, blah.
Duuuude, you must be smoking crack. If Gore had won in 2000, the republicans would have made a much bigger fuss (at least in the media which would have seemed a lot larger than the democratic protests).
Hell hath no fury like a bunch of angry conservatives. That's the party that spent $50+ million dollars of taxpayer money to expose the fact that Clinton got a blowjob. If you think liberals are more whack than conservatives when it comes to getting uppity, you're nuts.
This is my problem with these sorts of things. While the polls are always statistically sound i have a 800-lb gorilla-sized sneaking suspicion that the polls being conducted do not accurately represent the electorate, in which case the statistical rigor gives way to a sort of bias in these results.
I've thought for a long time (since last spring) that Bush will lose by a not unsizable margin and people may actually be surprised on election day by the way the polls had failed to capture the public's true intent.
This is all purely anecdotal of course but i just think that since all of these polls are via land-lines (at who knows what time of day), they no longer capture a validly random sample. After all a shrinking percentage of people i know (all of whom vote) even have a land-line, and far fewer actually talk to any pollsters or their ilk - the urge to hang-up on these sorts of callers is just too overwhelming...
Though it may very well be me who is surprised on election day this is what has been brewing in my head lately...
We'll see, although i would bet that there'll be partying in the streets around the world on Nov. 2nd/3rd should Bush lose.
-tid242
With a few exceptions, secrecy is deeply incompatible with democracy and with science. --Carl Sagan
Either Bush or Kerry will get into office. They will spend our federal tax money however they want, generally kissing the ass of big business. We will continue putting hundreds of thousands of people in jail for drug use. We will continue pushing a litigious society with no hope for tort reform. Illegal industry groups (MPAA, RIAA) will be given even more power. And no matter what, Bush's friends will become much richer, and Kerry's friends will become much richer.
Feel free to supply your own!
I've been following elections for over 20 years in over six countries and various states. In that time I've learned two things (a) generally polls are eerily accurate (ignore them at your own peril) and (b) every so often there are certain elections which one can tell, almost from the get go, that previous historical norms won't apply and hence polls will mispredict the outcome.
The 2004 presidential election is one of those elections in which participation rate of voters will be way out of the norm, on the coat-tails of the 2000 stalemate and the strong anti-Bush feeling from the democrats.
Using historical data, Bush is slightly ahead as reported by the Stanford poll or electoral-vote.com. If we correct the data assuming a slightly higher participation for the democrats, the polls give an edge to Kerry of 284 electoral votes vs 254 for Bush.
In fact, I'll be somewhat optimistic because Jimmy Carter made the country ready for Ronald Reagan.
Does that mean Bush has made the country ready for another Jimmy Carter? Uh oh.
Seriously, I wish there were more Reagans and Carters around. They both were, in their hearts, genuinely good men.
Can you say the same about Bush and Kerry? I don't think so.
And yet Bush and Kerry were both nominated.
Something is wrong with the primaries when it produces these Bozos. There are better people out there. There have to be.
I'm rooting for Bush because I'm looking forward to the Civil War.
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).
They use the results of a number of polls. Since these polls are more or less independent of each other, it's mathematically acceptable to aggregate them (provided you do the simple stuff like weighting the polls according to sample size, etc.).
You say that the polls themselves are all biased in the same direction, reflecting the viewpoint of likely voters who answer their landline. While I can't invalidate that completely, the fact that multiple polls find similar results tends to weaken the idea. The question is open whether people who don't answer their landline lean toward one side enough to change the results. Also, polls of kids, who usually tend to track their parents' viewpoints, agree with the telephone polls.
It's possible that your friends think the same way you do, so to you it feels like everybody hates the President, when in fact most people like him.
sigs, as if you care.
far more likely the Bush admin will do *something* to attempt to maintain power.
I don't believe that any more than I did when they were saying it about Clinton. That would destroy the country.
It's bad enough the Democrats are doing everything they can to undermine our confidence in our election process, guaranteeing four more years of the stupid and loud complaining Bush isn't legitimate, should he win.
I don't see how anything you seem to be suggesting would do anything other than make 1968 look like a picnic.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
This guy's clearly an example of an earlier story on slashdot.
(I kid, I kid.)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
As a wise man said to me as we were standing in line at a job fair back in 2001- this ain't 1992, this ain't 1986, This ain't 1972, This ain't even 1968- This is 1929 baby- and this is the modern eqivalent of the soup line.
When it came to high tech, that guy was right. Completely right. This administration has already destroyed everything I liked about America- and showed me what a hollow shell puppet show our political process actually is.
Clinton had his 8 years and was worn out- quite litterally we found out this year. The people behind Bush are not the kind of people I'd want to meet in a dark alley. I'm convinced that something very much like organized crime is behind Bush- only slightly more legal, because they've manipulated our laws to make their schemes legal.
The division in this country over this election is far more violence prone than any I've ever seen before- or even can find anywhere in our history. It won't matter which man wins really- we'll either be tied up in court for a month or more, or we'll be sitting on a civil war, or most likely, both.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Where's the polling data to back these numbers up? Just clicking on the link to Wisconsin shows Bush with a 92% likelihood of winning, even though the headline states, "Kerry and Bush Remain Tied Among Likely Voters in Wisconsin". I wanna see sources, not magic numbers.
With the election being likely another 50/50 split, the real deciding factor is going to be how much voter fraud is going to occur, how much electoral fraud (Diebold is looking forward to delivering Ohio's votes to the President!), the margin of error with the voting machines, margin of error with the humans checking the voting machines, and the likelihood of another Florida.
Actually, if we can determine the probability of another Florida, we already know the outcome of the election (5 Bush, 4 Gor...er, Kerry) and we can all sleep in on Nov 2!
Here come da fudge!
Both support the war in iraq.
Both have spending plans that are in the red and both say they'll cut their deficit spending in half within four years.
Both support the patriot act.
Both support curtailing the 2nd amendment.
Both have increased the size and scope of the federal government.
The differences are Kerry wants to tax and spend while Bush wants to borrow and spend.
Kerry - Pro choice, Bush - Pro Life
So in conclusion I'd say yes they are both asshats.
Service guarantees Citizenship! Questions Guarantee GITMO.... Amerika Uber Alles!
Why don't you academics stop jerking off over week-early predictions and do something productive like research a cure for cancer,
You know, I think I'm OK with Political Scientists not treating cancer.
(Sloppy Thinking Sign #4: Lumping all members of a group together and discarding relevant distinctions. In this case, the point is that all academics are not created equal. Accurate poll research is one of the more useful things a political scientist can be doing, considering the general uselessness of that branch of "science".)
I'm thinking that medical researchers should also, in general, avoid research into alternative fuels.
Actually, we get what we deserve if the Stanford prediction comes to pass. Our kids will be left to cleanup the monumental mess Bush has made. The folks I really feel for are those outside our borders who will take the brunt of another 4 years of Bush and they had no say in their fate. Its all very sad. What a bunch of idiots we have as citizens.
Tax cuts only for the rich (well, bent very far in that direction), a war started over mistakes, a preemptive policy that will bankrupt us and leave (left?) our country with no credibility, Osama is still on the loose and quite capable of attacks around the world. I sure as hell don't feel safer and anyone with half a brain would not either.
4 more years of this nonsense? Wonderful.
Actually interest rates are going up steadily and the Fed cannot keep them low for much longer because it is causing the bond market to dry up. There was a recent issue of TBills that went nowhere due to our skyrocketing deficits. As the debt grows and takes a larger percentage of our governments income (Look at the GAO reports (graph) (simulation)) the only way to get outside (foreign) investors to buy our governments bonds is to raise interest rates. The other problem is the devaluation of the dollar which helps the debt to be worth less *real dollars* but negatively affects foreign investment.
If you had cashed out all your stocks in 2001 after the crash (9/11 & Bush Economy combined) and converted your money to English Pounds at a 0% interest rate you would have gained around 25% over 3 years. Beats the hell out of the stock market. The monitary policy of this administration is very poor and is making the prospect of a bright future very unlikely.
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