Poll-Based System Predicts U.S. Election Results For President, Senate

An anonymous reader writes "Election Analytics is a website developed by Dr. Sheldon Jacobson at the University of Illinois designed to predict the outcomes of the U.S. presidential and senatorial elections, based on reported polling data. From the site: 'The mathematical model employs Bayesian estimators that use available state poll results (at present, this is being taken from Rasmussen, Survey USA, and Quinnipiac, among others) to determine the probability that each presidential candidate will win each of the states (or the probability that each political party will win the Senate race in each state). These state-by-state probabilities are then used in a dynamic programming algorithm to determine a probability distribution for the number of Electoral College votes that each candidate will win in the 2012 presidential election. In the case of the Senate races, the individual state probabilities are used to determine the number of seats that each party will control.'" You can tweak the site by selecting a skew toward the Republican or Democratic tickets, and whether it's mild or strong. Right now, this tool shows the odds favor another four years for Obama, even with a strong swing for the Republicans.

Comments

Re:How is cutting anything being a Democrat?

[SuperKendall]

1) What does promoting domestic energy entail?

Not blocking domestic energy production or things like the keystone pipeline. No subsidies required.

If you dislike subsidies, ask Obama - BP was a huge donor of his (before the spill) and he did nothing about them. He only dislikes smaller homegrown efforts at energy production, preferring to ship pollution to where we cannot see it.

Standing up to China . . . oh dear, he must be a fool. How does he intend on doing this? Very vague.

I agree yet what has Obama done in relation to China and human rights?

What job training programs? Are they actually even worth a damn? Even if, is this something the government should be subsidizing?

No, I don't think so either. But then it's up to states to decide if that's a waste of time or not.

Stand up to teacher unions? Because those damn teachers are leaching all our tax money by making as much as factory workers.

You mistake TEACHERS with the union. Let's say we abolish the department of education. Why not do that and distribute even half that money across all 50 states educational programs? The department of education is nothing but OVERHEAD. We should be eliminating overhead, and make sure that suck teachers can be fired as opposed to the position lock-in they have today. That alone would do wonders for the system. There are a lot of great teachers, lets support them and schools instead of bureaucracy.

This is a vague way of saying: dog-eat-dog. Washington's regulatory climate does little to stifle small businesses

Really? You should try asking small businesses that question, they don't think so because they have to deal with the paperwork. Increased regulations are the way corporations protect their position against smaller companies, and it works quite well - as we have seen by the giant corporations that cannot grow while lots of smaller innovative businesses close.

You claim that Obama has "lots of little plans". WHAT ARE THEY? I have precious little confidence to give to a guy that cannot even come up with a budget that a SINGLE member of his own party is willing to vote for. He's been in charge four fucking years, where the FUCK are these fucking wondrous plans you imagine he has, and why did he not play them yet? He has gone nowhere.

It was almost as if you were trying to convince yourself to not feel bad for your allegiance.

I am a Libertarian. I do not like Romney much (or liked him less before anyway, the Paul Ryan pick improved his image quite a lot in my mind). But after looking at real positions I find I must vote for him, from a purely fiscal practical standpoint. There is no more runway on correcting the looming fiscal disaster, we are at 16T of debt and growing faster every day.

You seem AWFULLY calm about that given that the person YOU are defending shows no sign of trying to resolve that issue. You like a guy with "plans" that you cannot even define, nor will he... madness.