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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.
Fox news tells me that Romney will win 59 states and sweep Obama and his extreme socialism away forever.
Meanwhile, 13 out of 10 slashdotters are supporting Ron Paul, so clearly he is the only possible winner.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Then again there is this one http://dailycaller.com/2012/08/23/university-of-colorado-prediction-model-points-to-big-romney-win/ that has been correct every time since 1980 that says Romney will win big.
It's renown among serious pollsters as a paid-for propaganda site.
Instead, consider "wasting" your vote in a different way: By voting for someone who isn't running on a major party ticket.
Maybe if enough people realize that their vote in their state isn't actually important when it comes to choosing the next president, they can cast a vote that says "the next next president shouldn't be a Republicrat". Only 6 states in the country aren't 90% in favor of one party or the other, and with the exception of florida, none of them really have much in the way of population. If you live in a 90% state, and were going to vote for the "lesser of two evils", why note vote for "neither of two evils". It'll make no more difference, but a much stronger statement.
It's worth noting that this analysis includes data from Rasmussen, a pollster whose track record at predicting election outcomes is marred by a persistent, consistent bias. Not that they're faking the results (as some overtly partisan pollsters do), but their methodology appears to over-represent demographics that are more likely to vote Republican. According to one analysis, they overestimated votes for Republicans by 3.9%. Andrew Tanenbam's web site has a concise explanation of what's wrong with Rasmussen's numbers, and why he maintains a separate map that omits them from his own Electoral College projections. So if a system that includes Rasmussen data projects that a Democrat is going to win the presidency... that's a pretty strong indicator of which way the wind is blowing.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
It's an interesting model, but feeding a poll aggregate into a statistical prediction algorithm has been standard practice for years now. On the internet, fivethirtyeight is probably the first prominent site to have done so (originally as an independent site, before the NYTimes bought them).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I predict that our next president will be an asshole.
And the one after that, too.
And the one after that.
So aside from being a visual disaster and not providing all of the background numbers, how is this different from what Nate Silver has been doing for the last four years? Okay, it allows you to assign a swing, but it's a lot more opaque and seems a lot less robust than what Silver has been doing over at fivethirtyeight.
My Slashdot account is old enough to drink...
"We"?
Who's there with you? Or is this the royal "we" as in, "My maid was cleaning the silver with a paper towel and I had to explain to the wretched girl that we don't use paper towels on the silver here at the Romney house. I'm seriously thinking of sending her back to Ecuador."
You are welcome on my lawn.
You may not be able to vote if you live in a Republican state and your photo ID is older than 9 months or if your voter registration shows a middle initial but your ID card doesn't or your photo ID happened to expire yesterday, or you have the same name or a similarly spelled name or your photo ID is issued by one of the state universities or is a Veteran's Administration ID or if you're darker than a paper bag.
They take democracy seriously in those states and they want to protect it at all costs, even if it means several million legitimate citizens are unintentionally deprived of the right to vote.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Using intrade properly looks like it would take bookie skills. I never have bothered to learn those.
I like the electoral vote predictor. Its comments show a definite blue bias, but there is no bias in its handling of poll data. It uses the last polls taken in each state for data.
At the moment what it shows is not necessarily representative of the country, since there have been very few polls done in the last week. But now that the conventions are over, I expect that there will be a lot of polling done, and electoral-vote.com will be as accurate as anyone can get.
Will
While you may be 100% confident, you are not 100% correct.
Unemployment is at 14.6% for the US for August 2012.
It's called U6 and is a much more telling number than the U3, which is the oft-manipulated rate used by the press which is at about 8.1% for August, 2012.
is that he just said he doesn't think the troops are important and somehow he's still in the running. That's the kinda gaff that should've broke him. It's amazing what unlimited funds can do. Thanks Citizens United.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
waiting every 4 years to express your outrage at the system by voting for a zero-chance third party candidate for president is kinda retarded.
I completely agree with your sentiment ... but if you want to build a viable third party you can't start at the top. This person will need a network of other party members spread throughout the rest of the system to effectively govern.
If you don't believe me, just look at the damn near unbelievable opposition that Obama has faced ... and HE HAS ALLIES ... just not as many as the other guys. Now imagine your third party candidate SOMEHOW manages to get into office, and now faces bipartisan unified brick-wall of opposition.
A real 3rd (or 4th or 5th) party is desperately needed in America, but it can ONLY happen when people who agree with that statement start paying attention to other elections than just the Presidential one ... right down to your school boards and city councils.
There is a substantive difference between the Democratic & Republican party .. even if you fall for this "two sides of the same coin" philosophy of apathy, you simply cannot deny that even if actual policy is somewhat similar, the tactics each side is willing to use to win are NOT EQUIVALENT. This election is as much a referendum on what we find acceptable in public political discourse, as it is a referendum on policy.
Do you want to live in a country run by wealthy elite willing to co-opt religion and twist it for their own gain? who have no problem outright buying elections? who have no problem with fear mongering and propagandizing in ways that would make the originators of the term blush? People who, in spite of their own incredibly expensive and exclusive educations, have no problem bashing any form of perceived intellectualism as "gay" ... oh and while they're at it, also scapegoating gays, and immigrants and non-christians as "the problem with this country?"
Even if somehow you honestly believe (R) & (D) are the same when it comes to policy, you simply cannot claim they are the same when it comes to that crap.
you have a choice. Do not throw it away on a third party candidate. Do that crap in elections where it could actually matter, and take this opportunity to make a stand.
Several polls showed Dr Paul would do better against Obama than Romney (or any of the other names that were thrown around in the primaries.) He has pretty good appeal with independents and swing voters and Romney, obviously, doesnt..
Romney was the pick of the RNC and they got worried enough about the convention to show their hand and openly coronate him in Tampa. They went way over anything needed to ensure the nomination and openly wrote the state parties and the activist base out of having any real role in the nominating process from now on, an interesting strategic decision to be sure. It's plainly suicidal for the party in conventional terms. The grass roots are critical to electoral success. But these guys seem to only see the affect of money. Money certainly has an effect, yes, but trying to pay people to do the work that grass roots activists used to do, after running them all out of the party, may not work out as well as these guys think.
Romney is a candidate that seems to be hand picked for his inelectability - he alienates potential swing voters with one hand and hardcore republican faithful with the other. All in all it's very hard not to think that the RNC must *really* want Obama to win his second term.
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Ron Paul is a better Republican candidate. They're saving him for 2016, when he'll defeat Biden in a landslide.
Meg Whitman lost even though she spent $177 million to Jerry Brown's $36 million.
Jon Huntsman turned out to be incredibly bad at campaigning. Not a little bad, like "What on earth are you thinking" bad.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
That would be the definitive poll.
The idea of something like this is to illustrate how different shifts would effect the result.
If you're a campaign for example, and you're trying to figure out how to win usually, tools like this will tell you which areas are still 'in play' and might be worth fighting in (spending your advertising dollars). The campaigns themselves almost certainly have huge amounts of data about what potential voters in each area care about, and how they're going to vote, but that analysis requires a large team of people to manage. This is more for people to play with relatively easily.
In that sense I'm not hugely fond of the tool, it's still a bit too complex for easy casual fiddling, and if I was a serious campaigner I'd likely have much more data to work from - the question becomes how easy is it to flip a particular state (the obvious ones from the charts are Iowa, Ohio, Florida, and Wisconsin ) rather than which would it be nice to flip. The democrats would like to pick up texas, the republicans California, but that doesn't seem likely.
I'm in canada, so it's a little different here, but in our last federal election the NDP managed to take themselves from 3rd party to official opposition essentially from one issue, in one province (French language stuff in quebec), in one stroke they pulled the rug out from one party (the bloc quebecois) - and picked up a lot of seats putting themselves ahead of one of our two big parties (the liberals). A real GOP strategist is looking at probably 4 -6 states and wondering if there's a major issue they can take a stance on an flip the whole state. The rest of us are just playing with sliders to wonder about what could happen.
Ron Paul is a better Republican candidate. They're saving him for 2016, when he'll defeat Biden in a landslide.
I for one welcome our new geriatric overlords.
Can we get Bob Dole and John Glenn as VP candidates too?
Instead, consider "wasting" your vote in a different way: By voting for someone who isn't running on a major party ticket.
Maybe if enough people ... were going to vote for the "lesser of two evils"...
I think I see where you're going with this.
C'thulhu 2012 - Why vote for the lesser evil?
Plot summary
In the future, the United States has converted to an "electronic democracy" where the computer Multivac selects a single person to answer a number of questions. Multivac will then use the answers and other data to determine what the results of an election would be, avoiding the need for an actual election to be held.
The story centers around Norman Muller, the man chosen as "Voter of the Year" in 2008. Although the law requires him to accept the dubious honour, he is not sure that he wants the responsibility of representing the entire electorate, worrying that the result will be unfavorable and he will be blamed.
However, after 'voting', he is very proud that the citizens of the United States had, through him, "exercised once again their free, untrammeled franchise" - a statement that is somewhat ironic as the citizens didn't actually get to vote.
The idea of a computer predicting whom the electorate would vote for instead of actually holding an election was probably inspired by the UNIVAC I's correct prediction of the result of the 1952 election.
Did they predict all of those elections ahead of time? I'm guessing not, otherwise we would have heard about it sometime around 1992. If not, the fact that it produced the correct output for every election is actually a huge red flag. Elections are complicated things with many factors that are unique to a given election. You'd expect any model that can be written down on paper to be wrong at least some of the time because there's no way to account for everything.
Likely they just went data-dredging until they found a set of variables that correlate with the election winner. Problem is, there's usually *some* set of variables that correlate with the outcome for spurious reasons. The meal preferences of an octopus, for example.
May you live long enough to be ridiculed for your age.
A quote from Ronald Reagan: "I want you to know that also I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's youth and inexperience."
Just because someone is elderly does not mean that they are senile or ready to kick the bucket. Listen to Ron Paul speak about monetary policy sometime and just try to keep up with him. He's also physically very fit, going on long bike rides in the heat of Texas. Whether you otherwise think about a candidate and their positions, ignoring or laughing at them because of their age is just silly.
All in all it's very hard not to think that the RNC must *really* want Obama to win his second term.
I've seen plausible arguments from serious (mostly liberal) commentators suggesting that a number of Republicans - especially the possible 2016 candidates - would prefer that Obama win, because they know that the economy is going to continue limping for the next four years, and continuing to blame Obama is much easier (and puts them in a much better position for 2016) than actually governing.
Pretty sure you meant 58 states, Mr Obama
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Perhaps, but he'll go down in flames should Hillary run. He wouldn't stand a chance.
Polls are usually wrong by enough to matter in a close election. This is a close election and the margin of error is too great for the polls to predict anything except that we get to choose between a douche bag and a turd sandwich. That being said, I'm going with the turd sandwich who hasn't had a chance to mess things up yet.
I don't see how you can claim Obama is a clear winner. Look between the conventions - Obama gave a re-run, with no plan at all on how he plans to help anyone do anything. Just a lot of vague numbers like he has always given.
Romney meanwhile, actually laid out a five point plan:
(1) Aggressively promote domestic energy development, especially fossil fuels (Obama has delayed this at every turn, instead propping up failed green energy companies run by big donors).
(2) Expand the market for U.S. goods overseas by negotiating new trade agreements and standing up to China on intellectual-property and currency issues.
(3) Improve workforce skills by transferring job-training programs to the states and going after teachers' unions, which, he says, stand in the way of school choice and better instruction. (When has Obama gone after ANY union?)
(4) Attack the deficit through budget cuts, not tax increases. (Obama clearly has the opposite idea here).
(5), reshape the regulatory climate to "encourage and promote small business" rather than swamp it. (We have a metric ton more regulations now than when Obama entered office).
You may not like some of Romney's plans but at least HE HAS ONE. At this point I'll be happy to vote for someone who just picks a direction and goes there. Democrats had four years, two of which they could have clearly driven direction with zero intervention by anyone and instead they just sat, apparently befuddled. Well screw that, the debt is too high to keep playing around.
Realistically we'll need to raise some taxes AND reduce spending heavily. I have a lot more faith we'll see some tax increases under a Republican administration than we'll see anything like the massive cuts required to keep the U.S. solvent under the Democrats. After all, we've just had four years of Democrats trying to fix things and are four trillion in the hole for the effort.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Question:
(In theUSA) Did the candidate who spent more than the other candidate on their election campaign ever lose the election?
It's a common misconception that spending more money will increase a candidate's chances of winning an election, but it's just that - a misconception. If you don't have enough money to get your message out, then yes, that can mean a loss, but it rarely comes into play.
Yes, there have been plenty of races where the candidate that spent more lost the election. In fact, most studies show that increased spending by an incumbent can actually negatively affect their chance of winning.
There is an interesting discussion regarding this misconception over on Freakonomics.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
2+2 does not equal 4 factorial.
A quote from Reagan: "I....I....I where am I?"
A quote from the Secret Service Men right after: "the Oval Office Sir"
Nate Silver predicted Obama's win as far back as September in 2008 to within a few electoral votes. I am keeping an eye on him again this year....if he is accurate again then his model will have some strong validation.
By which you mean he wasn't willing to pander to the "jesus jesus tax cuts for the rich" base and actually tried to be an intelligent adult.
I don't agree with the man's positions and would still vote for Obama over him, but his problem was that he's too honorable and rational to fit in with the Republican Party.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
I don't have any problem with requiring an ID, but if you're going to create a new requirement, you better have the infrastructure in place and do it in an orderly enough fashion that it doesn't disenfranchise millions of voters.
The case in Pennsylvania showed evidence of the better part of a million disenfranchised voters just in one state.
If they care about election fraud, why does it matter if the photo ID is expired? If it's my picture and my name and one doesn't have a period after the middle initial, should that disqualify me? If my ID is over 9 months old, why would that disqualify me if all they're trying to do is verify identity? And if the states that are putting these laws in place are serious, why the massive purging of voter lists? Why the closing of state offices where IDs can be obtained in poor neighborhoods? Why the limiting of hours of operation for those offices just before the election?
Sorry, pal, but this is going to be one big black mark on the political soul of the Republican Party. We have blatant voter suppression for the expressed purpose of keeping Democrats from voting (a state's atty in Pennsylvania actually admitted it on camera). You think that's OK?
You are welcome on my lawn.
That model is far too simple. It only uses the economy and it only works since 1980. All the model says is "in bad economic times, people tend to vote out presidents." So, yeah, that model alone predicts a Romney landslide. However, in some bad economic times people tend to keep presidents, FDR for example, which is why they have to limit the poll to 1980. The polls alone show that that model is not currently a good fit for the current situation.
Most statistics of this election predict an Obama win. If the race would be held today this is what it would look like and if you look back, the math has been relatively stable. For Romney to win he'd have to pick up Florida, Ohio, Virginia and then another state besides that. Obama has had a fairly good if small lead in most Ohio polling and has been slightly ahead in Florida and Virginia. Also, your model has Romney losing Pennsylvania, which I think is pretty much not going to happen. The FiveThirtyEight model linked to gives Obama a 78.1% chance of winning currently and on Intrade Obama futures have given a roughly 60% chance. I think these are much more realistic models than your totally-base-the-election-on-one-thing model.
Every year since 1980 means the model has worked 8 times. In statistics 8 is a pretty lousy sample size.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
I totally agree with you. At times I feel like he is treating it like a video game. He doesn't really seem to care about what he has to do, as long as he can get the President of the United States Achievement unlocked. It's the total lack of empathy that I sense from him that really freaks me out. That's where I get that uncanny valley feeling from him — not because of his wooden delivery (which doesn't help).
he had a democrat congress for at least a year or more.
You should really check this oft repeated mendacious claim. Obama used his very small window of opportunity to pass health-care reform. You should also look at some of the details of the bill yourself, instead of getting 3rd hand information from "four-legs-good, democrats bad" pundits.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Some people consider that the employment issue might be larger than the United States and the President. Europe is in recession, China's economy is slowing, and the U.S. is muddling along. Some economists even blame the Republicans in congress for a large portion of the United States specific problem. The theory is that their intransigence is undermining business confidence in the United States and delaying economic investments. A cynical man might conclude that Republicans have a policy of defeating Obama no matter what and are perfectly willing to sacrifice average Americans if they think it might get them an inch closer to the White House. There's plenty of evidence to support such accusations, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's true.
It doesn't do you any good to create jobs if they are destroyed at a far greater rate. It really doesn't do you any good to create jobs that have no hope of growing the economy (government jobs only pull from the economy).
That's demonstrably false. Government jobs are jobs like any other. There's no difference between a government employee at a power plant and a private sector employee at a power plant. For example, Greece's economy ticked along quite well with far too many government employees.
The real problem with government jobs isn't that they don't grow the economy, it's that they are dependent on tax revenues and thus they can become an amplifying feedback into the system. Keynesian economics advocate running counter to the business cycles to minimize the troughs, however, Greece (and a number of other countries, including the U.S. under Bush) ended up running in synch with the business cycles, amplifying both the highs and the lows. This recovery is dragging along because foolish countries (like the U.S. and Greece) allowed themselves to accumulate so much debt during the good times, that they can't afford to spend to ameliorate the bad times.
For example, the stimulus spending tried to jump start a 14 trillion dollar economy with around $300 million in spending (plus $300 million in ineffective tax cuts (Republican) and $300 million in mandatory spending (Unemployment Insurance). Frankly, 2% of GDP is a probably a bit low to trigger a big economic recovery. I think the recommended amount is closer to 10%.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Because the whole thing is a farce.
Are you being ignorant or dishonest here? Obama's energy policy is indistinguishable from Bush/Cheney's: "all of the above". Record new amounts of land and sea opened for drilling. Billions for nuclear power and perpetual motion machines, I mean, "clean coal". The eastern seaboard and coast near ANWR have been opened for drilling, something not even Bush tried to do.
I ask again: are you speaking out of ignorance or dishonesty? Obama has approved the bottom half of the pipeline, which means he approves of the top half of the pipeline. The only "blocking" was a slight of hand for his liberal base, which of course was eaten up at DailySheep. They pointed to Obama's action as if he was blocking the pipeline, when his only disagreement was with the route. Same as when they hailed his veto thread of the NDAA and pretended that Obama was against military detention of American citizens, when he was of course demanding that power.
Obama has signed three new trade agreements just like NAFTA.
What the fuck is increasing supply (qualified workers) going to do to solve the actual problem (a lack of demand)?
Sure, he says that. And he's lying. Where's your "school choice" going to be when Kaplan owns every charter school within a hundred miles of you? Do you conservative geniuses think about what killing teachers unions and public schools is going to do to quality affordable education?
You guys like to whine about lazy students being coddled, but what happens when said lazy student happens to be the son of Upstanding Business Owner and Member of the Community who happens to own a 15% stake in your charter school system and can get his teacher fired at the drop of his hat? How about when that rich kid turns into bully starts kicking the shit out of your kid?
You mean "austerity" which has been a fucking disaster for every country that has tried it? The only entity capable of jump-starting demand in a depression is the government. Slashing government spending is only going to make that depression worse, far more so when your cuts target social social spending before the military-industrial-congressional-contractor-survellance complex.
Slashing spending results in a death spiral of a collapsing economy, which results in less tax revenues, which results in more demands from fools and tools to slash more spending. A vicious cycle that took Grover Norquist decades to perfect.
For the third time: are you speaking out of ignorance or dishonesty? Obama has cut or forestalled regulations, not brought new ones. Oh, and the lie about "small bushiness" don't hunt no more. We know perfectly well that when Republicans talk about "small businesses", what they really mean is a small number of shareholders. Which means Koch Industries is a "small business" because it is owned by the Koch family. Which means when Republ