THE U.S. PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION on Tuesday November 6th will be won with a convincing electoral college majority. At least 70 votes.
That's my conclusion of poring over the polls, listening to what people are enthusiastic/despondent about, looking at where the money and candidates are being used.
The problem is, I'm not sure WHO is going to win by at least 70 electoral college votes.
The reason for this is that the polling data looks open to very different interpretation, depending on how one sees the last presidential election (which was won in convincing fashion by the then Senator for Illinois Barack Obama) in 2008.
Showing posts with label predictions. Show all posts
Showing posts with label predictions. Show all posts
11/05/2012
1/26/2010
Indicators
I like comparing election forecasts from politicians, people who are considering voting but don't watch the political programmes on TV, opinion pollsters, market traders and bookies. The people I never ask, except for entertainment are policy analysts, because they seem to be the only people more clueless than politicians at recognising when they're about to take a good kicking in an election.
One of my funnest moments in politics was sitting cross-legged in a Bayswater flat calling half of Kent's parliamentary constituencies as Labour gains on the evening of May 1, 1997 at the same moment as a buffoon (employed as a special adivsor to a worthless government minister) ostentatiously waved his brick-like mobile phone to ring up someone called "Charles", (he pronounced it "Chaaarlz" in a strangled yet booming Hooray-Henry voice) to wail "Whaaatz haaaapuning?"
I think he wanted to know why the voters weren't magically coming out to keep him in free lunches for another four years. Only a few minutes before, he'd been plotting with other "well-connected, inside-track" political "experts" on how his Tory Party was going to do deals to keep Mr Blair out of Downing Street.
The fact that I won three bets that night, a £75 sweepstake, a £5 where I'd offered 10 to 1 odds against John Major winning 17 months beforehand and a £20 personal bet that Michael Portillo would fall, also made for my only truly successful gambling experience.
The more people were connected to "the centre" of British politics, the less they really believed what actually happened. If they'd had a chat with people like the number one cashier at a high-street bank in Cricklewood about her husband's business, or thought for a minute about how many mini-cab drivers at the time had previously been self-employed, upwardly-mobile supporters of Thatcherism, alarm bells might have rung.
To be fair, the problem was not all on the government side: the opposition Labour did not dare believe the scale of its victory. Five years previously, in April 1992, one life-long Labour supporter with a relative in Parliament was so convinced, as were all her colleagues, that Neil Kinnock would win, especially in the Westminster North constituency, that champagne was being drunk as soon as the polls closed.
The AEI/Brooking study of indicators, titled Partisan Impacts on the Economy: Evidence from Prediction Markets and Close Elections, by Erik Snowberg, Justin Wolfers, Eric Zitzewitz, finds that markets are good at predicting the effects of elections and acting swiftly on information as it emerges.
The Wisdom of Crowds, an excellent little book by James Surowiecki, examined the Iowa Electronic Markets and other indicators of aggregated knowledge and judgement. I recently gave a talk on the subject, an audio recording is available here.
The key message I take from this, is that all the election polling in the world is wrong, because the wrong question is being asked. Instead of trying to find a demographic sample and asking "Who do you WANT to win?" or "Who WILL you vote for?" my impression is that the correct method is to take a random sample, not weighted for demographic representativeness (so it should be quite a bit cheaper).
The question to ask is: "Leaving aside who you WANT to win the next election, who do you think WILL win"?
One of my funnest moments in politics was sitting cross-legged in a Bayswater flat calling half of Kent's parliamentary constituencies as Labour gains on the evening of May 1, 1997 at the same moment as a buffoon (employed as a special adivsor to a worthless government minister) ostentatiously waved his brick-like mobile phone to ring up someone called "Charles", (he pronounced it "Chaaarlz" in a strangled yet booming Hooray-Henry voice) to wail "Whaaatz haaaapuning?"
I think he wanted to know why the voters weren't magically coming out to keep him in free lunches for another four years. Only a few minutes before, he'd been plotting with other "well-connected, inside-track" political "experts" on how his Tory Party was going to do deals to keep Mr Blair out of Downing Street.
The fact that I won three bets that night, a £75 sweepstake, a £5 where I'd offered 10 to 1 odds against John Major winning 17 months beforehand and a £20 personal bet that Michael Portillo would fall, also made for my only truly successful gambling experience.
The more people were connected to "the centre" of British politics, the less they really believed what actually happened. If they'd had a chat with people like the number one cashier at a high-street bank in Cricklewood about her husband's business, or thought for a minute about how many mini-cab drivers at the time had previously been self-employed, upwardly-mobile supporters of Thatcherism, alarm bells might have rung.
To be fair, the problem was not all on the government side: the opposition Labour did not dare believe the scale of its victory. Five years previously, in April 1992, one life-long Labour supporter with a relative in Parliament was so convinced, as were all her colleagues, that Neil Kinnock would win, especially in the Westminster North constituency, that champagne was being drunk as soon as the polls closed.
The AEI/Brooking study of indicators, titled Partisan Impacts on the Economy: Evidence from Prediction Markets and Close Elections, by Erik Snowberg, Justin Wolfers, Eric Zitzewitz, finds that markets are good at predicting the effects of elections and acting swiftly on information as it emerges.
The Wisdom of Crowds, an excellent little book by James Surowiecki, examined the Iowa Electronic Markets and other indicators of aggregated knowledge and judgement. I recently gave a talk on the subject, an audio recording is available here.
The key message I take from this, is that all the election polling in the world is wrong, because the wrong question is being asked. Instead of trying to find a demographic sample and asking "Who do you WANT to win?" or "Who WILL you vote for?" my impression is that the correct method is to take a random sample, not weighted for demographic representativeness (so it should be quite a bit cheaper).
The question to ask is: "Leaving aside who you WANT to win the next election, who do you think WILL win"?
11/04/2009
Late forecast for US election night (Updated)
UPDATE: NY 23:
Candidate Party Votes (%)
Bill Owens Democrat 47,826 49.1%
Doug Hoffman Conservative 44,349 45.5
Dede Scozzafava Republican 5,294 5.4
67% reporting
As of time of writing (03:54 GMT), the gap has been narrowing. Scozzafava's votes are thought to mostly be absentee ballots which would have been posted before she withdrew.
UPDATE: Local media calling NJ for Republican candidate Christie.
UPDATE: Creigh Deeds, the Democratic candidate has conceded in Virginia. President Obama is said by the White House Press Office to not be watching returns tonight.
Governor New Jersey: the courts will decide, absentee ballots could give this to Joe Corzine (ex-Goldman Sachs director), returning the Democrat to a second term.
Governor Virginia: one of the states that does not allow a Governor to stand for re-election. Expect Bob McDonnell to win easily for the Republicans, a gain from Democrats.
California 10th congressional district: expect Democrat hold for John Garamendi (currently the Lieutenant Governor of California).
New York 23rd CD: expect CONSERVATIVE PARTY win for Doug Hoffman (the "Republican" candidate quit over the weekend and endorsed the Democrat, justifying charges she was too close to the Dems). However, this is getting so dirty, I don't expect Democrats to play fair here.
Election nerds will be looking at the changes since last year, when Barack Obama won all four constituencies.
2008 results:
NJ: 57%
VA: 53%
CA 10th CD: 65%
NY 23rd CD: 52%
My forecast is a big swing against the Obama landslide, but to be fair, this is not entirely surprising.
For what it's worth, four years ago I covered the same two gubernatorial elections [and here] in New Jersey and Virginia, when both were won by the Democrats, in what I considered to be an impressive result.
What I got wrong in 2005-2006, was the degree to which the Democrats got themselves organised from a grassroots campaign using blogs such as Daily Kos as well as the idiotic consequences of the McCain-Feingold Act (the main loser being Senator John McCain's presidential ambitions).
Conservatives are likely to be reasonably cheered by these results, but the Republican fiasco in New York and the possible theft of two elections by the Democrats (not the first in recent years at state level) suggest that the Republican party machine and its ruling élite are a shambles.
Candidate Party Votes (%)
Bill Owens Democrat 47,826 49.1%
Doug Hoffman Conservative 44,349 45.5
Dede Scozzafava Republican 5,294 5.4
67% reporting
As of time of writing (03:54 GMT), the gap has been narrowing. Scozzafava's votes are thought to mostly be absentee ballots which would have been posted before she withdrew.
UPDATE: Local media calling NJ for Republican candidate Christie.
UPDATE: Creigh Deeds, the Democratic candidate has conceded in Virginia. President Obama is said by the White House Press Office to not be watching returns tonight.
Governor New Jersey: the courts will decide, absentee ballots could give this to Joe Corzine (ex-Goldman Sachs director), returning the Democrat to a second term.
Governor Virginia: one of the states that does not allow a Governor to stand for re-election. Expect Bob McDonnell to win easily for the Republicans, a gain from Democrats.
California 10th congressional district: expect Democrat hold for John Garamendi (currently the Lieutenant Governor of California).
New York 23rd CD: expect CONSERVATIVE PARTY win for Doug Hoffman (the "Republican" candidate quit over the weekend and endorsed the Democrat, justifying charges she was too close to the Dems). However, this is getting so dirty, I don't expect Democrats to play fair here.
Election nerds will be looking at the changes since last year, when Barack Obama won all four constituencies.
2008 results:
NJ: 57%
VA: 53%
CA 10th CD: 65%
NY 23rd CD: 52%
My forecast is a big swing against the Obama landslide, but to be fair, this is not entirely surprising.
For what it's worth, four years ago I covered the same two gubernatorial elections [and here] in New Jersey and Virginia, when both were won by the Democrats, in what I considered to be an impressive result.
What I got wrong in 2005-2006, was the degree to which the Democrats got themselves organised from a grassroots campaign using blogs such as Daily Kos as well as the idiotic consequences of the McCain-Feingold Act (the main loser being Senator John McCain's presidential ambitions).
Conservatives are likely to be reasonably cheered by these results, but the Republican fiasco in New York and the possible theft of two elections by the Democrats (not the first in recent years at state level) suggest that the Republican party machine and its ruling élite are a shambles.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
