On the left sidebar check out the RSS stream of presidential polls from Pollster.com. For those of you who really want the details, use it! The polls are coming fast and furious now. For an interesting point, see today’s reporting by Nate Silver. He points out that McCain’s bounce appears not to be evenly distributed. [...]
Entries from September 11th, 2008
Today: McCain +2.0+/-0.8% (adjusted EV Obama 238, McCain 300)
September 11th, 2008, 5:23pm by Sam Wang
It appears that the tie I reported before was indeed a fluctuation. Seven national polls conducted September 8-10 give McCain, once again, a median margin of 2.0+/-0.8% over Obama. Applying this as an adjustment to the EV estimator above gives a current estimate of Obama 238 EV, McCain 300 EV. The 95% confidence intervals are [...]
Tags: Uncategorized
Princeton study on election prediction – your opinion matters!
September 10th, 2008, 2:04pm by Sam Wang
My colleague Dan Osherson in the Psychology department is conducting a survey that you might enjoy taking. The topic is our favorite one, the 2008 Presidential Election. It’s a bit reminiscent of electronic markets like InTrade, but the questions are more complex. There’s a prize for the best entry. Go on, take a look – [...]
Tags: Uncategorized
Is the bounce fading? National polls a tie, 0.0 +/- 1.0%
September 9th, 2008, 9:34pm by Sam Wang
In five polls released today, all spanning September 6-8, the Obama-McCain margin is 0.0 +/- 1.0%, a perfect tie. Is this apparent tightening the end of a bounce – or just random fluctuation?
Tags: 2008 Election
A welcome to new readers – and a caution
September 9th, 2008, 9:51am by Sam Wang
Welcome! One-fourth of this site’s traffic has come in the last two days. On Sunday, someone made the 100,000th page view. This post is for new (and returning) readers who need to be brought up to speed. Also, because of rapidly changing events, the true current snapshot is not what’s listed above. Instead, it’s McCain [...]
Tags: 2008 Election · Site News
Palin’s image with women
September 9th, 2008, 8:10am by Sam Wang
A correspondent wanted to know if I had information on how John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin plays with women. Saying anything about Palin’s positives/negatives is difficult during the bounce. For now, a far larger divide than gender is marital status – marrieds prefer McCain, unmarrieds prefer Obama. That’s a bigger story than the absence [...]
Tags: Uncategorized
Post-convention national polls: 9-10 point bounce for McCain
September 8th, 2008, 1:42pm by Sam Wang
Eight weekend polls are out with all respondents reached after McCain’s speech, the last GOP convention event. The median margin is McCain ahead of Obama by 2.0 +/- 1.2 %. This margin can be used to adjust the state-polls-only EV estimate given above. The adjusted EV estimate is a near-reversal: McCain 300 EV, Obama 238 [...]
Tags: Site News · Uncategorized
When game-changing events collide
September 7th, 2008, 9:01am by Sam Wang
(Fark.com readers, welcome. Try the Camembert. Zut alors!) Nate Silver has an interesting post on cracking a tracking poll. The goal is to take Gallup’s 3-day rolling averages and extract the 1-day data. The last two weeks are worth analyzing this way because so many potentially game-changing events have occurred. However, Silver’s results appeared to [...]
Tags: 2008 Election
Current national margin and corrected EV estimator
September 5th, 2008, 9:11pm by Sam Wang
We aren’t going to know where things stand until weekend polling comes out on Monday. In the meantime, a brief snapshot of where things may be headed. Based on six national polls spanning September 1-4, on those dates Obama led McCain by 3.5 +/- 0.9 %…
Tags: 2008 Election
A long view of electoral history
September 5th, 2008, 11:22am by Sam Wang
As we wait for the eye of the polling hurricane to pass, here’s an interesting site: Voting America, created by the Digital Scholarship lab at the University of Richmond. It gives maps of Presidential election results at state, county, and population levels from 1840 to 2004. In addition there’s commentary on a variety of topics, [...]
Tags: Uncategorized
