Isn’t saying you won in this election not really anything to be proud of from a statistical point of view? I understand that being correct is important but when there is a clear winner in the election it seems to be less important. Your numbers on the Franken/Coleman race would be more interesting at this point.

Respectfully.

You are missing the broader point: Anyone can make this prediction by taking the last pre-election polls, calculating their median, and turning it into the stated percentage. It’s not hard. The lesson is that there is not a point in doing anything more complex.

But there is a problem with your question. Stop to think whether it really justifiable to give precision of +/-0.1%. The two-candidate margin in final pre-election polls had a standard error of about 1.0%. In such a situation, giving too many significant figures conveys a false sense of precision that does not actually exist.

FiveThirtyEight’s mean and median are almost certainly equal, at 348.5 EV. Our final single-day snapshot median (352 EV) and mean (352.8 EV) were better, as was my actual prediction (364 EV). In the case of the mode, as I explained above, we both got 50 out of 51 and 353 EV, a tie. So we won two out of three, and tied the third. To put it succinctly, we win.

There are some problems with how you have posed your question. If you would like a much longer answer, see here.

As another example, Benihana’s approach to poll quality this year did not improve his predictions in any individual state or in the overall outcome. So an elaborate scoring system is totally unnecessary.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/11/12/104733/07/259/659768

However, what I would really like to see done (as explained in the piece) is to evaluate pollsters based on more than a final-day snapshot. Who was “right” on more days once it became an Obama v. McCain race? This is of course complicated… Do you base rightness based on margins, trends, or some other metric? And what do you do about undecideds?

That is: If Gallup had a 4-point differential on some date four months before the election, with 16% undecideds, can one relate that meaningfully to the final result?

The goal being: Who should I be paying attention to in January/July/October 2012?

And then there’s PV/EV splits in close elections. Lichtman predicted that Gore would win in 2000, and then argued that his model predicted the PV winner correctly. Which is all well and good, especially if you think the election was stolen, but Sam Wang apparently made the more interesting and useful prediction that the election would come down to Florida.

I’m stunned at how well Sam did this cycle. I had a little imaginary bet of sorts going; I thought the state poll aggregator sites would be within 20-30 EV of correct, unlike others who predicted massive Bradley Effects. But since my own gut was telling me it would be closer than Sam was saying it would be, I paid attention to more conservative aggregates and my actual prediction was more lowball, about Obama 245. Instead the lesson seems to be the same as in 2004, that sophisticated probabilistic analysis is good but you should take the polls themselves at face value. Of course some individual states weren’t so spot on, but the aggregate was.