Princeton Election Consortium

The near-final outcome of the 2010 elections is Senate 53D, House ~243R. What an event – the largest Republican majority in six decades. Yet a clear majority for Democrats in the Senate. This should be an interesting two years. So how’d we do? As I wrote before, Senate poll medians did well, with Nevada as [...]

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I will write more later, but overall the simple approach did well…though not as well as expected. Current actual outcome: Senate 52D, House about 245 243R. The House discrepancy, about 1513 seats, is equivalent to about 1.6 1.4 percentage points of popular vote. Not ideal, but pretty good. If you’re dissatisfied, consider that this transparent, [...]

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The Gallup generic Congressional preference poll (R+15%) has drawn notice, including from ostensibly statistics-savvy poll geeks. It’s unclear why since individual data points always vary more than averages. Then again, as the saying goes, if it bleeds it leads. But there’s something more surprising.

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Political scientist Matthew Dickinson offers a cogent essay on the difference between a real prediction and electoral “forecasting”.

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In the Senate: In critical states there are so many polls that fairly exact statements can be made. The probability of the Senate remaining Democratic is nearly 100%*. Assuming polls are unbiased on average, with 85% probability the following exact outcome is predicted: 51D-49R. Knife-edge races: WA: Murray (D) over Rossi (R) by 2.0 +/- [...]

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In terms of leverage, Colorado and West Virginia are extremely ripe for GOTV and last-minute donations. Illinois is a large state, harder to be effective; also, Kirk (R) is edging ahead. Nevada…Reid’s significantly behind Angle.

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Last-minute polls will be available tomorrow. The final Senate prediction will move (indeed it already has). Also, I haven’t applied variance minimization (VM) yet for tiebreakers. In the meantime… I should express the idea of the previous post more carefully. Let us pose a hypothesis: Pollsters sample voters with no average bias. Their errors are [...]

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[Title edited to reflect the fact that polls are still changing at the last minute, so predictions won't be final until after the weekend. Notably, Reid/Angle is no longer a tossup. Reid is likely to lose.] As I wrote in 2008, despite the fuss about fancy modeling, for topline estimates, models such as FiveThirtyEight essentially [...]

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