Princeton Election Consortium

A first draft of electoral history

Entries Tagged as 'Politics'

How’d we do? 2010 edition

November 5th, 2010, 6:50am by Sam Wang

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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Tags: Politics

Medians win, except…Angle Defeats Reid!

November 3rd, 2010, 9:08am by Sam Wang

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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Tags: Politics

Democrats outperforming national polls in district-level polls

November 2nd, 2010, 1:43pm by Sam Wang

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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Tags: Politics

So-called election “forecasting”

November 2nd, 2010, 12:52am by Sam Wang

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

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Tags: Politics

Monday final: Senate 51D-49R, House 230R-205D

November 1st, 2010, 6:27pm by Sam Wang

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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Tags: Politics

Remaining knife-edge Senate races: CO, WV, IL

October 31st, 2010, 11:43am by Sam Wang

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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Tags: Politics

On the wisdom of crowds of pollsters

October 31st, 2010, 11:22am by Sam Wang

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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Tags: Politics

Simple poll-based snapshot: House 230R-205D (+/-1.5), Senate 52D-48R (+/-1)

October 30th, 2010, 1:09pm by Sam Wang

[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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Tags: Politics

Focusing efforts wisely

October 27th, 2010, 9:52am by Sam Wang

I’ve received correspondence from a Democratic activist taking me to task. I pointed out that his Democratic Congressman was likely to win by a large margin. He thought that my saying this would breed complacency. Putting aside the idea that very many Democrats this election season are complacent, there is a critical point I must [...]

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Tags: Politics · Princeton

2010 Congressional races – where to donate

October 25th, 2010, 3:34am by Sam Wang

Dear readers: If you’re looking for analysis of 2010 US Congressional polls, see Stochastic Democracy and the New York Times’ FiveThirtyEight. The bottom line: Today’s polling indicates that the House will flip to Republican control (233-202) and the Senate will stay under Democratic control (52-48). From Stochastic Democracy: Where to donate. To get maximum effect [...]

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Tags: Politics · Uncategorized