Princeton Election Consortium

Mother Nature is our best teacher and the only one who is always right. – Viktor Hamburger, biologist In yesterday’s Los Angeles Times, several prognosticators (including me) commented on why we were right or wrong. On the wrong side are Colorado researchers Bickers and Berry, who thought that Romney would get 330 electoral votes. Now, [...]

[Read more →]

9:34pm. CBS: New Hampshire called for Obama. Erm, election’s probably over. And unskewers are full of it. On the same note: Florida is Obama 50.01%, Romney 49.99% with 81% counted. <0.5% is recount territory (Brennan Center).

[Read more →]

I’ve made a simple guide for tracking the election. It’s at geeks-guide-2012-b.pdf. My two pieces of advice are: Ignore exit polls and large states. Watch New Hampshire (expectation: Obama +3%) (CNN) (electoral-vote.com) I’ll use this post to list some resources. I’ll update this on the fly – check back now and then. Or leave your own [...]

[Read more →]

I apologize to all for the late update. We wanted to make sure all the polls were in. And it’s a hectic day. The following are final estimates, based on taking polling data over longer intervals than our usual 1-week rule. Instead, I found the period over which a state’s polling variance was minimized, as [...]

[Read more →]

Early voting has been kicked around as an indicator of how the vote will turn out. It’s not perfect, since it reflects a combination of opinion, voter intensity, and maybe get-out-the-vote efforts. Still, here are some comparisons, taken from Prof. Michael McDonald’s early voting site at George Mason University. These are the fraction of early [...]

[Read more →]

If state polls perform as well as they did in 2004 and 2008, most aggregators should get within +/-15 electoral votes and 48/51 races correct. The question is how to squeeze a bit more out of the data. The topline listed just below the title of this website is not our prediction, but the automatically-generated snapshot. It [...]

[Read more →]