Hello, PEC fans. The Princeton Election Consortium is back! The data feed is live, and there are new projects. Today, just a brief note.
The data feed is live. You can get it by clicking in the banner above or in the right sidebar. As before, the feeds are clean statistical snapshots of state-level polls for President, U.S. Senate, and U.S. House. This has the advantage of (a) rapid response to new surveys, (b) identification of key states, and (c) reporting in terms of virtual margin (“meta-margin”).
As in 2020, we’re not emphasizing win probability. People get carried away with probabilities. Considering that the overall 2016 polling error was about 2 points, I prefer to think of this year’s race as close. The meta-margin reveals that the race is basically within polling error. Of course this can be turned into a win probability (and you can dig that out of our GitHub if you really want), but it seems better to emphasize the closeness.
For example, here’s the meta-margin for the Presidential race:
As you can see, the entry of Kamala Harris has brought this year’s Electoral College snapshot to a place it never went. In that respect, her entry was indeed a game-changer. At the moment, the key states with highest voter power are North Carolina and Georgia.
Harris’s entry has also brought the race closer to the Senate and House snapshot trackers.
In our modern age of partisan entrenchment, the Presidential and House trackers would be expected to stay close to one another. The fact that they didn’t before Harris’s entry is an indication of Biden’s weakness as a candidate. Harris is probably winning back a portion of three groups: double-haters (people who disliked Biden and Trump), Kennedy supporters, and undecideds. These are, of course, overlapping groups. In coming weeks we will see how far she gets.
The Senate tracker shows a knife-edge race for control. Democrats and their independent allies are ahead in enough states to add up to 49 seats after the election. After that, the critical races are currently in Montana and Florida. (Note that I am tracking down a possible glitch in the Senate tracker. More on that in coming days, I hope.)
Posting here will be a bit lower-frequency than in past years. I have other projects you can read about over at Fixing Bugs in Democracy, whose title says it all. Also, check out VoteMaximizer.org, which arose from work ideas developed at PEC over the years.
Welcome back!
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