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Gerrymandering makes for interesting mail! Here are some excerpts from activists, a journalist, political scientist, and a few redistricters. ...
PEC in the news
Here’s some Princeton Election Consortium news (and about poll aggregation generally):
Upcoming: Monday KCRW 2:00pm ET with Mark McKinnon, Sasha Issenberg, and Ron Brownstein.Tuesday WNYC 12:30pm ET with Leonard Lopate.
Recent radio: KPCC Los Angeles, Colorado Public Radio, NPR’s Science Friday with Flora Lichtman and Nate Silver.
Articles in Deadspin and Wired about the aggregation-hating hordes (“Nerds Under Attack!,” October 29th). I’m glad aggregation is important enough to hate. Deadspin calls PEC “criminally underrated.” Cool.
And then there’s The Onion.
Update: I’ll probably be on CNN CNNI today at 4:20pm. (CNNI is not CNN!) Update 2: …and here’s the video feed.
Topics:
PEC finally quoted by one of my favorite progressive curmudgeons:
Of the latter, Princeton’s Sam Wang writes, “A few days ago, the word was that Team Romney was buying ads in Minnesota and Pennsylvania. If he wins either of those states I will eat a bug.”
Wang’s overall forecast of the popular vote: Obama, +2.1 +/- 1.1%; “I estimate Romney’s chance of winning the popular vote at 6%, odds of 16-1 against.”
If you were unfortunate enough to see “Meet the Press” earlier today, the above might come as shocking news. I caught only bits of it myself, but what I did see was dominated by America’s two greatest bores, Tom Brokaw and Joe Scarborough, both of whom goofily prattled on about this, our close, very close presidential race. You know, the one in which the challenger has a 6 percent Wangish chance of winning the popular vote, thereby righteously swamping Obama’s 307 Silver-predicted Electoral College votes.
Sorry, the “progressive curdmudgeon” whose name I left off is PM Carpenter.
It’s pretty interesting how the PEC and FiveThirtyEight Electoral College predictions have been converging lately. I remember at one point PEC had Obama at around 330, while FiveThirtyEight had him at around 300. Now PEC is at 318 and FiveThirtyEight is at 307. I wonder if they will continue to converge.
the only thing that makes me nervous is that Prof Wang gave John Kerry something like 95% chance in 2004. His reason was that he assumed independents would break for the challenger. Now the assumption is that independents break evenly. This is still an assumption.
Undecideds, not independents. Not the same thing.
Also, fewer undecideds than usual. Say 4% is a high estimate. Those undecideds would have to break 75% to Romney to make a 2% shift. Against current polling, Obama would STILL win in that scenario.
It’s an assumption that is actually consistent with recent evidence, at the presidential and state level, and based on both incumbent and in-party results.
Great! Video feed!
Say, what is PEC’s election endgame?
Is there a date or time the projection finalizes, or does it all continue til there’s a declared winner? Ohio doesnt start counting provisional ballots til November 16 or 1th…
Good question. I don’t think I’ll be writing that much of substance on Tuesday night. It’s really the worst night because information is so low-quality. I prefer Monday and Wednesday!
However, I will pose some suggestions for what to watch and keep up the comment threads.
Thank you! I’m enjoying the video, and will be here of course. Possibly forever. But I still don’t understand.
(1) For example, what you did you do in past Novembers?
(2) There’s a bar in place where the meta-margin ends.
Where is that on our calendar and clocks? Or isnt it fixed.
(3) Is there a date or time the projection [top line] finalizes? Is it the same as #2?
With 99% of the vote counted in Ohio President Obama is up by a scant 4% and is still to close to call. Join us after numerous commercial breaks as we try and think up ways to make you believe that.
Great interview, but they showed the wrong graph! You were talking about a yellow zone and a red zone, so I suppose you intended them to be showing the graph on the web site. They did not, they had a reproduced graph that had the EC projection history in yellow and the 270 line in red. Very confusing to someone who was not familiar with your site, I bet.
Oh, that is too bad. I couldn’t see what they were projecting.
thanks Kevin, i’m now including the EV link with the CNN video link.
You were wonderful. Beautiful voice, just the person to answer what she was asking. THe newscaster made your forecast sound specious in the teaser, but the intro made clear you weren’t crank, and from the first second you spoke it was obvious your focus was information, not attention mongering. I bet i lot of people googled Princeton election to learn what’s going on here.
Me, I’ve been wandering the 2008 archives trying to learn the answer to what goes on here, as asked twice in the thread above.
Answer me this: Do the new 6x daily headline updates (with projected EVs and percent chance to re-elect) continue until someone concedes, or until the voting booths close or what??
Does the red/yellow bar shrink to a dot and disappear on midnight November 5???
DOESNT ANYONE KNOW?
Wow. You get to eat the bug on TV now. Not quite enough to make me want to see the model go wrong, but tempting, very tempting.
538, I’m a refugee from there too.
But Sam was _generous_ to have said that just to help us understand.
Tell you what’s tempting. i want to see you get a quick haircut from Romney Odd, Mad Barber of Cheat Street.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-UKYW-Wh-Q
I’m loving that my Maine vote is showing up at 27ish power…. But I suspect that is a 2nd district vote, not my 1st district vote. (Maine EV could be split and only 2nd district is a closer run thing.)