Before the 2016 campaign season, I had reservations about re-starting up this site’s polling analysis. However, there was one big reason in favor of doing it. It has to do with your readership of the site – and how you can best influence the outcome.
The biggest reason not to re-start the site was the market for statistical politics, which looked saturated. In 2004, this strange hobby was made newly possible by an abundance of polls. Now there are many sites, most notably the NYT’s The Upshot, ESPN’s FiveThirtyEight, Electoral-vote.com, and HuffPollster (which provides our polling data). The Princeton Election Consortium may now seem redundant.
Yet that is not the case. Site traffic is the highest it has been since October 2012. Traffic for July 2016 grew over 50-fold – that’s a factor of 50 – over July 2012. Some of this arises from the bizarrity of this year’s campaign. But it feels like there’s something else at work too.
I think it might be the relative purity of PEC’s calculation. I try to make the snapshot relatively transparent; the code and data are open-source. The prediction is based on polls only, and is meant to be accurate and stable. Since the start, the November election win probability has hovered in the range of Clinton 80-85%. It isn’t designed to swing around every day; in my view, a poll-based “prediction” that moves around a lot is no prediction at all. In principle, the probability and electoral Meta-Analysis should be as boring to watch as possible – and of course eventually land on the outcome.
A practical reason to follow polls is that you can learn where to invest time and money. There is value in triaging races because they are in the bag – or because they are hopeless. Instead, donors and activists should invest in races where the outcome is uncertain, i.e. whose win probability is in the 20-80% range for either side.
That’s where the left sidebar comes in.
For Democrats, the ActBlue site goes to a list of five candidates for Senate in close races. They are all women: Ann Kirkpatrick (AZ), Catherine Cortez Masto (NV), Deborah Ross (NC), Maggie Hassan (NH), and Katie McGinty (PA). Current polls put these races within five percentage points. All are within reach for either Democrats or Republicans. Depending on how these races fall, under current polling conditions Democrats would end up with 48 to 53 seats. So control of the Senate is up for grabs.
In addition, control of the House could go either way. So the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is on the list.
For Republicans, the logic is exactly the same. These races could go either way, and so I provide a link to the National Republican Senate Committee.
Note the absences of some high-profile Senate races, for example Wisconsin, Florida, and Illinois. For now, these races do not look competitive. I have also omitted downticket races such as the North Carolina’s governor’s race. These are important, but in most cases, data is lacking.
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I will close with a second reason to resist the siren call of this hobby. Work in the lab is going better than ever. We have exciting new projects in understanding the cerebellum’s contributions to cognitive and social function, including the neuroscience of autism. In addition, we are working on some nifty methods that may help researchers record neural activity with better resolution. All of that takes attention and time.
However, even if I am posting less often in the coming weeks, the automated calculation will continue to update multiple times a day!
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