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Daily Electoral Predictions 124

Posted by CmdrTaco from the hypothetically-speaking dept.
Robin Berjon writes " If you are both a political junkie and a statistics addict, I highly recommend Electoral Vote Predictor 2004, a site that gathers a collates polls taken in individual US states according to a well-documented method and uses that to generate a daily map and victory prediction, alongside a short and insightful analysis of the current trend. The site also includes a wealth of information for past maps, detailed tables, tools, links, the Senate elections, and much more. It also has a convenient RSS feed so you can get your daily fix."
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Daily Electoral Predictions More

Daily Electoral Predictions

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  • How I wish the US presidency was determined by popular vote and not some archaic electoral system.

    • Re:We need popular votes to count! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Marxist Hacker 42 ( 638312 ) * <seebert42@gmail.com> on Tuesday September 07, 2004 @02:59PM (#10180257) Homepage Journal
      Especially since if we could just make it secure, computer tabulation of votes during the month long election could give us a real time look at the election (most people don't realize this, but due to universal mail in voting my home state of Oregon can have ballots turned in, but not counted, as early as October 6th if the mail delivery is on time).

      • If we went with a straight popular vote the President would be selected by 7 major metropolitan areas. The EC forces the President to be accountable to all 50 states.

        As somebody in flyover country, I would rather not be forgotten.
        • That's the excuse- but is it really true that the 7 major metropolitan areas have more than 50% of the population of the country? I have some doubts about that one.

          But the answer is easy- LAND & INTERNET GIVEAWAYS. Since India has taught us that in an information economy location doesn't matter, small counties can gain population quite easily by purchasing land, dividing it up into Wi-Fi enabled homesteads, and giving them away for free. What city dweller doesn't dream of having their own yard?
        • Name those areas. What, are you going to say "The DC-NYC corridor", "Coastal California", and other similarly broad terms?

          Besides, your vote *should* count the same as your average person in NYC or LA, and it *would* if it weren't for the electoral college. Why shouldn't it? Are you better than them?
        • > If we went with a straight popular vote the President would be
          > selected by 7 major metropolitan areas.

          Only if all 7 metro areas agreed, which is by no means a given. The alternative is that your "rural" vote counts more than one from a New Yorker. Is that democratic? One vote per person, no one "more equal" than anyone else, if you ask me.
          • Only if all 7 metro areas agreed, which is by no means a given. The alternative is that your "rural" vote counts more than one from a New Yorker. Is that democratic?

            Thank God we live in a Republic. But to answer your question, no. People in more populous states like New York are represented by more electors than the people of Iowa. So all votes have roughly the same value.

            NTITE

    • Re:We need popular votes to count! (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      You must live in a highly populated state. Those of us in less populous areas appreciate the two baseline electoral votes we get -- just like the big states!

      • Re:We need popular votes to count! (Score:4, Informative)

        by KilobyteKnight ( 91023 ) <bjm.midsouth@rr@com> on Tuesday September 07, 2004 @03:23PM (#10180647) Homepage
        You must live in a highly populated state. Those of us in less populous areas appreciate the two baseline electoral votes we get -- just like the big states!

        Most people have forgotten, or never learned, the reason for the electorial college. In the US, the states select the president, not the people.
        • I'd say many of us know the reason, but the reason is about two centuries out of date. The fairest way to have your vote count (and if the state is solid red or blue, it won't) is to have national instant run-off voting.

          Right now we have tyranny of small states.

          • Re:We need popular votes to count! (Score:5, Informative)

            by swillden ( 191260 ) * <shawn-ds@willden.org> on Tuesday September 07, 2004 @04:19PM (#10181445) Journal

            I'd say many of us know the reason, but the reason is about two centuries out of date. The fairest way to have your vote count (and if the state is solid red or blue, it won't) is to have national instant run-off voting.

            If you're going to change the voting system, why replace a broken system with a semi-broken system? IRV is better than plurality but has plenty of problems of its own. Condorcet voting [electionmethods.org] is a much better choice.

            Right now we have tyranny of small states.

            This is a understandable, and common, error, but it's still wrong. The EC has two conflicting effects. The most obvious is that it gives residents of low-population states a slightly larger fraction of an electoral vote than residents of populous states. The other arises from the fact that most states deliver their votes in a bloc. This means that large states are much more likely than small states to swing an election. We saw evidence of this in 2000; even though Florida wasn't the only close state, it was the only one that mattered because Florida has a large population and lots of electoral votes.

            Several mathematicians over the last few decades have performed a rigorous analysis of the relative effects of these facets of the EC, based on a simple measurement of the power of a single vote: What is the probability that a given vote will swing the entire election? The result is that a voter in a larger state has more power to decide the presidential election than a voter in a small state, because the advantage of a big bloc of electoral votes outweighs the advantage of fewer voters per electoral vote.

            It's also worth noting that a more detailed analysis [caltech.edu] which takes into account the current political structure of the nation was done recently, and it found that, currently, the EC doesn't favor either party and that the EC will currently only return a result different from a popular vote when the electorate is very evenly divided. In those cases, a single new story, or even just some bad weather, might change the outcome in any case. In other words, the EC might "change" the outcome when the difference in the popular vote is statistical noise anyway.

            • True, this is an inherent problem in a winner-takes-all powerful-executive style of government. We really need a weaker executive branch. We keep adding new powers onto the branch (more cabinet level positions in direct charge of more facets of government administration, the acceptance of "policing actions" without congressional approval, the shifting of the vice president from the second place candidate to a running mate, etc). On a system where a statistical fluke can pick, you don't want so much power

              • True, this is an inherent problem in a winner-takes-all powerful-executive style of government. We really need a weaker executive branch.

                Hear! Hear!

                This is the *right* fix to the problem of people feeling like they're un-empowered in the presidential election. That feeling is actually a symptom of the fact that nearly all governmental power has migrated to the Federal level, which is simply too far removed from the average person. A strict popular election won't change that. Other election styles, o

          • The fairest way to have your vote count (and if the state is solid red or blue, it won't) is to have national instant run-off voting.

            Approval voting [approvalvoting.org].

            IRV still has spoilers.
          • The fairest way to have your vote count is to have national instant run-off voting.

            Condorcet [electionmethods.org] would [electionmethods.org] be [electionmethods.org] better [electionmethods.org] than [electionmethods.org] IRV.

          • The fairest way to have your vote count (and if the state is solid red or blue, it won't) is to have national instant run-off voting.

            First, I've gotta say it: of course your vote counts! How do you think the state gets to be solid one color or another!? Votes.

            But there are some other interesting issues to point out:

            Instant run-off voting has some problems [electionmethods.org], including paradoxical cases where voting for someone can actually increase their chances of losing. Plus, it's relatively hard to implement, given th
        • In the US, the states select the president

          Which would be fine if we still thought of ourselves as Pennsylvanians, Ohioans, or New Yorkers. But, we most identify ourselves on a national scale as Americans.


          Our voting system needs to evolve to reflect the society which we have become.

      • You must live in a highly populated state. Those of us in less populous areas appreciate the two baseline electoral votes we get -- just like the big states!

        So long as everyone understands that there's nothing inherently better about the current system. I'm sure Bush appreciates the two baseline votes you get, too. Just like Gore appreciates the winner-takes-all nature of the electoral vote. By changing either one of these games, you'd have changed who became president in 2000.

        But there's no essential re
        • So long as everyone understands that there's nothing inherently better about the current system.

          But the current system is better: rather than a nationwide hunt for hanging chad, the 2000 election only resulted in such nonsense in Florida. I believe that the Electoral College system tends to make very close elections (in electoral votes) less common, which to me is a very good thing--we don't need Florida 2000 to happen again every time the electorate is almost evenly divided.

          Realistically, it is bette

          • You're assuming so many different things in your post that I don't know where to begin.

            Many developed nations have figured out how to accurately, precisely, and cheaply count votes on a national level.

            But the current system is better: rather than a nationwide hunt for hanging chad

            Agreed. The current system is better than a nationwide hunt for hanging chad. Do you know anyone that has advocated such a system? Me neither.
            • Ah, a representative of the Michael Moore-school of selective quoting.

              Quoting me: But the current system is better: rather than a nationwide hunt for hanging chad while leaving out: , the 2000 election only resulted in such nonsense in Florida

              The current system is better than a nationwide hunt for hanging chad. Do you know anyone that has advocated such a system? Me neither.

              Did not the 2000 election in Florida result in a statewide hunt for hanging chad? It seems that you are advocating applying th

              • Ah, a representative of the Michael Moore-school of selective quoting.

                This is a dialog. You are the only person I am responding to. I trust that anyone can read exactly what you said. I was attempting to direct your attention to specific elements of your post. I did not intend to misrepresent your position, and I did not intend to weaken your point. I honestly didn't understand it.

                I certainly don't understand it any better now that you've reinserted the rest of that sentence. Don't be a dick.

                Did not th

      • You must live in a highly populated state. Those of us in less populous areas appreciate the two baseline electoral votes we get -- just like the big states!

        In a smaller state with 3 electoral votes, there actually is more representation per person than in a larger state. However, wouldn't voting count for more if it weren't an all-or-nothing proposition? If I vote in Whateveria (a made-up, hyopthetical US State) for a candidate who doesn't win the state electorate, my vote doesn't count at all. I

        • In any winner-takes all race, only the marginal voter (the hypothetical one guy who puts the winner 50%, or whatever the threshold is in that election) has a vote that really decides the election. Nobody else's vote, for or against the winner, matters.

          Voting for one guy to be president insures that voting will be an all-or-nothing proposition, and there's no way to change how that one guy is picked that will change that.

          Note that the electoral college system does not require that all votes go to one man,
        • Nah, thats not true. You're wrong. You don't seem to understand US politics, perhaps you're new to this topic, so I'll cut you some slack.
      • Yes - because every person in a sparsely populated state has a greater inherent worth than someone from a more populous state.

        What else could possibly explain a desire to have greater voting power per person?
    • So now instead of isolating the effect of voter fraud to a small number of electorial votes - you propogate it across the whole nation. Lets assume I live in a mythical windy city, where a certain party controls the electorial process so tightly that votes can be created, destroyed, and even the dead get to vote for a party.

      Now instead of only affecting the electorial votes of a mythical state called Lincoln, it can effect the whole country. So rather than only create enough votes for the party in favor

      • EC == vote fraud firewalls (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Yes, EC has several effects, and one of them is the firewall effect that you mention. A corrupt machine (Chicago 1960 as you mention) can tilt just one state.

        More than that, though. Consider a swing state that is very evenly contested. That's the kind of state where vote fraud is most valuable. But that's also a state where both parties have plenty of resources to bring out pollwatchers, media coverage, lawyers and judges.

        In a state where Party X has all the resources and Party Y has few resources, Pa

    • Not archaic (Score:3, Interesting)

      by hey! ( 33014 )
      The system is not archaic, in the sense that it does not serve the function which it was created to do. For better or worse, the founders decided that the unity of the country was a higher priority than strict popular power, and so a deal was struck that gave small states proportionately more power. Obviously, it raises the possibility of a candidate winning while losing the popular vote (or at least the votes of the most populous states), otherwise the founders would have specified popular elections (or e
      • No we wouldn't. Bush lost the popular vote by 500,000 in 2000. That's way more than the number of votes that were disputed in Florida.
        • Not sure the 500,000 number is releavant if you change the rules. Had the system been based on popular votes, the actual turnout in FL and elsewhere might have been dramatically different. Changing the rules in how votes are counted is a variable that could impact the motivation of a voter to actually cast his/her vote.
          Given a choice between pure pluarality and the current electoral college system, I tend to lean toward the EC. My preference would be to see more states adopt practices such as Maine wh

  • What about... (Score:4, Funny)

    by keiferb ( 267153 ) on Tuesday September 07, 2004 @02:52PM (#10180136) Homepage
    ...the Supreme Court? I can't find anything on that site that tells me who they're planning on appointing.
    • it's obvious isn't? John Ashcroft!
    • Which candidate has the bigger campaign budget? IIRC, for about forty years now, the candidate who spent most always wins...

  • How much longer until this is fixed, and I can exclude this stuff from my front page?

  • I know this is off-topic, but there doesn't appear to be a forum to discuss this type of thing with other slashdot readers.

    Is there a way to block politics stories from the home page? I checked "Politics" in my home page preferences under "Exclude Stories from the Homepage" so that they wouldn't show up but I still see them. Games stories also still show up even though I have them selected to not show up as well. Is this a bug or is there some other setting I need to turn on or off?

    • Is there a way to block politics stories from the home page? I checked "Politics" in my home page preferences under "Exclude Stories from the Homepage" so that they wouldn't show up but I still see them. Games stories also still show up even though I have them selected to not show up as well. Is this a bug or is there some other setting I need to turn on or off?

      I just tried this, and it worked for me, after I turned off the "Collapse Sections" preference. That is, I had all the sections shown on the fr

  • Great site (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Oxy the moron ( 770724 )

    I have been to this site several times before. And while I certainly think it is great from the standpoint that the information presented is (as far as I can tell) totally void of bias, the source of the information isn't quite so grand.

    While polls certainly give a reasonable idea of how votes would fall, it's well-known that poll numbers can be fairly easily slanted.

    All things considered, I enjoy reading it every morning.

    • He's admitted that he's a Kerry supporter, but it doesn't affect his presentation of the data.

      I do question the use of some of the polls, because you have three basic polling types that get used: adults, registered voters, and likely voters.

      While there's been a swing away from adults and registered voters (those polls lean heavily towards democrats), some of the polls he puts up do use those criteria.

      He goes strictly upon newest poll gets posted. I'd prefer that a poll of likely voters have more weight
      • Likely voter polls are already highly subjective. Each polling outfit has their own method of determining likely voters, usually based on historical trends. Democrats will tell you that their base is more likely to vote this year than in elections past, due to their extreme dislike of George W. Bush.

        How would you weight the likely voter polls higher? What weight would you use? Any method in which you weight certain types of polls higher seems highly subjective to my mind. I'd prefer a main projection
      • If anything, I think being a Kerry supporter would make him more likely to make it look like Bush was ahead, the better to encourage Democrats to take action.
    • The problem with electoral-vote.com is that the staunch non-bias requires them to use whatever the most recent state polls are, regardless of the source. Last week, there was something like a 50-vote swing from Kerry to Bush when a firm hired by the Republican side (they do most of the Republican internals) released eight or nine new polls with a large Bush lead, when previously most of them had been Kerry states.

      Take it with the requisite amount of NaCl.
  • Unfortunately, given /. tendencies...we'll probably bring them down shortly, ensuring that no one has access to their information.
  • One that I've been frequenting, thought I don't agree with his political beliefs, is electionprojection.com [electionprojection.com] Lot's of state by state information.

  • Another (Similar) Site (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Dr. Bent ( 533421 ) <ben&int,com> on Tuesday September 07, 2004 @03:29PM (#10180735) Homepage
    Nice link.

    I also like Rasmussen Reports [rasmussenreports.com].

  • Rasmussen Reports is another great source (Score:3, Informative)

    by bareman ( 60518 ) on Tuesday September 07, 2004 @03:35PM (#10180821) Homepage Journal
    of information that uses sound methods.

    http://www.rasmussenreports.com/

  • Here is a good site for betting odds on upcoming state and federal elections. Although the odds change over the course of the campaigns, they claim to have a pretty high rate of eventual accuracy.

    http://www.campaignline.com/oddsmaker/ [campaignline.com]
  • This election will stand out as one in which the statistics were nearly useless. For all practical purposes the two candidates are tied. This means that a very small random event could tilt the balance towards either candidate. Say, a simple slip of the tongue near election day and the candidate takes the day.

    Furhtermore enough things have gone wrong with the current incumbent (no WMDs found, bin Laden still on the lam, Iraq is a quagmire, the ballooning deficit) that a sudden shift in favor of Kerry could

    • I'd say the polling methods have a basic flaw (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Skyshadow ( 508 ) * on Tuesday September 07, 2004 @04:18PM (#10181425) Homepage
      My guess is that the polling folks will spend the week after the election going around the talk-show circuit explaining how their polls managed to be so wrong.

      Pretty much all the polls we see are of "likely voters", a group which is made up mostly (or entirely) on the people who voted in the last election. This may be a useful measure in the average election, but not this one.

      The 2004 election will have a much, much higher turnout than 2000. In 2000, it didn't seem to matter a whole lot who got elected. In 2004, most everyone knows someone who has lost their job and/or knows someone in Iraq. A lot of people are still genuinely angry about Florida's lack of concern for voting rights or even following their own laws. At the same time, Bush hasn't given his more casual supporters a reason to come vote for him -- the best they've managed to do is spread a bunch of half-truth (or outright lying) reasons why they *shouldn't* vote for Kerry.

      More new voters have already registered for this election than any other since 1992. That should tell you something, and logically it doesn't seem like good news for Bush if these polls are showing a close race...

      • The 2004 election will have a much, much higher turnout than 2000. In 2000, it didn't seem to matter a whole lot who got elected.

        Care to bet on that? 51% turnout last election. Higher than for Clinton's last election. I wouldn't bet on the number being higher than 55%, as it was in Clinton's first election.

        A lot of people are still genuinely angry about Florida's lack of concern for voting rights or even following their own laws.

        Yah, it was terrible the way three or four counties counties in Florida

      • You are correct in your assertion that a lot of people who in the past haven't been interested in voting will be doing so this time around, but fail to take into account the biggest factor between this election and the last: September 11.

        People who in the past didn't have much interest in politics or world events have seen that these things can have an all-too direct effect on their lives. Bush has provided strong, decisive leadership in difficult times. If anything, his critics may accuse him of being t

    • Actually, most elections are like that. Virtual deadheats. The best part about this site is that you can see how tiny swings in the polls sometimes will produce MAJOR swings in hypothetical Electoral Vote. And contrariwise, from time to time, large swings in the polls will produce negligible effects on the Electoral Vote.

  • TradeSports.com Electoral Projection (Score:3, Interesting)

    by gengee ( 124713 ) <gengis@hawaii.rr.com> on Tuesday September 07, 2004 @04:04PM (#10181244)
    Also checkout this site [geekmedia.org] which displays an electoral map/vote projection based on contract prices scraped from TradeSports.com/InTrade.

    TradeSports.com is an online gaming site which sells contracts for all sorts of assertions: from sports betting, to political election outcomes. Some of the most actively traded contracts on TradeSports.com are related to the U.S. Presidential Election.

    The site above scrapes the average bid price data from each of the state-by-state contracts for the assertion "George W. Bush to win the November 2004 Election."

    A winning contract pays $USD 10, and a point costs $0.10. Thus, it can be assumed that a bid price > 50 indicates that the TradeSports.com market believes George W. Bush will win the election in that state, while a bid price below 50 indicates a win for John Kerry.

    If you don't like the default rulesets (Bid prices between 45-55 unprojected; projection made with the bid price rather than the ask price; etc), the site allows you to configure your own parameters.

    The state-by-state contracts trade rather thinly -- usually, only a few hundred dollars a day -- so take day-to-day movements with a grain of salt. The total size of the market is quite large, however -- totalling just under $1 million when all the states are combined. The site currently projects a win for George W. Bush, with 284 electoral votes.
  • FIrst off Ohio is still blue even though Kerry's ratings have gone down after the RNC.

    Second Virginia is not a toss up state and is heavily bush the last time I looked Bush was ahead by almost 9 points!

    So who knows.

  • but has anyone got any statistics on average schooling levels in each state? It would be fun to see if the more educated crew votes more for one side than the other.
    • I hear you. I saw that big red streak through the deep south, too. Yee-haw! Bush for four more!
      • I hear you. I saw that big red streak through the deep south, too. Yee-haw! Bush for four more!

        Dude, I've met and worked with the red-state "Yee-haw" crowd, and I grew up with and live within the blue-state over-educated pinhead crowd. Although one group may statistically have more years of book-learnin', it is clear to me that neither has a lock on wisdom, and I'd far rather have our leaders elected by the very wise than the highly-schooled.

        Don't be an "Urban Supremacist" and slam entire swaths of peo
  • Does it take into account voters whose vote is easily swayed by surveys such as these?
  • Especially the parts where they show their ignorance:

    The race is complicated by Louisiana's quaint view that politics should be kept out of politics, so the Senate election is nonpartisan. Rep. Chris John, Rep. David Vitter, state treasurer John Kennedy, and some minor candidates are all running without party affiliation in the Nov. 2 election. If no candidate gets 50%, there will be a runoff election a few weeks later. Insiders think it will be Chris John vs. David Vitter in a runoff. Runoffs are general

  • Interactive map here. [latimes.com] Flash based, it lets you change between different scenerios and see how the outcome would differ if certain states go one way or the other.
  • http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/i nfo-battleground04-frameset.html [wsj.com]

    Just thought I'd chime in with the WSJ map - they only update a few times a month but it's fairly in-depth.
  • Is 270 simply more than half of the EVs? If a viable 3rd candidate gets 100 EVs, does the presidency still go to whoever gets the most EVs even if it isn't a majority?
  • This graph has just been bouncing wildly, like people haven't already decided who they will (or won't) vote for. I'm sure that in the end most of them will just let the media decide, then rush to the polls to pass on that decision, to give them a sense of community. Maybe vote for Bush because the president said they should.

    http://www.electoral-vote.com/info/graph.html [electoral-vote.com]

  • I find it rather curious that the states with the highest support for Ralph Nader are Idaho and Montana, both at 6%. Does anybody have any insight as to why he is (relativly) popular in this corner of the country?

  • Looking at the numbers, there are a few states that they say are "exactly tied." That's probably not going to happen, but it seems there's still a chance that somebody might not get the required majority of the electoral votes this time around.

    Does everybody know who their member of Congress is?

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