The Art of Elections Forecasting 101
ideonexus writes "Years ago Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com, a blog seeking to educate the public about elections forecasting, established his model as one of the most accurate in existence, rising from a fairly unknown statistician working in baseball to one of the most respected names in election forecasting. In this article he describes all the factors that go into his predictions. A fascinating overview of the process of modeling a chaotic system."
electoral tracking (Score:5, Interesting)
Andrew Tanenbaum (of Minix fame) does a good job of tracking state-by-state polling results and what they predict about the Electorial College outcome at http://electoral-vote.com/ [electoral-vote.com]
Re:It's all about the money (Score:4, Interesting)
Correlation != causation.... but only up until you demonstrate the causal connection. The fact that money leads to advertising is self-evident, and the fact that advertising influences opinions and behaviors is also very well established.
Also, then notion that a vastly more popular candidate will attract vastly more money overlooks human psychology. Other than big donors buying access, why would most donors bother giving money to a shoo-in? What attracts money to a contest (as demonstrated most recently in Wisconsin) is a deeply and relatively-evenly divided electorate.
Re:Doesn't Matter (Score:1, Interesting)
WTF? Where'd you get that utterly insane idea? There's tons of Presidents who have been better this century, including Bill Clinton, and in fact almost all of them except possibly LBJ (who did both good and bad, bad being Vietnam and good being passing the Civl Rights Act). Obama has been about as bad as George W Bush. And I'd rate him worse, because at least with Bush, you knew what you were getting if you voted for him, a dumb neocon monkey. With Obama, it was all lies, because he gave speeches about how he was going to change everything, but then when elected just backed up all of Bush's policies and extended them.
Re:Doesn't Matter (Score:5, Interesting)
Historically, people have been willing to cross the aisle on important policies, especially if you meet them halfway. Obama's health care proposal, cap and trade, and the DREAM act (i.e. citizenship through military service) were all Republican ideas that they would have loved to support as recently as 2006. No one could have predicted the scorched earth tactic they'd employ to bring the president down.
Obama's greatest fault was how long it took him to realize what was going on. Most people had realized all the Republican "negotiations" were a stalling tactic by the summer of '09, the fall at the latest. Obama didn't seem to get it until after the 2010 elections.