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TomCADem

TomCADem's Journal
TomCADem's Journal
November 11, 2012

538 - "Which Polls Fared Best (and Worst) in the 2012 Presidential Race"

Interesting review of the error of pollsters in the 2012 election. Amazingly, the most well known firms, Gallup and Rassmussen decided to throw away their credibility in 2012 to support the Republican narrative.

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/10/which-polls-fared-best-and-worst-in-the-2012-presidential-race/?src=me&ref=general

As Americans’ modes of communication change, the techniques that produce the most accurate polls seems to be changing as well. In last Tuesday’s presidential election, a number of polling firms that conduct their surveys online had strong results. Some telephone polls also performed well. But others, especially those that called only landlines or took other methodological shortcuts, performed poorly and showed a more Republican-leaning electorate than the one that actually turned out.

Our method of evaluating pollsters has typically involved looking at all the polls that a firm conducted over the final three weeks of the campaign, rather than its very last poll alone. The reason for this is that some polling firms may engage in “herding” toward the end of the campaign, changing their methods and assumptions such that their results are more in line with those of other polling firms.

There were roughly two dozen polling firms that issued at least five surveys in the final three weeks of the campaign, counting both state and national polls. (Multiple instances of a tracking poll are counted as separate surveys in my analysis, and only likely voter polls are used.)





November 6, 2012

WaPo - "Pundit accountability: The official 2012 election prediction thread"

Some of the Republican predictions are mind blowing. George Will, for example, predicts that Romney will win Minnesota.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/11/05/pundit-accountability-the-official-2012-election-prediction-thread/

There are a lot of predictions floating around out there about who will win the presidential election on Tuesday. So why not round them all up in one place?

Here are the electoral vote predictions from various modelers, political scientists and pundits from around the Internet. All predictions are as of Monday evening. And yes, this will be a fun thread to revisit the day after the election:

Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight: Obama 303, Romney 235. ”The model estimates that Mr. Romney would need to win the national popular vote by about one percentage point to avert a tossup, or a loss, in the Electoral College,” Silver writes.

* * *

Karl Rove: Romney 285, Obama 253. He’s got Romney winning Ohio, Iowa, Virginia, Colorado, and Florida.

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