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November 02, 2004
Until next time...
The last days have shown a clear and unexpected trend favoring Kerry in the presidential race. Polls in key states, particularly Florida, have led us to update our probabilities of who wins these states, and as a result the "roll-up" of all these probabilities at the Electoral College level, as reported on our main page, led to final odds favoring Kerry.
Surely, this "final answer" is but a probabilistic one, and should not be interpreted as us calling the winner.
First, we remind the reader that the final number reported is a probability of winning the White House -- not a forecast of the popular vote. Subtle leads in key battleground states can quickly snowball into noticeably biased odds for one candidate or another nationwide. This mechanism is not quantified by traditional media reports. Second, we must bear in mind that this final prediction is based on opinion polls conducted through Tuesday, 4 PM PST, and are not based on actual exit polls. Most analysts agree that two factors are being left out of any analysis based on such opinion polls: (1) turn-out effects (and preliminary indications this Tuesday seem to suggest a historically high turn-out for this election), (2) biased sample effects: it has been argued at length that “unpollable” cell phone users not owning or answering a landline are mostly comprised of younger voters, and several polls have shown a distinctively Democratic-leaning tendency in this age group.
In summary, this project has now reached the limit of what it can offer, and while we attempted to assess the odds of this race, the dice are now cast -- and out of our hands.
We do hope, however, that this website and this methodology stimulated our readers' curiosity, and offered interesting insights into the mechanics of the Electoral College, and particularly the discrepancy between classical statistical reports of state-by-state polls and a more rigorous analysis of the Electoral College outcome. We will be busy performing postmortem analysis of this and past elections to refine the reliability of our methodology, particularly the aggregation of polls over time. The fluctuations of polls over time have a large impact on the smoothness of our reported probabilities since we “roll up” all the state polls into a single probability of who will win the majority of the electoral votes. Our off-season research hopefully will shed insight to improve upon such concerns. We are most grateful to all our readers for their support, comments, error corrections, constructive criticism, and thoughtful commentaries.
Until 2008, then...
Posted by Can Sar at November 2, 2004 08:39 PM
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