Poll aggregators Simon Jackman, Drew Linzer, Nate Silver, and Sam Wang all made extremely accurate predictions for both the 2012 Electoral and popular vote outcomes. Why were they so good?  The most important reason is that they all developed statistical models based on state polls.  They also avoided subjectivity by using consistent statistical criteria for [...]

My final predictions are that Barack Obama will receive 332 electoral votes and Mitt Romney will receive 206.  This is the same as the Princeton Election Consortium arrived at under different assumptions but using only state polls. The current results for all states are in State Polls 11-5-12.  Florida (Figure 1) remains a tossup, but [...]

Colorado (Figure 1) has shifted to undecided since my last post based on an alpha = 0.01 criterion for deciding that a percentage difference between Obama and Romney is significant.  The current results for all states are in Table 1. The predicted national vote difference stands at 3.0%. State Polls 11-3-12 As of today, the [...]

Little has changed since my last post.  Since I began pooling polls of the states about two weeks ago, I have added about 250,000 likely voters and little has changed.  I suspect that fluctuations in enthusiasm have settled down since the third presidential debate resulting in little change. At the alpha = 0.01 level of [...]

Since my first post on the state of the presidential race, I have updated the weightings of states to calculate the popular vote from the state polls.  Originally, I weighted each state’s contribution to total voter turnout based on the Highest Office voter turnout per state in 2008.  Now, I’m weighting states based on the estimated [...]

National and state polls have been all over the place since the beginning of September.  As of this post, the Gallup tracking poll has governor Romney up by 4% while the Rand tracking poll has president Obama up by 6%. All of the other national polls are between these extremes.  Indeed, today the HuffPost Model [...]