Sunday, October 12, 2008

Forecasting the Electoral College with October Data

As promised in my last post on the September Model I'm be posting a rolling Electoral College forecast (in the panel to the right), based on past election results and October national and state-level trial-heat polls. As with the September model, these state-level forecasts were developed with Jay DeSart. Clicking on to map to the right will take you to Jay's web page, where more details are available. As new polls come in the forecast will change, so please check in on on a regular basis for changes.

The results for today are:
  • Electoral vote: Obama 354, McCain 184
  • National popular vote: Obama 52.85%, 47.15%
The biggest change from the September model is that both Virginia and West Virgina are now in the Obama column.

40 comments:

Anonymous said...

Tom/Jay:

I was late to comment on the Missouri/Virginia situation in the previous post, but was curious about North Carolina and to a lesser extent some of those other red states.

North Carolina would likely drift onto the Obama side of the win percentage table if the past elections variable were dropped. It wouldn't be insulated by those four consecutive GOP wins there since 1992. But how would some of those other red states be affected if you dropped that variable or changed it to the last two elections instead of the four? Most of them, I'd suspect, would stay where they are simply because Obama has seemingly reached his ceiling in recently polling (These are reliably red states.), but is there any consequential change at the margins?

Thanks.

Anonymous said...

It's funny, Tom and I had a little debate about the prior vote variable prior to his posting our forecast here, for precisely this reason it's being discussed now. [BTW, I think I won ;) ]

Our original model, the one we initially developed and have used the past couple of elections, used a prior two elections variable, instead of the prior four. In the paper that we presented at the WPSA in March, we showed that using the prior four variable made the model generally more stable and accurate. So that's why we decided to go with it for this election.

Interestingly, if we'd gone with the prior two elections variable in the model for our September forecast we would have generated a prediction that McCain would win both in the popular vote, 50.79 to 49.21, and in the electoral college, 278 to 260. Why? Because the original model gives much more substantial weight to Bush's performance in states, and not really capture the "true leaning" of the state over the long haul.

Simply dropping the prior vote variable altogether signficantly weakens the model by all measures (Adjusted R-Square, SE y/x, Mean Absolute Error in state predictions, % of States correctly predicted, and average error in the national popular vote and electoral college vote)


But to answer Josh's question more directly, here are the specific differences in the state predictions if we went with a two-prior election variable in model for the September forecast... McCain would be projected to win (some of them by comfortable margins) most of the "tossup" states: Colorado, Florida, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina and Virginia. Obama would be predicted to win Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. These are states that are currently viewed as states that are firmly in the Obama column, but the prior 2 model would consider them toss-ups that he just barely wins.

In light of the current landscape, it looks as though our decision to go with the prior 4 elections variable might have been the right call. We'll just have to wait and see.

Anonymous said...

Thanks Jay.

I sat in on that WPSA panel in San Diego. That may be why I had the prior two elections version of that variable on my mind (at least subconsciously). I definitely agree that the prior four is the better option if only for the balancing effect between two Democratic elections and two Republican elections.

Incidentally, I'm hoping to post the results of the forecasting end of the Gurian and Cann model from that very same WPSA panel on my blog sometime soon. They are working out some kinks at the moment.

Thanks again, Jay. I appreciate the prompt response. I'm looking forward to the updates that you and Tom will have.

Matthew Hubbard said...

Hi, professors. I'm also keeping track over at my blog, Lotsa 'Splainin' 2 Do, using a method I call confidence of victory. If no polls make major moves between now and early tomorrow morning, by current polls I have Obama leading 350 to 188 in expected value, while the numbers as of most recent input from pollster.com is Obama 352, McCain 166 and 20 too close to call, as the last three polls in Ohio are one for Obama, one for McCain and one even split.

You can take a look at my predictions for the past few weeks at http://lotsasplainin.blogspot.com/search/label/Sunday%20numbers

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