During the 2012 elections, my liberal aunt kept worrying. She thought that Romney was likely to win the presidential race. Several times, we had to talk her down from the ledge. We knew that Obama had this. Nate Silver told us so.
Political geeks of all stripes are frequent visitors to websites predicting the national political races. At least 13 well-known groups are making predictions on the presidential and Senate races. Many of these are associated with news media. For example, ABC, Associated Press, NBC, CNN, and the Washington Post all make predictions. Based on individual state polls, each predicts how many of the 270 electoral votes required to win that each candidate can count on. Here are the most recent calls from this morning (October 7, 2016):
Outlet Hillary EV's Trump EV's Toss-up EV % Likelihood of Hillary Win
ABC 272 197 69 ---
AP 272 197 69 ---
NBC 272 174 92 ---
CNN 271 197 70 ---
Wash Post 253 197 88 ---
There are other, independent pundits who also make prognostications on the races. Sabato's Crystal Ball (U. of Virginia), the Cook Political Report, and the Rothenburg and Gonzales Political Report are three of these groups. All three also predict the Senate, House, and gubernatorial races.
Sabato 316 215 7 ---
Cook 272 197 69 ---
R&G 279 191 68 ---
However, I prefer the groups that use statistical analysis to derive a percent likelihood of a given result. The New York Times, Huffington Post, and the Daily Kos all take this approach. Of the statistical groups, my personal favorites are the Princeton Election Consortium (Sam Wang), and FiveThirtyEight (Nate Silver).
FiveThirtyEight, for example, weights each poll contributing to its overall predictions by how recent the poll was conducted, historical ideological skew, and historical accuracy. Both FiveThirtyEight and Princeton offer a dazzling array of great graphs and charts. Using differing assumptions, both give several types of percent likelihoods. Best of all, neither tries to weasel-out of prediction by calling any state a toss-up.
Huff Post 263 180 95 83.5
Daily Kos 308 230 --- 86
NYT 322 192 24 82
538 326 212 --- 79.6
Princeton 323 215 --- 88
With all of the various and sundry poll-agglomerators, is was only natural that an agglomerator of poll-agglomerators would appear. The site 270 to Win is such an entity. The site gives current results and links for most of the groups mentioned above. It lists averages of all of the sites, covering both the presidential and Senate races.
After the 2012 election, stories abounded on how the election night loss shocked Romney and his staff. We remember the right-wing website that "unskewed" supposedly liberal polls and proclaimed that the Republican candidate would actually win. However, reliable poll-agglomerators like Wang and Silver had been predicting an Obama win for weeks. The Romney campaign should have paid more to the actual numbers than to their misplaced hopes.
There is a wealth of free, on-line election predictions available to the incurable political geek. With that information, there is no reason to be unsure of the state of the races or to be taken by surprise on election night.
Paul C. Adair
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