The real winner of this election

Andrew Sullivan is effusive in his praise of Five Thirty Eight, the polling aggregation and analysis website created by Nate Silver: The only state their model got wrong was Indiana, where they expected a narrow Obama loss. He won the state by a hair. Nate Silver owned this election on the polling front: one young [...]

Read Full Post »

Senate projections

According to the latest Five-Thirty-Eight projections, the Democrats’ odds of getting a filibuster-proof 60 seats in the senate are getting longer (currently Nate gives a less than 25% chance of this happening). A filibuster proof Senate majority by a party that also has control of the Presidency and the House is always a disaster. I [...]

Read Full Post »

Dead girl, live boy territory

The polling seems to be getting stronger for Obama with every passing day. Five Thirty Eight currently gives Obama a 95.8% chance of winning the election, and that is after accounting for some tightening of the polls in the coming weeks. More astoundingly, no fewer than seven current polls show Obama with a double-digit lead [...]

Read Full Post »

Why betting on political futures makes sense

If you go to Las Vegas and gamble, you will probably lose money. If you keep betting, you will certainly lose money and a lot of it. That’s because everything from blackjack to roulette to slot machines have negative expectation, meaning you are guaranteed to lose in the long term. Not so with real life [...]

Read Full Post »

Two predictions

McCain will never again hold the lead in either the Gallup or the Rasmussen daily tracking polls. The election won’t even be that close — Obama will win by at least 30 EVs. [Update, October 11]: My first prediction has held good so far. As for my second, I now think Obama will win by [...]

Read Full Post »

The Palin bounce

Check out the graphic above. Obama received a big bounce from the Dem convention, but then, McCain went..whoosh! Sarah Palin is the GOP dream — a potatoes-and-meat, ultra-glib, sexy, super-charismatic, Republican version of Obama. As Althouse said: It’s as if some mad right-wing scientists designed and built an android to counter all the things that [...]

Read Full Post »

Incorporating house effects in poll analysis

I love Nate Silver!

Read Full Post »

The swing states

As I have emphasized before, Virginia, Colorado and Ohio are the three crucial players in this election. As long as Obama wins one of them, he will be the next president. If he loses all three, then he probably won’t. Nate Silver gives the precise numbers: Colorado, Virgina and Ohio remain the three principal focal points [...]

Read Full Post »

Predictions for today

With all pollsters out with their own versions of what is going to happen in Indiana and North Carolina today, here’s my prediction: Obama will win North Carolina by 12, Clinton will win Indiana by 7. We will know the actual results in about ten hours. Update: With about 99% of the votes counted, Obama is winning in [...]

Read Full Post »

Exit polls: consistency in error

The exit polls have been pretty off the mark this election season but in a consistent manner. As Brendan Loy notes in this post, the polls have been typically off by 7-8 points in Obama’s direction. This pattern was repeated yesterday — Clinton won Pennsylvania by 9 points when the CNN exit polls earlier in the day predicted she should [...]

Read Full Post »

Mugabe loses majority

This is good news.

Read Full Post »

Gallup and Rasmussen

Two tracking polls, opposite trends. Hillary vs Obama : Gallup, Rasmussen. Look at the period March 15 – March 24. What to make of it?  Update: Mark Blumenthal points out that at least a large part of this variation can be attributed to statistical ‘noise’.

Read Full Post »

Some thoughts on Mike Huckabee

The most telling moment of Mike Huckabee’s campaign came a month ago, when he told a conservative gathering why he wasn’t giving up yet. “I know people say that the math doesn’t work out,” the Baptist pastor politician said. “Folks, I didn’t major in math. I majored in miracles, and I still believe in those too.” [...]

Read Full Post »

The unemotional case for Obama

Andrew Sullivan writes, A meme is developing is that support for Obama is all emotion, fantasy, hysteria, etc. There’s no question that the emotions behind Obama are powerful. And any fool can see why. His oratory does what oratory should. He is the greatest public speaker in American life since Reagan….But the strongest case for [...]

Read Full Post »

Go Obama

http://www.libertariansforobama.org/ Disclaimer: I am fully aware that Obama is not a libertarian and I disagreee with many of his positions. Nonetheless, as a non-American with a keen interest in American politics I am rooting for him for his positions on matters such as the war in Iraq, civil liberties, foreign policy, free markets and (to [...]

Read Full Post »