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July 22, 2004

The 98% Solution?

By Jim Dallas

Dr. Wang at Princeton says Kerry's chance of winning is 98 percent.

I have in mind a few ideas on how to improve this analysis (of course, I'm not a doctor). What Dr. Wang is doing here is pretty reasonable - use the standard error of the mean to estimate the likelihood of a Kerry victory in a state using recent polling, and then multiply.

Also, I'm not sure I would consider state poll "wins" to be independent events, although it's probably easier to just assume that they are. One reason I think that is this: if you have a set of pollsters, they're going to have some kind of bias, and that bias may (in the aggregate) favor one candidate over the other consistently. Wang makes no adjustments for this, which is for the best given the paucity of data to start from. But it makes me wonder.

It seems to me that it might be better also to simply pool samples instead of averaging sample means (that is, instead of averaging results of different polls, add up the Rs). Of course, in practice, this is harder because some polls quote Registered Voters and some polls quote Likely Voters. And some polls simply don't quote N at all.

Also, instead of using "the last six polls" I'd just use polls from the last four weeks, and if there aren't (m)any recent polls, well, sorry. The problem with using x number of polls is that in some states, you'll get 6 polls a week, and in others there've only been 6 polls in the last year. So it's really scattershot.

Oh well, perhaps I want too much. But if I have some free time tonight or tomorrow, I'll try to apply my ideas (also, a dailykos poster suggested doing monte carlo simulations instead of running all permutations, which is probably more MS Excel friendly (117,000 permutations = bad mojo). Of course, if anyone wants to buy me a copy of MatLab...).

Yes, there were times, I'm sure you knew
When I bit off more than I could chew.
But through it all, when there was doubt,
I ate it up and spit it out.
I faced it all and I stood tall;
And did it my way.

Posted by Jim Dallas at July 22, 2004 04:11 PM | TrackBack

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