Who2 Editorial Blog

Notes and Commentary from the Editors

Friday, October 31, 2008

'Electoral Projections Done Right'

FiveThirtyEight.com has already been widely covered this election season. But in case you haven't seen it, it's worth a look in this final pre-election weekend.

The site aggregates national political polls, with further analysis and commentary by Nate Silver. He's an analyst for the stats-crunching site Baseball Prospectus, and he applies those same skills to competing polls.

His latest computer model of 10,000 scenarios gives Barack Obama a 95.41% chance of winning the popular vote. More interesting are the longer shots: An 0.93% chance that John McCain loses the popular vote but wins the electoral vote, for instance, or a 6.16% chance that Obama loses Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania and still wins the election.

Today he also has a fine roundup of the in-play Senate races around the country.

(In case you're curious, 538 is the number of available presidential electoral votes.)

Posted by Mr. Holznagel at 6:12 AM Share on Facebook

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