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Archive for November 8th, 2016

Since 1912, this model has only mis-called one Presidential elections…

November 8, 2016

I just wanted to get this one onthe record before the polls close.

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Helmut Norpoth, a political-science professor at Stony Brook University, has a Presidential election model that is largely driven by how well a candidate did in his/her party’s primary elections.

Before you chuckle … Norpath’s model has correctly predicted the winner of every presidential election since 1912, with the exception of 2000.

Earlier in the year, Norpoth predicted an 87% chance that Trump would prevail since he vanquished 15 competitors (winning NH & SC) –while Clinton tight tussled Bernie Sanders (losing both NH &SC).

Now, despite the plethora of polls showing Clinton ahead by at least 3 percentage points, Norpoth is sticking by the results of his model

He says: “If [Clinton] was leading by 10 or 20 points, I would say this is not going to be my year, but I don’t see it. It’s so close. It’s certainly do-able [for him], even when you look at the polls.”

Norpoth will “certainly have bragging rights if he’s right,” since just about everyone else is calling the race for Clinton.

Source

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No one can ever accuse Prof. Norpoth of “herding” – the tendency of forecasters go with most popular prediction.

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How many eligible citizens turnout to vote?

November 8, 2016

What’s the “mix” by party affiliation?

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By diving deeper into the widely varying polls, the obvious became evident to me.

By and large, the polls get about the same same answers by ‘type’ of voter … e.g. about 90% of voters throw their support behind their party’s candidate.

So, the variance in ‘headline’ numbers is almost entirely attributable to party-affiliation ‘mix’ – the proportion of voters from each party that are expected to turnout to vote.

Polls assuming that many more Dems will vote than GOPs say that Hillary is up by 4 or 5 points; polls that say there will be about an equal number of Dems & GOP turning out narrow the difference or give the edge to Trump.

Given that this will be a turnout election, I dove a bit deeper into voting trends, just to get some historical context for this election.

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For openers, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center…

In 2012, there were about 219 million citizens eligible to vote … 57.5% (126 million) of them did vote.

Note that 1960 was the high-water mark (64.8%), not 2008 (62.5%).

And, note that 2012 was down about 5 percentage points from 2008.