| Clinton | Obama | |
|---|---|---|
| Probability of winning | 90.5% | 40.1% |
 |
 |
|
| exp. n. of electoral votes | 287.2 | 265.3 |
| electoral votes, standard deviation | 16.5 | 20.6 |
| electoral votes, basic computation | 288.5 | 237 |
last update: 2008-05-16 01:22:01
05/08/08 I checked some of the days where Clinton's probability of winning is zero in the chart. Those zeros seem to make sense.
I compared April 12 (probability of winning: zero) with April 13 (probability of winning: 17%). The mean number of electoral votes to Clinton are, respectively, 215 and 268 on those two dates (remember that 270 votes are needed to win). There were lots of new polls on April 13, with big changes in Missouri (11 electoral votes), Minnesota (10), New York (31), and most importantly Ohio, where Clinton goes from 42-47 vs Mcain on April 12 (effectively losing the state) to 52-43 (which is tantamount to winning the state with probability close to one). Ohio alone provides 20 electoral votes. Needless to say, pivotal states are important ... I will soon put up some conditional probabilities, conditioning on McCain winning some of the pivotal states.
05/07/08 the history charts are back online showing huge swings in probabilities. I'll check later if they make sense. If anyone wants to look at the data they are based upon, the urls are in this format
../var/includes/Storage/rawdata-[mm]-[dd].html
where mm is the month number and dd is the 2-digit with leading zero day number
05/07/08 i have found an error in the code, and had to erase all historic data. I will try to reconstruct them later. Stay tuned.
04/28/08 i managed to recover predictions from past dates and to reconstruct the trends. Now all pictures are in the front page underneath the main table
04/27/08 one day online and first big swing already. Not sure which poll changed since yesterday, but clinton's probability increased considerably. I have added the "basic computation" that adds up electoral votes by just counting a win in the poll as if it was a win in the election in that state (if there is a tie, I split the college)
04/27/08 I finally managed to get the predictor running, with Clinton's and Obama's state level polls. It should be updating daily around 1am CET. The documentation is not there yet, I have only managed to copy the old stuff from the 2004 site at minnesota. The site style is not ready yet, but I'm getting there. Be patient.