This web site presents predictions of the 2008 presidential electoral college outcome (if elections were held today) based on state level polls collected by electoral-vote.com. At least once a day, a script fetches those site's polls table, computes simulations of election outcomes (details below) based on state-level polls and posts them on the front page.
I use simple statistical techniques that take into account how close the candidates are in each state's poll to compute how likely one candidate is to win in November, and how many electoral votes each candidate will receive. Polls report only imprecise information about the electorate's opinion. However, it is possible to use the poll results together with the reported margin of error to compute the probability that one candidate wins the state. I compute this probability in each state, and use it to simulate 10000 electoral college outcomes in each state. I add up the electoral votes across states, in each simulated elections. Then, I compute the fraction of elections won by each candidate, the average number of electoral college votes obtained by the candidate, and the standard deviation of the electoral college votes. These are the numbers reported in the main display on the front page. For a more technical explanation, see below.
This information is also reported on the main display and is simpler to explain. It calculates electoral college votes assuming candidates win with certainty states where they are ahead in the poll. This does not take into account how close the candidates are in the poll. In states with 50-50 shares I assign each candidate 1/2 of the college's volte.
The histograms reports the percentage of simulated elections resulting with a given range of electoral votes going to Obama. It's helpful to provide an idea of the precision of the estimated expected number of electoral votes.
Please use caution in using these results to predict who will winthe election in November (see notes 2, 3, and 5 below). My computations assume that the only problem with these polls is sampling error. That is, every voter has an equal probability of being sampled. Obviously, pollsters may also make systematic mistakes (for example, they may not sample enough young voters, or they may have a biased method to pick likely voters ...). These mistakes are not corrected by my methodology. I prefer to view these results as a tool to interpret current state polls.
Updated: 06 Feb 12 03:16
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