This week's simulation of the electoral votes based on the
InTrade Prediction market data once again shows a Democratic victory in 63% of the simulations, with a median Democratic electoral vote count of 281. Today,
FiveThirtyEight.com has the Democrats even further ahead with 312 electoral votes and a Democratic victory 74% of the time, but he uses a less transparent simulation using polling numbers for his simulation.
This is an upswing from last week's prediction of a republican victory and probably represents the inTrade prediction markets digesting the bump in popularity that Senator Obama has gotten due to the recent crisis in the financial markets. The candidates seem to trade the same few states back and forth as before. This week Colorado and New Hampshire are weakly Democratic, and Ohio and Virgina are weakly Republican. Nevada is essentially tied in the Intrade data. Losing Nevada would still leave the Democrats with 273 electoral votes.
Intrade has jumped on the visualization bandwagon with a graphic on
their front page showing the electoral college results based on their prediction data. They join
Yahoo's election dashboard, who was already using the Intrade data, as well as poll data.
Truthisall has his
own simulation in which he thinks
Senator Obama's chances are even better than my results or 538's results. He thinks that there has been systematic election fraud for decades so I invite you to interpret his results yourself.
270towin has their own simulation based on the polls. They predict the Democrats have a median 276 electoral votes and a Democratic win 60.2% of the time.
This is an upswing from last week's prediction of a republican victory and probably represents the inTrade prediction markets digesting the bump in popularity that Senator Obama has gotten due to the recent crisis in the financial markets. The candidates seem to trade the same few states back and forth as before. This week Colorado and New Hampshire are weakly Democratic, and Ohio and Virgina are weakly Republican. Nevada is essentially tied in the Intrade data. Losing Nevada would still leave the Democrats with 273 electoral votes.
Intrade has jumped on the visualization bandwagon with a graphic on their front page showing the electoral college results based on their prediction data. They join Yahoo's election dashboard, who was already using the Intrade data, as well as poll data. Truthisall has his own simulation in which he thinks Senator Obama's chances are even better than my results or 538's results. He thinks that there has been systematic election fraud for decades so I invite you to interpret his results yourself. 270towin has their own simulation based on the polls. They predict the Democrats have a median 276 electoral votes and a Democratic win 60.2% of the time.
2 comments:
The electoral college exists specifically to cause there to be 51 elections and not just one. It causes candidates to have to campaign in all 50 states and Washington DC and not just run a national campaign to get the popular vote. For the same reason we have two houses in the Congress, the House of Representatives to be proportional to population, and the Senate to be represent each State equally.
These systems were put in place because, at the beginning of our country, the less populous states were concerned that their desires would be superseded buy the wishes of the large states. Back then the large state was Virginia, now it would be California or New York. A popular vote based election wouldn't eliminate "battleground" and "spectator states", it would just change which ones were which.
The winning candidate must win 270 electoral votes from many different states. This year's "spectator" is next year's battleground. I even disagree with this nomenclature. As a resident of a smaller state I think the electoral college system strikes the right balance between pure Democracy and Republicanism or Federalism (those words in their technical meanings, not party denominations).
I've just discovered your blog and find many interesting things here. I'm impressed by this political piece. I do hope that Obama will maintain a lead; indeed increase it substantially. The CNN reports seem to only quote polls showing the two pretty much even.
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