FiveThirtyEight.com: Regressions for Politics

Number two on my list (previous post) of technological innovations to political discourse and campaigning this year is regression modeling of polls. The first one that I saw doing something like this, though far more simplistically is realclearpolitics.com (RCP). Basically what they did is took an average of all the polls, without assigning any kind of weighting. This was good to give us a nice and easy quick look at where the polls stood for the election, and washing out, for the most part, the effects of left- or right-lean of polls.

I would check RCP during the primary season occasionally, just to get the sense of where things stood, but they often didn't get the right trends. Around the middle of the primary season, I came across the website fivethirtyeight.com.  At first, I was very apprehensive about the model. My initial reaction was that there would be a propagation of errors that basically rendered the results useless. But the genius of the regression model, wasn't just the polling but the way these polls were weighted, both with lean and with recency.

If you'd like to check out the FiveThirtyEight FAQ, please do so; I will not repeat work that is already excellently explained even if you're not mathematically inclined. I think many of us who were watching this campaign intently, and liked the numbers aspect, really came on board around the time of the North Carolina and Indiana primaries. It was at that point that I put 538 on my bookmarks and checked it daily. You will also notice that I now use the 538 widget on my right rail. 

A note about FiveThirtyEight.com is that the statistician in question is Nate Silver, of the baseball stats site, BaseballProspectus.com. Most of you know that I also have a baseball-related blog, Sabermetrati.blogspot.com, and am a big fan of Nate Silver's work on BP, which I reference regularly. I did not realize that it was the same Nate Silver until around early June, and it definitely lended more credence to his fine work on FiveThirtyEight.

My favorite part of 538 is the win percentage. I have been following that number since Obama officially won the nomination. It now stands at 94% chance of Obama winning the election, with a peak about a week ago of 98%.

Tuesday will prove the accuracy of Nate Silver's model; it should be interesting.