Now that the election is over and the votes have been
counted, I would like to compare Battleground270’s projections to the actual
results. As it turns out,
Battleground270 called 49 out of 50 states correctly for the Presidential
election and all but one state in the Senate elections.
As you can see in the table below, Florida is the only state
I projected incorrectly. My predicted
margin of victory for Mr. Romney was 0.2%, making it the closest of any of the
states. While it seems Florida will
indeed be the closest state, it was actually Barack Obama who emerged
victorious, by 0.9%.
However, just calling the state correctly is not a
sufficient way to analyze an election projection. Instead, I have compared my projected margin
of victory for each candidate to the actual margin of victory.
Looking at the results individually, it seems the biggest
outliers from my projections were Arizona, Colorado, Michigan, and New
Hampshire. Two of these states, Arizona
and Michigan, were not truly taken seriously by either of the campaigns, and,
at least in Arizona, there were very few public polls for the Presidential race
in the weeks leading up to the election.
Colorado and New Hampshire, on the other hand, were hotly contested states that
were both expected to be extremely close.
Mitt Romney even made his last stop of the campaign in New Hampshire,
usually a sign of strength for a state.
However, both states went strongly for the President, by a margin of
4.7% and 5.8%, respectively.
In the Presidential election, Battleground270’s margins were
not drastically off. On average, I
missed the actual margin by 1.785 percent.
Additionally, my projections had a slight Republican bias of 1.092
percent. Because the projections are
made with respect to public polling (along with weighting and personal
judgment), this bias can be explained mostly by looking at the polling, as we
will do in a minute.
The story was a little different, however, in the
Senate. While 49 out of the 50 states I
called were correct, Democrats beat my projected margins by an average of
2.607%. And remember, that’s just an
average. Some candidates like Senators Claire
McCaskill and Bill Nelson ended up clobbering their opponents. Other races were closer to the predicted results, but in all races but three, the Democrat beat the projections.
The race I called incorrectly, North Dakota, was one of
those states. Democratic candidate Heidi
Heitkamp won in a state that voted for Mitt Romney by nearly 20%. Other Democratic candidates also did much
better than expected. So what caused
such a large difference in expectations and reality?
Karl Rove and the right-wing talking heads got at least one
thing right this election cycle: the polls were wrong. However, where Rove and others were wrong is
in the direction that the polls were skewed.
During the waning weeks of the campaign, it essentially became GOP
orthodoxy to denounce nearly all public polls.
The idea was that pollsters were oversampling Democrats, and instead,
they believed, Romney was actually winning or tied in most states and was
likely to go on to win a landslide victory.
Obviously, that didn’t happen. Instead,
as it turns out, most of the polls were actually skewed towards the Republicans
(by ~1% in the Presidential election and ~2.5% in the Senate elections). As noted above, Battleground270 uses a
weighted average of polls to help calculate the expected final vote. Therefore, Battleground270’s error for the
Senate elections is probably at least somewhere close to the overall bias for
polling this cycle.
There will be those who try to blame Obama’s
larger-than-expected victories on Hurricane Sandy or perhaps other
factors. But in reality, it is likely
pollsters were too strict when screening for likely voters. They undersampled young voters, latinos,
African Americans, and, overall, those who no longer use landline phones. What’s the common link between these
groups? They all tend to vote much more
Democratic. Let’s hope they don’t make
the same mistakes in the future.
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