Via: Tuned In
Come next Tuesday night, we’ll get a resolution (let’s hope) to a great ongoing battle of 2012: not just the Presidential election between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, but the one between the pundits trying to analyze that race with their guts and a new breed of statistics gurus trying to forecast it with data. In Election 2012 as seen by the pundits–political journalists on the trail, commentators in cable-news studios–the campaign is a jump ball. There’s a slight lead for Mitt Romney in national polls and slight leads for Barack Obama in swing-state polls, and no good way of predicting next Tuesday’s outcome beyond flipping a coin. In Election 2012 as seen by the stats guys–there are many, though Nate Silver of the New York Times’s Fivethirtyeight blog has been getting most of the attention–the campaign is not a lock, but Obama has a clear advantage. By averaging out the results of state and national polls, considering the accuracy and trends in those polls over past years and figuring in economic and historical factors (or not), the data guys have generally (though not universally) given the President a clear edge: currently 77% in Silver’s model, north of 90% at the Princeton Election Consortium. (Their reasoning boils down to the President’s small but consistent lead in enough battleground state polls to win the Electoral College, plus the historical record of state vs. national polls. I’m oversimplifying here, though.) Can you call an election by applying math rather than going to rallies and talking to cab drivers and diner customers? As a political-news junkie, I’ve been noticing some passive-aggressive sniping against the data guys by more traditional reporters for a while now. Howard Fineman, for instance, recently tweeted that the Des Moines Register endorsement of Romney made clear for the first time that Obama might lose—though “it’s not scientific or quantifiable by Nate Silver.” Meow! And in a Politico article by Dylan Byers Monday, that low-simmering catfight became an all out cat war. Byers suggested that Silver could become “a one-term
Read full story at: Tuned In
Posted: October 31st, 2012
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