Loading ...By Jim Hoft
Published October 24, 2020 at 9:38am
23 Comments
Most election polls include a question that pollsters rarely talk about: whom do you expect to win. Expectation data is more accurate than voter intention data in predicting the margin of victory:
Published October 24, 2020 at 9:38am
23 Comments
Most election polls include a question that pollsters rarely talk about: whom do you expect to win. Expectation data is more accurate than voter intention data in predicting the margin of victory:
Most people expect Trump to win despite polls showing Biden in the lead. And this split is not unusual. As of October 3rd, 56 percent of likely voters expected President Trump to win reelection, and only 40 percent expected Biden to win, according to Gallup, via Western Journal.
The Science Behind the Numbers
Back in 2012, researchers could still publish their findings without fear of being canceled. Two researchers, Justin Wolfers of the University of Michigan and David Rothschild of Microsoft Statistical Research, published a paper on the accuracy of polling’s expectation question.
Here’s a summary of their findings:
Our primary dataset consists of all the state-level electoral presidential college races from 1952 to 2008, where both the intention and expectation questions are asked. In the 77 cases in which the intention and expectation question predict different candidates, the expectation question picks the winner 60 times, while the intention question only picked the winner 17 times. That is, 78% of the time that these two approaches disagree, the expectation data was correct.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/10/no-one-tells-polls-project-big-win-trump/