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"A comprehensive, collaborative elections resource."
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Where Obama and Romney Beat Their Polls
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| Parent(s) |
Race
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| Contributor | Homegrown Democrat |
| Last Edited | Homegrown Democrat Nov 21, 2012 08:48pm |
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| Category | Analysis |
| Author | Nate Silver |
| News Date | Wednesday, November 21, 2012 09:30:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | I’m traveling for Thanksgiving, so we’ll keep this relatively brief. But I thought this map was worth sharing. It shows how President Obama and Mitt Romney performed on Election Day relative to the FiveThirtyEight forecasts in each state, based on the ballots counted so far.
States colored in blue represent those where Mr. Obama beat his forecast — the deeper the blue color, the larger the margin by which he did so — while those in red are the states where Mr. Romney bested his.
A few things jump out here.
First, there are some pretty clear regional patterns in which each candidate beat his forecast (and, by extension, beat the polls). States where Mr. Obama beat the polls (Oregon, for example) tended to border others where he also did so. The same was true for Mr. Romney.
This suggests that it is a mistake to assume that the potential error in the polls is distributed randomly. Instead, if a candidate beats the polls in one state, he is very likely to also do so in other states that are demographically or geographically similar. (The FiveThirtyEight model assumes that error in the polls may in fact be correlated in just this fashion.) |
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