Ping to FR’s own master poller. Jackmercer is one of the (VERY) few who called this election correctly. He got slaughtered for it, but he was right.
“Ping to FR’s own master poller. Jackmercer is one of the (VERY) few who called this election correctly. He got slaughtered for it, but he was right.”
Haha, not sure about master poller but I did basically what Nate Silver did but only in a MUCH MUCH more crude way. I put the national and state polls in an equation and only weighted by whether they included cell phones or were internet based. I also threw out Rasmussen and Gallup because if you compared them to at least 12 other polls, they were (seemingly) crazy outliers.
Turns out that Rasmussen and Gallup were definitely outliers (embarrassingly so) but I had no business throwing them out completely. But since I am a VERY much an amateur, I can forgive myself for over-reacting on that.
In retrospect, I see that internet polls did pretty decent and should not have weighted them as badly as I did. I was right to give more weight to cell phone polls. I was wrong to completely throw out Rasmussen and Gallup; should have kept them in but weighed them down significantly like Silver did.
I called Obama +1.8% nationally and got 49 out of 50 states (technically 48-1-1 since I was really unsure of CO). If I had done the things in the previous paragraph, I would have gotten closer to Nate Silver and the actual final results. I’m really going to get serious with my own model next time.