Political Clips

FiveThirtyEight.com is ran by a man named Nate Silver, a University of Chicago Economics alum. In his spare time he developed comprehensive historical database that could project the future performance of any pro baseball player by matching him to a comparable predecessor--down to, like, his height, his weight, his career singles and the size of his home stadium. Called PECOTA, it's now recognized as the most accurate baseball forecasting system on the market.

Nate has now turned his sites to Political Predictions. He takes state polls and averages them like all the other sites. But he weights each poll based on the historical accuracy of the pollster and the historical voting patterns of the state's demographics.

With each site update he runs 10,000 simulations and posts the results. Currently, Obama wins 74.7% of the simulations. His current electoral vote count shows Obama with 332.8 votes and McCain with 205.2 votes.

He publishes how each pollster ranks in historical accuracy. This is useful when you are looking at articles like this that show a surprising lead for Obama in 3 swing states. The pollster, Quinnipiac, ranks in the top third of historical accurate pollsters. So there may be something to these polls.