Voodoo polling? Predicting the US election
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Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service, calling number misusers to account everywhere. I'm Ruth Alexander. This week, Nate Silver, blogger and statistics geek who correctly predicted the US election results in 2008, proved he wasn't a one-trick pony. We ask whether his methods are the way forward for calling elections. And Hurricane Sandy, it left a trail of destruction in its wake.
Good morning, America. Breaking news. The perfect storm. Sandy brings utter devastation overnight.
But how did the death toll differ from an ordinary day on the east coast of America? The presidential elections may have had more than one victor this month, Barack Obama and Nate Silver. Nate is a New York Times blogger who's famous for predicting the 2008 election. Then he correctly predicted which way 49 of the 50 states would go, and he got every US Senate race right too. This time he's predicted 50 of the 50 US states correctly and praise flowed on as diverse outlets as Fox News and the Huffington Post. But this isn't magic, it's maths. Loyal listeners may remember we spoke to Nate just last month. He explained what he did.
These polls are reported, and people tend to treat each of them as being a highly newsworthy event unto itself. My view is that, first of all, you use all the information, but tend to use it more skeptically. And I also use it in a way that's systematic.
How did Nate Silver become a headline after the US election?
So you design a set of rules for how you process these polls, and it spits out essentially a set of odds that updates each day as new polls come in.
But Nate Silver has his detractors. US journalist and former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough derided his predictions, saying this on his MSNBC programme, Morning Joe.
Nate Silver says this is a 73.6% chance that the president's going to win. Anybody that thinks that this race is anything but a toss-up right now is such an ideologue.
In fact, Nate Silver got a lot of stick from Republican commentators who weren't happy about his forecast. But he was so confident he could predict the outcome again, he made a $2,000 bet with Joe Scarborough that Obama would win. And of course, Barack Obama did win. And other aggregators also fared pretty well with strikingly accurate predictions. The traditional pollsters, however, their forecasts range from overstating Obama's win to predicting that Romney would win by a percentage point or two. One of those was Gallup. Their polls looked at the national picture and predicted Romney would win the popular vote. The aggregators took a different approach. They looked at state polls from across a range of polling companies and took a weighted average.
In the case of Nate Silver, he added in other data such as economic and demographic data which could affect voting. They then made a state-by-state prediction and worked out how many electoral college votes each candidate would get. From this, they could forecast who the winner would be. I asked Frank Newport, editor-in-chief of the polling company Gallup, why there was such a discrepancy between their predictions and those of the aggregators, like Nate Silver.
That's a discrepancy. What these aggregators were doing, who don't do polling of their own, by the way, they were saying, looking at the electoral college in the U.S., they thought that the number of polls in the swing states showing that Obama was probably going to win was high enough to give him a higher probability of winning. What we were doing was simply saying, here's where we think the national popular vote will be, which will be quite close. And in fact, the national popular vote was, in fact, quite close within a couple of points.
There seems to be a slight tension between you traditional pollsters and this new breed of data geeks, the aggregators. Would you agree?
I think that there is some tension there, and part of it is founded on the fact that they don't poll. It's kind of like the law of the commons.
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