Saturday, September 8, 2012

Economists do it with models, again


Updating my blog on Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight.com model forecasts, I left the story in the aftermath of the RNC when it looked like any Romney bounce was below the expectations built into the model. Prior blog linked here.

The model is now responding to inputs from the DNC period, and is showing substantial gains in President Obama's probability of winning in the Electoral College. His probability as of today's (9/8/12) model update is 79.8%, up 2.5 percentage points since the end of the DNC, up 3.5 percentage points since the beginning of the DNC, up 8.2 percentage points since the end of the RNC, and up 10.5 percentage points since the beginning of the RNC. So the model has been consistently increasing the probability of an Obama win for the last 13 days. This is also a model high since it began in June. The early specific poll returns indicate that the Obama bounce is at or exceeding model expectations.

At an 80.0% probability of winning, Obama's win should be categorized as likely on the scale election forecasters appear to use.

I write these words, of course, with pleasure given my political bias. But also with fascination at the extent to which Nate Silver has gone to build a model which responds to the most important inputs to the eventual election outcome. Econometricians, good ones, rock!

This is a clumsy way to show the model output, but the site does not permit a link to just the graphs afaik. And I wanted to visually document the clear uptrend in Obama's winning probability as of this date.


Early Sunday update: Nate Silver has found faith in his model (it's OK Nate, you have the best model I am aware of): link here.

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