Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Aggregating the Aggregators

As we all know, Nate Silver at 538, Sam Wang at Princeton, and Drew Linzer at Votamatic have made quite the names for themselves this election cycle with their number-crunching predictions.  All three call today's election for Obama with following electoral votes (at the moment I write this):

Wang:  303
Silver: 313
Linzer: 332

So to be fair, as they all suck data from polls paid for and conducted by others, that I suck data off their work and aggregate their aggregation, thus inserting even more random error in a messy political process rife with false precision.  If we do some simple calculations on the back of a stained cocktail napkin, Obama wins with 316 electoral votes.

Where do they disagree?  Florida, mostly.  Silver has it leaning Obama, Wang (map to left, weighted by each state's respective electoral vote size) has it leaning Romney, and Linzer has it leaning, er, nowhere.  It's his only swing state bathed in white.  All give Obama such key states as Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Obviously we won't know if the nerds were right until late tonight or perhaps Wednesday.


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