Slashdot points to ElectoralMap.net, a site which aggregates the Intrade prediction market results for individual states in the fall U.S. Presidential election, to predict aggregate electoral college totals and the election winner. I’m bookmarking it as an alternative to media coverage of the race, which will put their own spin on likely outcomes. Note the arrows at the bottom of the map will allow you to track the changes in sentiment over the weeks and months leading up to the election.
FYI, another predictions market, hubdub, actually does things by state (predictions voted by state) and can give you proportional coloring on their map. Check it out at http://www.hubdub.com/elect...
Per the FAQ, (http://hominidviews.com/?pa..., his simulations are "Monte-Carlo simulations of the Electoral College outcome based on state head-to-head polling data." His most recent analysis..."showed Sen. Barack Obama leading Sen. John McCain by (on average) 277 to 261 electoral votes. If a general election was held now, Obama’s chances of winning were about 67.6% (if we give ties to Obama)."
The model projects that if the election were held today, Obama would win by 314- 224 electoral votes.The State model projects that he would win 52.3% of the 2-party vote.The National model projects that he would win 52.6%.
Obama leads the latest state poll aggregate average by 45.7- 43.1%.He also leads the latest national poll aggregate by 47.4 - 43.9%.
The electoral vote is the average of a 5000 election trial Monte Carlo simulation.Obama won 99.8% of the trials; that’s the probability he would win.
The model executes five scenarios of undecided voter allocation.In the most likely base case, 60% of undecided voters were allocated to Obama.In the worst case, 50% were allocated: Obama had 51.2%, 295 EV and 93% probability.
The polls indicate that these states will flip to Obama: CO, IA, MO, NM, OH, VA
These graphs display the trends:Aggregate poll sharesElectoral vote and win probabilityElectoral vote and 2-party vote shareLatest battleground state pollsBattleground state win probabilityProjection sensitivity analysis for 5 undecided voter allocation scenarios
But there’s a catch: the projection assumes a fraud-free election.It assumes that the recorded vote will be equal to the True Vote – but it never is.
Approximately 3-4 million Obama votes will be uncounted (70-80%).There will likely be vote-switching on the DREs and central tabulators.The Democrats need a very heavy voter turnout to overcome the fraud.Obama will probably need at least 54% of the True Vote (2-party) to win.
Now for the good news: Obama should get the 54% - at a minimum.It’s only June and he is leading despite all the media-driven negatives from the primary.Bush is at 25% in the polls – and McCain supports his policies.His poll numbers vs. McCain can only go up as the focus turns to the election.
The 2004 Election ModelReview the methodology in the Election Model.
The Election Model aggregate state poll closely matched the national polls.The aggregate pre-election state polls also matched the pre-election national polls.Kerry led the aggregate final state pre-election polls by 47.7- 47.0%.Kerry led the national 18-poll average by 47.3 - 46.9%.
The Election Model state model projections closely matched the national average.The State projection had Kerry winning 51.8% of the 2-party vote and 337 electoral votes.The National projection had him winning 51.6% of the 2-party vote.
Exit Pollsters Edison-Mitofsky released their 2004 Evaluation report in Jan. 2005.It indicated that Kerry won the unadjusted (WPD) aggregate state exit polls by 51.8 - 47.2%.The 12:22am National Exit Poll update indicated that Kerry won by 50.8 - 48.2%.E-M stated that respondents were randomly selected and that the margin of error was 1.0%.
Professional pollsters allocate undecided voters in every election.The majority are allocated to the challenger, especially if the incumbent is unpopular.Bush had a 48% approval rating on Election Day.
The Gallup Poll allocated 90% of undecided voters to Kerry. Harris and Zogby gave him 67-80%.The Election Model final base case projection allocated 75% of undecided voters to Kerry.
The Election Calculator ModelThis model calculates the True vote based on estimated shares of returning voters.The National Exit Poll “How Voted” category is a reasonable best case estimate.Returning prior election voters equal total votes cast less mortality multiplied by the turnout.In 2000, the Census reported 110.8m votes cast, but only 105.4m were recorded.In 2004, the Census reported 125.7m votes cast, but only 122.3m were recorded.
The Election Calculator determined that Kerry won the True Vote in a 67-57m landslide (53.2 - 45.4%).
The Calculator determined that Obama should win the True Vote in a 71-59m landslide (54 - 45%).The 2004 True Vote was the basis for calculating the 2008 model.
Pre-election and Exit Poll ConfirmationFinal pre-election polls showed Kerry and Bush in a virtual tie.The unweighted state average favored Bush, but Kerry led the aggregate weighted average.The pre-election aggregate state polls closely matched the national pre-election poll average.
Some naysayers maintain that polling analysis cannot prove that the 2004 election was stolen.They claim that the Final National Exit Poll was correct and the unadjusted exit polls were wrong.But after undecided voters were allocated, the pre-election polls matched the unadjusted exits.
The Final National Exit Poll was forced to match the recorded vote using impossible weightings.The Final NEP indicated that Bush 2000 voters comprised 43% (52.6m) of the 2004 electorate (122.3m).But Bush only had 50.5m recorded votes in 2000.And approximately 2m Bush 2000 voters died prior to 2004; another 2m did not vote.The Final Exit Poll had to inflate returning Bush voters by 6m (52.6-46.5) to match the recorded vote.
Where did Bush find 16 million new voters?Kerry won 64% of returning Nader voters. Bush had 17%.He won 57-60% of new voters and others who did not vote in 2000.He won at least 91% of returning Gore voters who saw their votes nullified in 2000.He won at least 70% of late undecided voters.
Kerry also won the final 5m recorded votes by 54.3-45.7%.These were late votes recorded a few days after the election.They consisted primarily of absentee and provisional ballots.
Bush won the 2004 recorded vote by 62.0-59.0m, 50.7- 48.3% and 286 EV.Of 3.4 million uncounted votes, approximately 2.6m were for Kerry - a net 1.8m margin.Bush’s 3.0m margin is therefore reduced to 1.2m – and that’s before vote-switching.
To believe that Bush won, one must believe that the pre-election and unadjusted exit polls were wrong.And also believe that the Final Exit Poll, although mathematically impossible, was correct.
The real issue is not how well Obama or McCain might do in the closely divided battleground states, but that we shouldn't have battleground states and spectator states in the first place. Every vote in every state should be politically relevant in a presidential election. And, every vote should be equal. We should have a national popular vote for President in which the White House goes to the candidate who gets the most popular votes in all 50 states.
The National Popular Vote bill would guarantee the Presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states (and DC). The bill would take effect only when enacted, in identical form, by states possessing a majority of the electoral vote -- that is, enough electoral votes to elect a President (270 of 538). When the bill comes into effect, all the electoral votes from those states would be awarded to the presidential candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states (and DC).
The major shortcoming of the current system of electing the President is that presidential candidates have no reason to poll, visit, advertise, organize, campaign, or worry about the voter concerns in states where they are safely ahead or hopelessly behind. The reason for this is the winner-take-all rule which awards all of a state's electoral votes to the candidate who gets the most votes in each separate state. Because of this rule, candidates concentrate their attention on a handful of closely divided "battleground" states. Two-thirds of the visits and money are focused in just six states; 88% on 9 states, and 99% of the money goes to just 16 states. Two-thirds of the states and people are merely spectators to the presidential election.
Another shortcoming of the current system is that a candidate can win the Presidency without winning the most popular votes nationwide.
The National Popular Vote bill has been approved by 18 legislative chambers (one house in Colorado, Arkansas, Maine, North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Washington, and two houses in Maryland, Illinois, Hawaii, California, and Vermont). It has been enacted into law in Hawaii, Illinois, New Jersey, and Maryland. These states have 50 (19%) of the 270 electoral votes needed to bring this legislation into effect.
Here's something I want to do (or see done) with the data that I suggested before: compare the time history of a given political bet's price (Obama's chance of winning, Democrats' chances of gaining seats, etc.) with the time history of some economic measure, like the S&P, oil futures, some energy/commodity index, etc. That coud allow you to extract the market's estimate of how one affect's the other. (i.e. as the market estimates a higher chance of Obama winning, does it also discount the value of stocks?)
And to reiterate the issue from last time, no, just looking at election day isn't enough: other factors could influence the markets or election, it could be decided already, other events could happen that day, and it's too much for one data point to handle.
The thing you need to remember is that the outcomes of the state electoral votes are NOT independent (people's psychologies are similar, they have similar biases, the candidates may make a slip that makes them less attractive in all states etc.). For example, in 2006 the TradeSports simultaneously called every individual state’s Senate election correctly, even though they were predicted at fairly even odds. David Pencock makes this point well here: http://blog.oddhead.com/200...
Therefore, I don't think aggregating the prediction market bets like that would be a very good idea.
Wouldn't we have to account for correlated error terms? If a prediction market is overestimating Obama's share of the vote in some states, we should infer it is more likely than not that the market is overestimating his share in other similar states. Maybe I'm missing something but it seems to me that this would underestimate our actual uncertainty about who will win the electoral vote.
Regarding insider trading, the following notion occurred to me the other day: maybe it would be more fair to the "little guy" if we placed zero trading restrictions on all company employees. That way, insider trading statistics might actually become a valuable indicator about the prospects for a particular company and its stock.
What happens today is that any impending news, good or bad, must be bottled up until some official news is released, typically a quarterly report. The result in the market is always an underdamped reaction to the delta function. The little guy, and even the big guy, has limited control of his destiny during this rude shock.
I submit that allowing for insider trading might lead to a properly damped response to the change in condition. Maybe you make things fairer by taxing gains made by execs on their own stock at a higher rate, but you don't stop the information transfer. You might argue against the implementing the proposal if you think that the underdamped nature of securities is somehow preferrable ... I'd bet that the CBOE would take that side.
"Hear you, but sports possess entertainment value like music, drama and literature, not to mention cultivating fit bodies. Not sure why you would bin them as zero-sum, even given the technical winning and losing."
I'm pretty sure Patri is not claiming that sports as a whole are zero-sum. But the outcome on which we typically *bet*, is zero-sum.
The total value produced in the world by an NBA season in which Detroit wins the eastern conference championship is little different from that produced when Boston does. In addition, the difference is completely intangible. In this sense, a bet on this series is a bet that has little connection to the real world.
Now that I say that, though, I have to back off a bit. There is surely a redistribution that happens depending on who is in the finals, or wins the championship, in that that team will sell more paraphernalia etc. It's not a big a difference as 10 billion stolen in Iraq in that the people who get the money in either situation are investing it in roughly similar ways. But it is a difference.
HA,how does a Ponzi scheme transition to profitability?Are there prominent examples you're thinking of?
I suppose a company can try to create reputation and legitimacy during a Ponzi scheme, but it's hard to imagine that Enron needed any more. I also suppose it's possible that Enron expected to pay its operating losses with occasional windfalls, like in CA, but that was just too small to be a serious business model.
Enron was a case of bad incentives. The salesmen cooked the books and exited. The behavior of the executives makes me doubt they knew they were playing a Ponzi scheme (until the prosecuted fraud) and ever had an exit plan.
"Eventually, Ponzi schemes and companies like Enron get caught, because their accumulated physical assets don't match their claimed profits."
That just-so story simply isn't true, in my observation. Lots of "Ponzi schemes" transition to legitimate profitability and pull it off. A good argument could be made that Enron was attempting the same thing, and with better and luckier timing could have pulled it off, too. Beware of any "eventually" narrative, because it leaves room for intervention and transition before the purported inevitable outcome.
FYI, another predictions market, hubdub, actually does things by state (predictions voted by state) and can give you proportional coloring on their map. Check it out at http://www.hubdub.com/elect...
I've added the state by state summation you suggested, at least for today (6/16). If it continues to be interesting I'll make it a permanent feature.
I think the Monte Carlo is a good idea too, and I'll probably add that when I have some time.
GoogleCharts now allows a colored geographical map:http://code.google.com/apis...
Another Monte Carlo simulator is at Hominid Views: http://hominidviews.com
Per the FAQ, (http://hominidviews.com/?pa..., his simulations are "Monte-Carlo simulations of the Electoral College outcome based on state head-to-head polling data." His most recent analysis..."showed Sen. Barack Obama leading Sen. John McCain by (on average) 277 to 261 electoral votes. If a general election was held now, Obama’s chances of winning were about 67.6% (if we give ties to Obama)."
2008 Election ModelMonte Carlo Electoral Vote SimulationTruthIsAllUpdated: June 12
http://www.geocities.com/el...
The model projects that if the election were held today, Obama would win by 314- 224 electoral votes.The State model projects that he would win 52.3% of the 2-party vote.The National model projects that he would win 52.6%.
Obama leads the latest state poll aggregate average by 45.7- 43.1%.He also leads the latest national poll aggregate by 47.4 - 43.9%.
The electoral vote is the average of a 5000 election trial Monte Carlo simulation.Obama won 99.8% of the trials; that’s the probability he would win.
The model executes five scenarios of undecided voter allocation.In the most likely base case, 60% of undecided voters were allocated to Obama.In the worst case, 50% were allocated: Obama had 51.2%, 295 EV and 93% probability.
The polls indicate that these states will flip to Obama: CO, IA, MO, NM, OH, VA
These graphs display the trends:Aggregate poll sharesElectoral vote and win probabilityElectoral vote and 2-party vote shareLatest battleground state pollsBattleground state win probabilityProjection sensitivity analysis for 5 undecided voter allocation scenarios
But there’s a catch: the projection assumes a fraud-free election.It assumes that the recorded vote will be equal to the True Vote – but it never is.
Approximately 3-4 million Obama votes will be uncounted (70-80%).There will likely be vote-switching on the DREs and central tabulators.The Democrats need a very heavy voter turnout to overcome the fraud.Obama will probably need at least 54% of the True Vote (2-party) to win.
Now for the good news: Obama should get the 54% - at a minimum.It’s only June and he is leading despite all the media-driven negatives from the primary.Bush is at 25% in the polls – and McCain supports his policies.His poll numbers vs. McCain can only go up as the focus turns to the election.
The 2004 Election ModelReview the methodology in the Election Model.
The Election Model aggregate state poll closely matched the national polls.The aggregate pre-election state polls also matched the pre-election national polls.Kerry led the aggregate final state pre-election polls by 47.7- 47.0%.Kerry led the national 18-poll average by 47.3 - 46.9%.
The Election Model state model projections closely matched the national average.The State projection had Kerry winning 51.8% of the 2-party vote and 337 electoral votes.The National projection had him winning 51.6% of the 2-party vote.
Exit Pollsters Edison-Mitofsky released their 2004 Evaluation report in Jan. 2005.It indicated that Kerry won the unadjusted (WPD) aggregate state exit polls by 51.8 - 47.2%.The 12:22am National Exit Poll update indicated that Kerry won by 50.8 - 48.2%.E-M stated that respondents were randomly selected and that the margin of error was 1.0%.
Professional pollsters allocate undecided voters in every election.The majority are allocated to the challenger, especially if the incumbent is unpopular.Bush had a 48% approval rating on Election Day.
The Gallup Poll allocated 90% of undecided voters to Kerry. Harris and Zogby gave him 67-80%.The Election Model final base case projection allocated 75% of undecided voters to Kerry.
The Election Calculator ModelThis model calculates the True vote based on estimated shares of returning voters.The National Exit Poll “How Voted” category is a reasonable best case estimate.Returning prior election voters equal total votes cast less mortality multiplied by the turnout.In 2000, the Census reported 110.8m votes cast, but only 105.4m were recorded.In 2004, the Census reported 125.7m votes cast, but only 122.3m were recorded.
The Election Calculator determined that Kerry won the True Vote in a 67-57m landslide (53.2 - 45.4%).
The Calculator determined that Obama should win the True Vote in a 71-59m landslide (54 - 45%).The 2004 True Vote was the basis for calculating the 2008 model.
Pre-election and Exit Poll ConfirmationFinal pre-election polls showed Kerry and Bush in a virtual tie.The unweighted state average favored Bush, but Kerry led the aggregate weighted average.The pre-election aggregate state polls closely matched the national pre-election poll average.
Some naysayers maintain that polling analysis cannot prove that the 2004 election was stolen.They claim that the Final National Exit Poll was correct and the unadjusted exit polls were wrong.But after undecided voters were allocated, the pre-election polls matched the unadjusted exits.
The Final National Exit Poll was forced to match the recorded vote using impossible weightings.The Final NEP indicated that Bush 2000 voters comprised 43% (52.6m) of the 2004 electorate (122.3m).But Bush only had 50.5m recorded votes in 2000.And approximately 2m Bush 2000 voters died prior to 2004; another 2m did not vote.The Final Exit Poll had to inflate returning Bush voters by 6m (52.6-46.5) to match the recorded vote.
Where did Bush find 16 million new voters?Kerry won 64% of returning Nader voters. Bush had 17%.He won 57-60% of new voters and others who did not vote in 2000.He won at least 91% of returning Gore voters who saw their votes nullified in 2000.He won at least 70% of late undecided voters.
Kerry also won the final 5m recorded votes by 54.3-45.7%.These were late votes recorded a few days after the election.They consisted primarily of absentee and provisional ballots.
Bush won the 2004 recorded vote by 62.0-59.0m, 50.7- 48.3% and 286 EV.Of 3.4 million uncounted votes, approximately 2.6m were for Kerry - a net 1.8m margin.Bush’s 3.0m margin is therefore reduced to 1.2m – and that’s before vote-switching.
To believe that Bush won, one must believe that the pre-election and unadjusted exit polls were wrong.And also believe that the Final Exit Poll, although mathematically impossible, was correct.
The real issue is not how well Obama or McCain might do in the closely divided battleground states, but that we shouldn't have battleground states and spectator states in the first place. Every vote in every state should be politically relevant in a presidential election. And, every vote should be equal. We should have a national popular vote for President in which the White House goes to the candidate who gets the most popular votes in all 50 states.
The National Popular Vote bill would guarantee the Presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states (and DC). The bill would take effect only when enacted, in identical form, by states possessing a majority of the electoral vote -- that is, enough electoral votes to elect a President (270 of 538). When the bill comes into effect, all the electoral votes from those states would be awarded to the presidential candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states (and DC).
The major shortcoming of the current system of electing the President is that presidential candidates have no reason to poll, visit, advertise, organize, campaign, or worry about the voter concerns in states where they are safely ahead or hopelessly behind. The reason for this is the winner-take-all rule which awards all of a state's electoral votes to the candidate who gets the most votes in each separate state. Because of this rule, candidates concentrate their attention on a handful of closely divided "battleground" states. Two-thirds of the visits and money are focused in just six states; 88% on 9 states, and 99% of the money goes to just 16 states. Two-thirds of the states and people are merely spectators to the presidential election.
Another shortcoming of the current system is that a candidate can win the Presidency without winning the most popular votes nationwide.
The National Popular Vote bill has been approved by 18 legislative chambers (one house in Colorado, Arkansas, Maine, North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Washington, and two houses in Maryland, Illinois, Hawaii, California, and Vermont). It has been enacted into law in Hawaii, Illinois, New Jersey, and Maryland. These states have 50 (19%) of the 270 electoral votes needed to bring this legislation into effect.
See http://www.NationalPopularV...
You could always ask them for code.
I think the keyword for making maps is GIS, eg,GIS-Python. ESRI (ArcInfo) is the dominant brand, so you'll probably find maps in their "shape" format.
Here's something I want to do (or see done) with the data that I suggested before: compare the time history of a given political bet's price (Obama's chance of winning, Democrats' chances of gaining seats, etc.) with the time history of some economic measure, like the S&P, oil futures, some energy/commodity index, etc. That coud allow you to extract the market's estimate of how one affect's the other. (i.e. as the market estimates a higher chance of Obama winning, does it also discount the value of stocks?)
And to reiterate the issue from last time, no, just looking at election day isn't enough: other factors could influence the markets or election, it could be decided already, other events could happen that day, and it's too much for one data point to handle.
The thing you need to remember is that the outcomes of the state electoral votes are NOT independent (people's psychologies are similar, they have similar biases, the candidates may make a slip that makes them less attractive in all states etc.). For example, in 2006 the TradeSports simultaneously called every individual state’s Senate election correctly, even though they were predicted at fairly even odds. David Pencock makes this point well here: http://blog.oddhead.com/200...
Therefore, I don't think aggregating the prediction market bets like that would be a very good idea.
Wouldn't we have to account for correlated error terms? If a prediction market is overestimating Obama's share of the vote in some states, we should infer it is more likely than not that the market is overestimating his share in other similar states. Maybe I'm missing something but it seems to me that this would underestimate our actual uncertainty about who will win the electoral vote.
"Then to make it even more useful, run a Monte Carlo simulation where each state is randomly assigned to one party or the other"
I believe something like that methodology is used at fivethirtyeight.com. Look at the simulation results on the rightmost bar.
Regarding insider trading, the following notion occurred to me the other day: maybe it would be more fair to the "little guy" if we placed zero trading restrictions on all company employees. That way, insider trading statistics might actually become a valuable indicator about the prospects for a particular company and its stock.
What happens today is that any impending news, good or bad, must be bottled up until some official news is released, typically a quarterly report. The result in the market is always an underdamped reaction to the delta function. The little guy, and even the big guy, has limited control of his destiny during this rude shock.
I submit that allowing for insider trading might lead to a properly damped response to the change in condition. Maybe you make things fairer by taxing gains made by execs on their own stock at a higher rate, but you don't stop the information transfer. You might argue against the implementing the proposal if you think that the underdamped nature of securities is somehow preferrable ... I'd bet that the CBOE would take that side.
"Hear you, but sports possess entertainment value like music, drama and literature, not to mention cultivating fit bodies. Not sure why you would bin them as zero-sum, even given the technical winning and losing."
I'm pretty sure Patri is not claiming that sports as a whole are zero-sum. But the outcome on which we typically *bet*, is zero-sum.
The total value produced in the world by an NBA season in which Detroit wins the eastern conference championship is little different from that produced when Boston does. In addition, the difference is completely intangible. In this sense, a bet on this series is a bet that has little connection to the real world.
Now that I say that, though, I have to back off a bit. There is surely a redistribution that happens depending on who is in the finals, or wins the championship, in that that team will sell more paraphernalia etc. It's not a big a difference as 10 billion stolen in Iraq in that the people who get the money in either situation are investing it in roughly similar ways. But it is a difference.
Eventually, Ponzi schemes and companies like Enron get caught, because their accumulated physical assets don't match their claimed profits.
And bubbles eventually burst. That does not prevent them all from being formed in the first place.
HA,how does a Ponzi scheme transition to profitability?Are there prominent examples you're thinking of?
I suppose a company can try to create reputation and legitimacy during a Ponzi scheme, but it's hard to imagine that Enron needed any more. I also suppose it's possible that Enron expected to pay its operating losses with occasional windfalls, like in CA, but that was just too small to be a serious business model.
Enron was a case of bad incentives. The salesmen cooked the books and exited. The behavior of the executives makes me doubt they knew they were playing a Ponzi scheme (until the prosecuted fraud) and ever had an exit plan.
"Eventually, Ponzi schemes and companies like Enron get caught, because their accumulated physical assets don't match their claimed profits."
That just-so story simply isn't true, in my observation. Lots of "Ponzi schemes" transition to legitimate profitability and pull it off. A good argument could be made that Enron was attempting the same thing, and with better and luckier timing could have pulled it off, too. Beware of any "eventually" narrative, because it leaves room for intervention and transition before the purported inevitable outcome.