Posted on

US 2008 Presidential Election Breakdown

Andrew Gelman, who writes at Statistical modeling, has a quick summary of what took place over on his redbluerichpoor site.  The two take-away thoughts for me:

1) The red state/blue state divisions haven’t been redrawn.  There was simply a general shift across the board away from the Republicans and towards the Democrats:

Update: See also More on the shift from Republican to Democrat.

2) Nate Silver, at fivethirtyeight.com, did a pretty good job of aggregating the polls to predict what would happen, at least for those states in the middle:

I’ll leave the question over whether Nate’s aggregation technique was optimal to the experts.

Posted on

Georgia Senate race – it looks like a runoff

In the U.S. state of Georgia, senate races have a crude form of preferential voting:  if no candidate secures 50% of the vote, the top two candidates go into a runoff election.  It looks like that may be about to happen:

With 99 percent of precincts reporting early Wednesday afternoon, Chambliss [incumbent, Republican] had 1,841,449 votes, or 49.9 percent of the total, while Martin [Democrat] had 1,727,625 votes, or 47 percent. Libertarian Allen Buckley had 126,328 votes, or 3 percent.

It’s by no means certain – there are some 200,000 more votes to count and the whole thing needs to be certified – but if Chambliss stays below the 50% line, we could be about to have some (more) fun.

Given the visual scale of the Obama victory, it seems safe to assume that Martin would do better in the runoff.  A Martin victory would not give the Democrats the supermajority of 60 seats in the US Senate, even with the two independents, but it is nothing to be sneezed at and it’s safe to assume that if the runoff goes ahead the president-elect will be visiting Georgia in the next few weeks.

Posted on

The scale of campaign finance in the US election

I’ve spoken before about how the sheer scale of the Obama campaign will give Republicans something to hide behind instead of doing some serious soul searching.

The NY Times has great graphic showing the campaigns’ finance by area and week.  The totals:

Obama:  $659.7 M

Clinton: $249.0 M

McCain: $238.1 M

Romney: $113.6 M

Giuliani: $65.9 M

Edwards: $62.2 M

Paul: $35.1 M

Yes, that’s right – Hillary Clinton raised more money than McCain and Obama more than Clinton, McCain and Romney combined.  Incredible.

Posted on

… Or is it?

David Strömberg, writing over at Vox EU, observes:

Without the Bradley effect, Obama has an 84% chance of winning, receiving 52% of the two-party vote share. (Obama is expected to receive 52% even though he is polling at 53% of the two-party vote share, because of the catch-up effect.) However, the race is a coin flip if the presidential race will exhibit a Bradley effect of the same size as the average for the 22 House, Senate and Governor races 1998-2006 for which I have data. Obama’s win probability drops to 53%, with an expected vote share of 49.9

Bugger me, that’s depressing.  Transcend, dammit, transcend!