Long live the king

Best of luck to Barack Obama as well. However, the truly momentous and inspirational aspect of yesterday’s result was my almost perfect prediction of it, as published in Crikey last Friday. Obama has carried the erstwhile red states of Iowa, New Mexico, Colorado, Virginia, Ohio, Nevada, Florida and Indiana, with two states coming down to the wire: Missouri, where McCain leads by 5868 votes (0.2 per cent), and North Carolina, where Obama leads by 14,053 (0.4 per cent). I tipped Obama to gain all of these states and no more. I gather late counting of declaration votes is unlikely to change any leads, so it appears those 0.2 per cent of voters in Missouri have stood between me and my moment of destiny. Better luck next time, I guess. To those who tipped McCain victories or record-breaking Obama blowouts and find themselves wondering what my secret is, one simple piece of advice: believe the polls (or Intrade if you prefer – it will usually tell much the same story). They may not be perfect, but they will outperform your own “informed conjecture” well over 50 per cent of the time, no matter how clever you think you are.

If the last two states play out as expected, the final result will be 364 electoral votes for Obama against 174 for McCain, pending one complication: Nebraska, which along with solidly Democratic Maine divides its college votes by congressional district. Two of the three districts have stayed Republican, but in a third Obama trails by just 569 votes, and thus stands a chance to make it 365-173. In any event, the joint winners of the informal Poll Bludger tipping contest (thanks to Juliem for conducting this) will be David Walsh and Ron, who I gather will win a tie-breaker ahead of fellow 364 Club members Grog and Peter Fuller.

Finally, our good friends at UMR Research have published qualitative polling on Australians’ attitudes to the President-elect. Those who harbour an unfashionable element of cynicism about the great man might want to keep a sick bag handy.

Author: William Bowe

William Bowe is a Perth-based election analyst and occasional teacher of political science. His blog, The Poll Bludger, has existed in one form or another since 2004, and is one of the most heavily trafficked websites on Australian politics.

780 comments on “Long live the king”

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  2. Steve tanks for that , although after reading it it seems it was overseas Banks to Japenese Banks for holding Yen etc , but wondering th step after (if) rates got to 0% itself in a country and if th amigo FINNS trick cpomes into play ..th curent presumption todate is at “some” point before 0% an effect will occur as per history but even inter Bank confidense is low (‘oz’ banks hold 6 trillion of these CDO & CDS deritives off balanse sheet)

  4. Adam, please less running a psephological thread into the ditch with some irrelevant dinner-party controversy-creating standbys. And more eating of humble pie regarding your prognostications about the election, which now must read like the ramblings of some bastard child of Karl Rove and Malcolm McKerras at his silliest.

    Apologies if you already have and I missed it.

  5. SimonH

    th guy Adam is not live to defend himself & he certainly wouldn’t want a literary rogue like me defending him , however you ar shooting th messenger instead of th untollerant provateur (“S” whose bandwidth on it is proof)

    Anyway humble pie applies to winners doing so also and you’ve in underlying spirit of your blog hav exceeded that pie eating , seeing th guy acknowledged prediction many times , and its quite diengenuous to make th attack and then say Oh appologies if I missed it

    You’d be better off taking me on , i’ve congratulated your man without qualification on winning but hav ‘left’ policy reaons & others for having reservations about outcomes vs perseptions

  6. Adam isn’t live to defend himself? My deepest sympathy to his family and loved ones.

    While your contributions are frequently experimental Ron, the fact remains that you either won the sweep or at least went much closer than me. I was way too far on the Obama-pessimistic side (311). As I hope is the case with most Australians, I’ll always respect a good punter.

  7. th culture of my lingos was lost in translation heres , SimonH I NEVER made a reference or inferense to predictons , i was simply saying I’m live I’m not a supporter of Obama although I ve congratulated him witout reservation …AND THEREFORE i’m live here to attack should you wish…those in nigh nighland attack dems when they ar lives

    As for good punting , no , Bauer centimters short and all on th nose , no each ways for th greedy punter here

  8. FINNS

    Posted Thursday, November 6, 2008 at 9:45 pm | Permalink
    #118
    “amigo ronnie, congrat 4 slayin those obama suppts who hv swellin head at the moment…Salute frm santiago… in machu piccu”

    Amigo , missed your post earlier , your post was in middle of a big religous parlay vou & I was tinking th memory of Obama’s win got forgot somehow …so you in Santiago over nited there , and spreading th Amigo gospels to th South America’s as official Ambassadors…so you drawing Abama like crowds

  9. Ron @ 181,

    That is because he is pro choice and wants to preserve the right of others to chose for themselves. If a state or national government were to mandate laws in that area, it would remove the right of women to chose for themselves what they want to do.

  13. Oz

    The argument that “reality” is a dream is solipsism, not absurdism. Absurdism is the philosophy that life has no meaning and that human attempts to find one will fail.

  16. Possum, a question.

    Does the 57 Dems tally count in the senate include the two independent democratic leaning senators? Or are they a different kettle of fish?

  19. Steve – both Bernie Sanders and that Lieberman creature caucus with the Democrats, so they’re both counted in the 57 tally.

    Lieberman is expected to be given a shit sandwich to eat by the democrat leadership later today I think. No more committee chairs and other boondoggles for him.

  22. [How can people already strongly disapprove?]
    No idea, that’s what makes the poll funny.
    [Lieberman is expected to be given a shit sandwich to eat by the democrat leadership later today I think. No more committee chairs and other boondoggles for him.]
    I think that is fair. I mean it is one thing him campaigning for McCain, but his absurd speech at the Republican convention is something else.

  25. [Cell phone effect]
    How can we tell that there WASN’T a Bradley effect, that just happened to be canceled out by a big cell phone effect?

    Oh, and in what states was the Sara Palin effect most important? Iowa, Indiana, Ohio?

  26. Possum

    The average underestimate of Obama’s vote was 2.5% in those 10 swing states. If it’s due to the cell phone effect, how does that translate to Australia, where we increasingly have younger (Green/Labor) voters with no land-line? Do the polls here take this into consideration?

  29. The cellphone effect is going to take a bit to get to the bottom of properly because of ecological fallacy issues. State data on cellphone only households needs to be broken down into smaller regions, then age characteristics accounted for.

  31. How do we also know the young people in ‘cell phone’ only households break significantly differently across party lines than young people sampled in the normal way?

  32. 😀 …… (and yes, Dems can laugh at themselves)

    [
    But satirical newspaper The Onion is already plunging ahead into the era of Obama humour.

    The latest issue carries this story under the headline “Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job”.

    “African-American man Barack Obama, 47, was given the least-desirable job in the entire country Tuesday when he was elected president of the United States of America…

    “As part of his duties, the black man will have to spend four to eight years cleaning up the messes other people left behind.”

    http://www.watoday.com.au/world/us-comedians-sharpen-claws-for-obama-presidency-20081106-5j7u.html
    ]

    Onion site – http://www.theonion.com/content/index

  33. “Dio – we’ve never seen the cell phone effect in Oz yet.”

    Possum, I thought it might have been part of the problem with the Morgan face to face.

  35. Possum

    The two huge outliers were NV and NM, both out west. Maybe part of the underestimation is due to McCain voters not turning up after PA and OH were called.

    Actually, I saw some data showing that in the 06 elections there was also a 2-3% underestimation of the Dem vote. There is clearly a systematic (unintentional) bias in US polling against the Dems. The cellphone effect might be the it. But why isn’t it here as well?

  36. [Face to face being effected by mobile only households? I don’t get it.]

    If pollsters in Oz are actually factoring the effect cell phones into their polls with their age weightings, then perhaps Morgan face to face does not remove this effect from their weightings and thus has an extra skew?

  38. ltep – because nearly every US pollster that has looked at it finds the same thing, Pew and Gallup particularly.

    There’s a few reasons that are often argued to be behind it – one being technology utilisation. People that live in cell phone only households are more likely to use the net and use it more often, are less likely to be evangelical and less likely to be ideologically conservative.

  39. It’s an interesting hypothesis, but if they know it exists why haven’t the figured out a way to factor it into their weighting?

    Perhaps evangelicals think mobiles are tools of the devil. Perhaps there’s a telegram only effect.

  40. Maybe there’s no political difference in Oz between cell phone only households and the wider population? Morgans face to face polls have bigger problems than any hypothetical cell phone effect in Oz anyway.

    Dio – lots of little reasons will be measured and analysed and aggregated to explain polling/election result differentials over the next little while. There’s never any given single thing that ends up explaining Problem X with elections, but a given few things collectively usually end up explaining, statistically at least, large parts of Problem X.

  41. “Morgans face to face polls have bigger problems than any hypothetical cell phone effect in Oz anyway.”

    I’ve always thought of it as the more mobile people are then the less likely they are to be home when Morgan visits.

  42. Ltep – the telegram only effect would explain Utah 🙂

    Some things are really hard to weight for. It sounds easy in theory – just up the weighting of 18-34 year olds. But if cellphone only households act significantly differently than their landline peers, then weighting wont solve the problem. The pollster has to either:

    (a) dampen or expand the actual results (like add some number to the polled results for the Dems and subtract another from Republicans). But Pollsters hate doing that because it means they’re no longer really being pollsters.

    (b) Actually set up a process where that cellphone only cohort can actually be polled (or use screening questions to find that subdemographic in the field and weight from there, but that adds large uncertainty to the end result)

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