http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/signal/obama...43583.html

Quote:Obama poised to win 2012 election with 303 electoral votes: The Signal Forecast

by David Rothschild & Chris Wilson

With fewer than nine months to go before Election Day, The Signal predicts that Barack Obama will win the presidential contest with 303 electoral votes to the Republican nominee's 235.

How do we know? We don't, of course. Campaigns and candidates evolve, and elections are dynamic events with more variables than can reasonably be distilled in an equation. But the data--based on a prediction engine created by Yahoo! scientists--suggest a second term is likely for the current president. This model does not use polls or prediction markets to directly gauge what voters are thinking. Instead, it forecasts the results of the Electoral College based on past elections, economic indicators, measures of state ideology, presidential approval ratings, incumbency, and a few other politically agnostic factors.

We'll dip into what the model says in a moment, but first a note about models in general: there are a lot of them, from complex equations generated by nerdy academics (like the team at The Signal) to funny coincidences like the Redskins Rule, which holds that the incumbent party keeps the White House if Washington's football team wins its last home game. (This is true in 17 of the last 18 elections!) Every year, some of these models are right and some are wrong, and the difference is often just luck. As a result, models get a bad rap as being very good at predicting the past and lousy at predicting the future.

But every election gives researchers more data to work with and a better idea of what works and what doesn't. Not all models are bogus just because many of them are. Our model combines powerful scientific algorithms with both real-time and historical data sources. We have examined the last 10 presidential elections and found that the Yahoo! model, which is the work of Yahoo Labs economists Patrick Hummel and David Rothschild, would have correctly predicted the winner in 88 percent of the 500 individual state elections.

The following chart shows our predictions for each state in the general election, based on this model.



In addition to predicting winners, you'll see that the Yahoo! model predicts by how much each candidate will win each state. These estimates are, on average, under 3 percentage points off. (We exclude Washington, D.C., in the model and assume it will go for the Democratic candidate.)

The Yahoo! model assumes that the president's approval rating will stay the same between now and mid-June, that each of the 50 states will report personal income growth that is average for an election year, and that certain key indicators of state ideology will remain unchanged this year. Although the model currently predicts that Obama will win 303 electoral votes in November, please note that it predicts only probabilities of victory, and that many states are nearly toss-ups.

Because Mitt Romney has the lead in the delegate race for the Republican presidential nomination, for this table we assume that the Republican candidate's home state is Massachusetts and that the Republican candidate's home region is the East.

This may be a conservative estimate for Obama, because January's economic indicators suggest that the states are likely to experience greater-than-average income growth in the first quarter. We will update our predictions accordingly when the actual data from the current year is available.

A key finding of the model is that economic trends—whether things are getting better or worse than they were a month ago—are more meaningful than the level state of the economy. In other words, whether the unemployment rate is increasing or decreasing is more important than what the unemployment rate actually is.

Another lesson of this model is that, while campaigns and candidates matter, they don't matter all that much. Despite the varying quality and positions of the campaigns and candidates over the last 10 presidential elections, variables beyond their immediate control describe the outcome very well. A brilliant or lucky campaigner is at an advantage, but the net effect of politics and strategy, averaged over the past 40 years, is just the small variation that the Yahoo! model cannot predict.

In the following weeks, The Signal will have more posts that describe how the model was built and what its implications are. Rothschild is scheduled to give a talk on an academic paper that he and Hummel are writing on the Yahoo! model in May at the American Association for Public Opinion Research national convention.

David Rothschild is an economist at Yahoo Labs. He has a Ph.D. in applied economics from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. His dissertation is in creating aggregated forecasts from individual-level information. Follow him on Twitter @DavMicRot and email him at thesignal@yahoo-inc.com.

Chris Wilson is editor of The Signal. Follow him at @chriswilsondc.

They have him winning Ohio and Virginia. I don't see that happening.

I would put this in the way too early category, but I do think he'll be reelected, mainly because no one is excited about any of the possible republican candidates. I think Romney's money (not personal money, but PAC money) is going to carry him to the nomination, but the republicans as a whole just don't like romney. I think he's a guy obama can run against too.

But plenty of time for things to change.

(02-16-2012 07:18 PM)Kenyon#4 Wrote:  They have him winning Ohio and Virginia. I don't see that happening.

Even if he loses those two and everything else goes like they predict, he still wins.

This is a no-brainer. Dude has it locked up.

(02-16-2012 07:30 PM)subflea Wrote:  

(02-16-2012 07:18 PM)Kenyon#4 Wrote:  They have him winning Ohio and Virginia. I don't see that happening.

Even if he loses those two and everything else goes like they predict, he still wins.

They have Nevada in there for him as well, I don't see him winning there either. At which point, he loses.

I may go postal if King Obamanijead wins.

As radical as he's governed in his first term I'm terrified of how he'd run the country if he didn't have to worry about reelection. This assault on the first amendment will be just the tip of the iceberg.

I heard on the radio that Obama after winning Catholics 54-45 last time now has 59% disapproval among Catholics. That makes winning a state like OH difficult.

(02-16-2012 09:30 PM)BearChatter v2.0 Wrote:  I may go postal if King Obamanijead wins.

What does that mean?

(02-16-2012 08:13 PM)Billy_Bearcat Wrote:  This is a no-brainer. Dude has it locked up.

I think Obama is a lock. The United States has become an entitlement society. All of us, myself included have areas we want the Government to either subsidize or flat out give to us for free. Career politicians pander to all of us and instead of Governing to the Constitution or what is good for the country they 'buy votes' from constituencies through pork and Government give aways.

47% pay zero federal taxes; there's 47% (provided they all go to the polls) that I think the incumbents can count on.

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.

Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again to bondage.

Attributed to Alexander Tytler

Edited for some misspellings

Interesting read. Models are always fun to go through and this one seems to go very in depth and I'm afraid that it could be very correct. I've already decided that I will only vote for 2 of the 4 Republicans, otherwise I'll stay home or vote third party if I want to go vote on the issues.

Interesting note, no Republican has ever lost Ohio and won the election. So if Obama gets Ohio, historically that would be the race. But a Republican has won Ohio but still lost the race.

Also, in 2008 Obama only won six counties: Hamilton, Montgomery, Franklin, Lucas, Cuyahoga, and Summitt. So basically he wont the major metros and therefore won the state. The Republican might have to concentrate on these areas to get Ohio.

God please say it ain't so

Bush for 8 years and now this idiot for 8 years

Dewey beats Truman

We have examined the last 10 presidential elections and found that the Yahoo! model, which is the work of Yahoo Labs economists Patrick Hummel and David Rothschild, would have correctly predicted the winner in 88 percent of the 500 individual state elections.

Considering there are 9 states that aren't near shoe ins:
MO, FL, VA, OH, NH, CO, IA, PA, NV
The model would only have to get 3 right to hit 88 percent, in other words this model is no better than throwing darts at the battleground states, to make up for maybe one miss in a surprise state.
As this model predicts 7 of the 9 as Obama backers.

If there are 13 states within the margin of error (3%), and the model gives a 100% weight to those within the error limits, then this model is more statistical propaganda than it is statistically accurate.

In otherwords it's .

Dick Morris was on Sean Hannity a few weeks back and he stated the following....

No president going into an election year with 8% or greater unemployment has ever been reelected.

AND

Every president relected to a 2nd term had a 10% or larger margin in the polls versus the generic Replublican (or Democrat) prior to his opponent being known. Currently Obama has only a 1-2% lead in that poll. Most independents, when being polled about who they'd vote for this early, tend to lean toward the residing president because they just don't know who they would be voting for without having a specific candidate on the other side determined yet.

I disagree with all those who say this is a slam dunk win for Obama. I think the Republican, barring something unusual happening like a Gary Hart incident, will win this election. It'll be close but he will win. And even the fact that this race will be close is a sad statement on where the United States resides these days.

(02-17-2012 01:17 PM)nachoman91 Wrote:  I disagree with all those who say this is a slam dunk win for Obama. I think the Republican, barring something unusual happening like a Gary Hart incident, will win this election. It'll be close but he will win. And even the fact that this race will be close is a sad statement on where the United States resides these days.

It's kind of pointless to say that Obama is going to win when the Republican nominee is still unknown. Whoever the nominee is will have a lot of amunition to fire at the president deficits, unemployment, religious liberty. These are not small issues and the Republican candidate that makes these arguments against Obama with clarity and confidence will win.

No president going into an election year with 8% or greater unemployment has ever been reelected.

Except the president that Obama may be the most like FDR.

Some credit him with being a good president, I consider him our worst in history, by a wide margin.

Wouldn't be shocked, the republican field is pretty terrible in it's own right.

It kind of helps big O when he has the entire press corps still on his side, never questioning him and playing "look over here, don't look at his record and the economy."

O and his media friends have done a masterful job with the whole contraception issue. A month before you heard anything about the healthcare and religious institution contraception issue, Stephonopolous spent 30 minutes of a GOP debate asking about states rights to ban contraception. The candidates were dumbfounded at this total nonissue topic. Yet a few weeks later Obama kicks up a pseudo social issue on contraception when it's purely a freedoms of religion issue. Not a coincidence at all. Get everyone focused on what they want you to think is a GOP wants to ban your birth control issue and pay no attention to Obamas record, solyndra, unemployment, massive deficit, spending and what will be even more of the same in a second term. Diversionary tactics by the left. Create a faux social issue to drive away independents and moderates from the GOP. Get everyone talking abut something other than this failure of leadership we have in the oval office. If the GOP is dumb enough to go down this road, they get what they deserve.

They should be hammering him nonstop on HIS record.

It just goes to show how blind Americans are. And also how gullible.