It's 17 days to the election, and 3 days till early voting starts in Texas. I keep a running average of the top seven polling aggregators and election pundits and update it once a day or so. A ton of new polls came out today, but they were all over the place, some showing a big leads, others with smaller leads for Hillary. The State polling was also a mixed bag with improvements in some states and a tightening in a couple of the closest swing states. But the Senate races are also jumping around, some up and some down.
My data follows the 4-way race of likely voters. Hillary's national lead peaked up to 7.0 very briefly a few days ago and then started shrinking a bit for the last three days (Mostly as a result of a flood of polls from right leaning pollsters). This evening it is at 6.3% Her odds of winning are still hovering around 94%
Texas has been getting closer and closer to a toss-up for about three weeks and is a point closer than a couple of days ago. Standing in line just below Georgia at -5.3 in the polls.
Other data:
Total 3rd Party support is at 9.3%, and undecideds are at 6.4%, both those numbers have ticked up recently. McMullin's surge in Utah is causing the 3rd Party support number to climb. It looks like he has an excellent chance of winning Utah, as Mormon Republicans look for an alternative to Trump.
Projection for final results are currently: C=49.7, T=43.3, O=7.0
Texas is at -5.3 (up from -15 right before the first debate).
IA is Red again today by less than a point. It is so close that it flips from Red to Blue or Blue to Red with each new poll.
The odds of taking the Senate moved upward at 538 and several other sites in the last week, but have now been static for a few days.
We are just waiting to see if the third debate and latest outrages by Trump can drive out any last lingering sane-ish Republican voters and move the polls again at all before we go into the home stretch. My guess is that Trump and other Republicans will do worse at the ballot than the polls show (due to the effects of an big enthusiasm gap, big ground game advantage, and historic GOP infighting are not likely to be reflected in the polling data), but we are unlikely to see any more huge drops in the polling for Trump before the election. Just how much worse is damn hard to say. There are a lot of stories of depressed Republican turnout for early voting, but its impossible to say how many points that might be worth in the final tally. Let's hope for a lot and GOTV until you drop for the next 17 days.
About the Spreadsheet Simulator:
It's a Spreadsheet that uses iterative summations, and the NORMSDIST() and RAND() functions to do U.S. Presidential election simulations based on state polling data. If anyone wants a copy of it, feel free to let me know (ken@indianoakstables.com) and I'll email it to anybody that asks. I've had a lot of fun and success with it for the last 8 years. I average state and national polling data and expert opinion from a number of sources in every state and turn it all into 53 percentage chances of a Democratic victory in the upcoming General Election in each state, D.C., and two odd congressional districts in Maine and Nebraska. Then randomly simulate several thousand elections and come up with a percentage chance of winning 270 or more Electoral College Votes in November.
I also include in the simulation a "systemic error" in all polling that will raise or lower all of the polling in every state by a random amount. This takes into account the possibility of things like: Trump's supporters not fitting typical polling categories and being dramatically under-sampled by typical polling techniques; and/or Hillary's ground game being so overwhelmingly better than Trump's that her actual numbers on election day will out perform her polling numbers. The most likely outcome of this factor is a zero or near-zero bump in the poll numbers one way of another, with a bump of 1, 2 or 3 points being reasonably possible, and bumps of 7, 8 or even 9 points being possible, but highly unlikely. I establish the value spread of the systematic error empirically, using data from many elections in the past 20 years.
I don't get too fancy and try to add in a ton of factors for how far we are from the election, demographic changes from the last election, second guessing the pollsters, etc. As such, this calculation does not represent Hillary's chance of winning in November, it represents her chances of winning if the election were held tomorrow (assuming it has the most current data), or, more-accurately, this would be her chance of winning if the poll numbers on November 7th were the same as these). In that sense, it is similar to the 538 "now-cast" using polling data only. Thus, it may or may not be very accurate right now, but it will inevitably become more and more accurate the closer we get to election day. There are a number of factors that converge to increase it's accuracy as we approach election day. As examples: each day there is less time for people to change their minds, the number of undecided voters will continue to decrease, there is less time for new developments and news items to influence the opinions of voters, the number and accuracy of the publicly available polling data will continue to increase, and early voting will begin to lock in votes even before we reach election day. So, by the time we reach election eve, you can be pretty sure this sort of predictor will be about as accurate as possible.
Notes on the spreadsheet:
- Points shown are percentage points difference in expected vote share, or "point spreads".
- A 10 point spread might indicated an expected outcome of 50% for Clinton, 40% for Trump and 10% for "Others", or 46% Clinton, 36% Trump, etc.
- Points are positive for a Dem. lead and negative for a Rep. lead.
- Wherever possible, I use data from polls showing "likely voters" and a 4 way race including Clinton, Trump, Johnson and Stein.
- "EP" is data from www.electionprojection.com/...
- "538" is data from projects.fivethirtyeight.com/...
- "2012 +X.X" are actual results from the 2012 Presidential election adjusted to eliminate Candidate or Party bias in the Nationwide vote. Each State's vote spread has been adjusted by equal percentages to reflect an even 50/50 national vote in 2012, then the current 2016 nation-wide average poll spread is added to each state's normalized spread.
- "270" is data from www.270towin.com/...
- "NYT" is data from www.nytimes.com/...
- "HP" is data from elections.huffingtonpost.com/...
- "RCP" is data from www.realclearpolitics.com/...
- "EV" is data from www.electoral-vote.com
- "AVG" is an average of the estimated point spreads of the 8 data sources.
- The nationwide popular poll spread used to adjust the 2012 results is an average of the national poll spread from the same seven data sources above.
- I normalize the 2012 election results for HI and UT equally to try to factor out the "home-team" effect of them being candidate's home states.
- Blank spaces in the data matrix indicates there is no available data (usually in states with little or no polling).
- Point spreads are converted into percentage chances of electoral victory in a given state using a Cumulative Distribution Function.
- Percentage Chances of electoral outcome are all expressed as chances for a Dem victory.
- When I post a copy of this spreadsheet the data is as up-to date as possible, but some of the data sources update their numbers several times a day, so it is possible that some of the numbers in the data input area may be out-of date in the 30 minutes it takes for me to post it.