Reuters has a new Electoral College calculator that you can use as a supplement to the cruder 270toWin. What’s particularly nice about it is that it allows you to play around with different turnout models. The default is set at 60% turnout overall, with Minority turnout set at 43%, African-American women at 59% and White men at 69%. This currently gives Clinton a projected better than 95% chance of winning by an average of 108 electoral votes.
But you can turn the dials any way that you want. You can even see what would happen if only white men could vote, or if the electorate was made up only of women. More useful is to play around with actual (somewhat) plausible scenarios to see how they might affect the outcome. For example, jacking hispanic turnout from an anticipated 30% to a more ambitious 45% has less of an impact than I expected. Clinton still has a better than 95% chance of winning, but her average margin of victory only goes up to 112 votes. Likewise, keeping everything else the same and boosting while male turnout from 69% to 85% doesn’t budge Clinton’s 95-plus chance of winning and only reduces her expected margin of victory to 98 votes. And if I boost white male turnout to 100%, Clinton still has a better than 95% chance of winning but her margin is down to 86 electoral votes.
Below you can see the result if whites (men and women) had 100% turnout:
Before you reach too many conclusions from this, let me share how the polling input is done.
Reuters’s simulator depends on the accuracy of Ipsos’s weekly tracking poll. It is unwise to rely on any single survey to analyze the state of the race—polling averages provide a more comprehensive picture—but the new tool does help capture the historical arc of demographic change. FiveThirtyEight gave Ipsos an “A-” in its most recent rating of pollsters—strong by the news organization’s standards. What’s more, the firm also expanded its weekly sample size about sixfold to allow Reuters users to cut up respondents’ demographic data by sex, race and ethnicity, income range, age, and party affiliation.
“At 15,000, [the sample size] gives us basically state-level data for all the key battleground states,” says Reg Chua, Reuters’s executive editor of editorial operations, data, and innovation. “There are, of course, state-level polls being done, but this gives us a continuously tracking, single-methodology poll all the way through the election. When we start aggregating weeks, it gives us state-level data for pretty much all the states.”
So, it’s not a terrible tool but not one you can rely on too much for the top-line polling. It’s better for looking at some of the other data, like how income and gender are shaking out and how turnout can change the outcome in certain states. All the polls use some kind of turnout model that makes these kinds of assumptions. Clinton has such a strong lead at the moment that the results aren’t very sensitive to dial-turning of the turnout model, but that could change.
Not factored in: Clinton’s crushing advantages in ground organization and advertising.
Let’s face it. Unless she collapses from a brain aneurysm during the debate or Julian Assange has a video of her handing a folder labeled “NUCLEAR SECRETS” to Hassan Rouhani in exchange for a bulging sack with a dollar sign stenciled on it, this is all over but the shouting.
Not to mention, fun stuff like this:
http://www.rawstory.com/2016/08/minnesota-gop-descends-into-total-confusion-after-trump-left-off-sta
te-ballot/
Hat tip to DerFarm for the link in a previous thread:
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2016/8/25/83442/5151#13
The only state Rubio won and don’t you forget it, haha.
Alternatively:
Get real.
May as well go Pokémon for all the good this little toy will do you.
AG
Poor Arthur, did I just demonstrate to you that your new pet theory doesn’t budge the outcome at all on an odds level?
Nope.
You just provided another political sex toy with which people can pleasure themselves while they await an unknowable outcome.
AG
There are at least two ways to cope with depression, or is it pessimism:
Find a neat estimation toy to become addicted to.
Get out and canvass for some campaign or another.
Doing the latter gives you as good a sample as most pollsters get by phone or on the internet, even given the bias that canvassers better be seeing supposedly sympathetic voters. GOTV isn’t conversion; it’s revival and running around the church bus to pack the pews.
What the poll tells you is what should be out there. What canvassing tells you is who the samplers are missing for several reasons of access. Typically each of those several errors tends to cancel out the others so that the results come close enough to the polls to justify paying pollsters the next time around.
Knowing that Texas possibly could be gotten this year with a whole lot of work is a fascinating thing to come out of a poll. Whether GOTV will actually get moving and do that work remains to be seen. Of late, Democrats, excepting the local Obama campaigns, have done a poor job of getting moving.
I cope with cynicism (I don’t get depressed) by working in GOTV efforts. I signed up for voter canvassing last night by responding to an email from the HRC campaign. Have already been contacted by two different entities with the campaign about how I want to be involved (I simply want to be a worker bee).
Tomorrow evening the local county Dem party is celebrating the official opening of its campaign office. Will be attending to see what’s up. I canvassed in 2008 and 2012 for Obama and in 2014 for Michelle Nunn’s campaign. We worked hard in all of those campaigns and now I feel guilty if I don’t show up and do something. It will be interesting to hear the feed back;mostly though, we work the AA areas of town because they are the supporters we need to get to the polls.
You’re quite the asshole. Enjoy yourself.
Thank you.
I will.
AG
Has anyone else ever wondered if Arthur is as obnoxious in real life as he is on the internet? Some people aren’t.
A always took that as just geographical style not personal psychology. Neighborhood talk.
I don’t know. I’m from a totally different conversational culture.
It depends of who I’m talking to, SS. I generally avoid people who seem likely to piss me off, and when I can’t avoid them I just get quiet and pray that they go away soon. I suppose I should do that more often here as well, but some of you are just such perfect examples of what I am trying to point out in the general population that I use y’all as vehicles for my points.
When I choose to do so, I can talk Harvard with the best of them.
I often choose not to do so here because…because I am trying to make a point. First you have to get their attention.
You don’t like what I write?
Simple enough.
Don’t read me.
Duh.
No skin off my teeth.
Some mules jes’ cain’t be reached.
Later…
AG
Some donkeys, too.
Later…
AG
Pokemon is pretty damn fun.
weren’t Black women the group that voted strongest in 2012?
They are the most reliable group, groups of a size big enough to tease out of cross-tabs, anyways.
Fixed link
Kind of interesting to plug in the extremes of demographics in turnout and see the results. It turns out that there is no algorithm in the model for sorting out “independent”. 100% independent turnout is as if they didn’t vote.
Republican and Democratic designations assume 100% votes for Trump or Clinton, respectively. A 100% black turnout nails the election for Clinton. Because of the independents being indeterminate in the model, a 100% Republican turnout does not nails the election for Trump.
Yes, it is interesting but pretty clunky and no doubt recently put together. Being able to adjust turnout by state and demographic would be an interesting exercise.