Molecular biology professor Sam Wang believes he will know the winner of the 2008 presidential election by 8:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on Nov. 4. Should early returns from New Hampshire and Virginia show the same candidate ahead, that man will be inaugurated come January, Wang said.
Wang, who runs the Princeton Election Consortium (PEC), a poll aggregator and polling analysis website, uses polls from pollster.com to calculate the probability of a candidate to win any given state’s electoral votes by looking at the median and standard deviation of the state polls.
“Polls are, on average, very good predictors of election outcomes,” Wang said.
Additionally, Wang projects various electoral map scenarios by throwing swing states to either of the two presidential candidates. These projections, which ultimately yield a tally for each candidate between zero and 538, involve almost 2.3 quadrillion individual calculations.
He added, however, that “looking at individual polls is moderately reliable ... The simplest thing to do is to average polls.”
Wang’s site currently indicates that, were the election held today, it would be a victory for Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) over Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) by 320 electoral votes to 171 electoral votes, with Ohio and Florida being too close to call.
Wang, unlike some pollsters, said he does not believe that current polling is influenced by what is commonly called the “Bradley effect.” This stipulates that voters will tell pollsters they’ll support a black candidate to avoid being perceived as racist but in fact have no intention of voting for that candidate.
“Statistically, in races [since 1996] where there is data available, the Bradley effect appears to be zero,” he noted.
Wang launched PEC in 2004 to provide a clear daily update of the close race between incumbent President Bush and Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.). The PEC website received more than one million visits during the 2004 campaign.
On the eve of the election, Wang predicted that Bush would win re-election, with 286 electoral votes to Kerry’s 252. He turned out to be correct.
The correct prediction “shows the algorithm is good,” he said, though he added that “at the time I thought that the undecided voters would split in favor of the challenger, but in 2004 that was not the case.”
Since Wang resumed updating the site in July for the 2008 campaign, PEC has received more than 771,000 total site views, with about 20,000 visitors each day, he said.
PEC tries to minimize the effect of outliers on poll results, he said, adding that outliers may accurately represent voters’ intentions, or they may result from voter screenings that pollsters use to determine whether the person who is contacted will actually vote.
Inability to contact a representative sample of voters can skew data because pollsters may choose to count one poll response as if it had come from multiple respondents, Wang explained.
The shift of some households to only cell phones has made these users less accessible to some pollsters, he noted.
Andrew Ferguson ’08, who assists with the coding of the website, explained in an e-mail that “the goal [of PEC] is to understand the state of the election today — clearly, the polling data is out there, it just needs to be organized.”
“A really important part of the site is that we keep our calculations as simple and straight-forward as possible ... because we believe that polling is influenced by outside events which can’t be predicted,” he explained.
PEC is not the only website providing statistical analysis of polls. Other popular sites this year include fivethirtyeight.com, realclearpolitics.com and electoral-vote.com.
“It’s turned into this funny cottage industry,” Wang said. “We live in an age when it’s possible to become popular by being a data geek.”
As for what Wang will be doing on Nov. 4, he said, “I think the thing to watch on election night will be Senate races.”
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