Applying a swingometer to US Elections
politicaltipster:
In the UK, because there are over 600 individual seats, pollsters apply a Uniform National Swing to past results. For instance, if national polls suggest that the Labour lead over the Conservatives will be 3% less than last time they simply assume that there will be a uniform national swing of 3% in each seat. Conventional wisdom suggests that you can't do this with US Elections because, even at the national level, 'all politics is local'. However, applying a UNS to the 2004 election is surprisingly accurate.
http://thepoliticaltipster.wordpress.com/2007/11/17/can-we-use-the-swingometer-to-predict-us-elections/
Has anyone tried this with congressional elections? What do you think of the idea?
Erc:
Generally, it will work decently for races involving the same President (look at the similarity between '92 & '96, or '00 & '04), but will have serious issues when there are third party candidates of any significance (Nader included) or when the candidates are different.
2000 election under uniform swing from '96:
Actually, doesn't perform that horribly, but fails spectacularly in a couple of areas. AR & LA are given to the Democrats on the basis of Clinton's great performance in those states, which was due to the fact that he's from AR, that he performed better in the South than Gore, and that Perot underperformed in the South.
It also gets WV wrong, but that took a lot of other people by surprise, as well.
Other elections, with more dramatic shifts, it will completely screw up:
That's 1976 under a shift from 1972. It horribly messes up the South, moderately messes up the West, gives SD to Carter based on McGovern's performance, and fails to account for Ford's strength in Michigan, among others. Carter still wins, but that's more a statement on the fact that the PV is a pretty good indicator of an EV win, regardless, than anything else--the Swingometer assigned half (half!) of the states incorrectly.
[Interestingly, the Swingometer also puts 10 states within 2%]
There's nothing wrong with using a swingometer, as long as you know its limitations very well and adjust for certain obvious facts on the ground. In the end, a careful following of polling data will do you just as well, as long as you avoid partisan bias meddling with your predictions. I got 48/50 right in 2004...and if it hadn't been for a bit of unwarranted optimism on my part, I'd have put WI & NH in the Kerry column & gotten 50/50 right.
Хahar 🤔:
I was going to try this, but my computer somehow shut down and I haven't had time to restart it.
Mr. Morden:
What if you just don't care about which specific states each candidate wins, but are interested in using a swing-ometer just to estimate the number of electoral votes each candidate would win, given the popular vote breakdown? How well would it work then? Can you produce a very rough formula for likely range of electoral votes won, given a particular popular vote result?
Also, how well would it work for the House of Reps? Again, if you don't care about which specific seats flip, but just want to estimate the raw number of seats switching for a particular shift in the "national popular vote" in the House?
politicaltipster:
It would be interesting if someone could find the 2004 and 2006 congressional results in a format that didn't involve massive fiddling around. The FEC produce data for 1996-2004 in spreadsheet format but manage to lay it out so badly that it is little better than inputting the stuff manually.
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