Follow FiveThirtyEight and PredictWise to stay presidential-poll sane

For political junkies like me, it's easy to go a little (or a lot) crazy during the excruciatingly long presidential campaign season -- becoming joyful when a chosen candidate (Clinton, in my case) is ascendent in the polls, and despondent when a downturn happens.

Here's my advice about how to handle this:

Follow the best poll analyzer around, FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver's operation. After he left the New York Times, Silver and Co. branched out into analyzing sports and other areas.

But politics, not surprisingly, is his emphasis at the moment. I follow FiveThirtyEight on Twitter and enjoy his highly competent take on what's happening in the Clinton-Trump battle.

He regularly reminds people that single polls aren't meaningful, like the recent CNN poll that showed Trump with a 2-point lead nationally. Looking at averages of many polls over time is the way to go.

Currently FiveThirtyEight gives Clinton a 67% chance of winning, almost exactly the same as in early June. There have been ups and downs for the candidates, but no overall movement in the past three months. 

I'm also a fan of prediction markets, where people lay bets on political and other sorts of contests. I don't follow prediction markets very closely, so had to do some Googling to find a good example to share. 

PredictWise popped up. This is the web site's pitch:

PredictWise reflects David Rothschild’s academic, peer-reviewed, research into prediction markets, along with polling and online/social media data. The backbone of predictions on this site are market-based, generated from real-money markets that trade contracts on upcoming events. While we have great respect for: polls and online/social media data, the topline predictions reflect data that are more accurate, flexible, and update in real-time.

Below is the current presidential chart.

It shows Clinton with a 75% chance of winning, and Trump 25%. Which isn't far off from FiveThirtyEight's 67% chance of a Clinton victory.

You can see that the prediction markets are more stable than the FiveThirtyEight model. FiveThirtyEight had the race tied in late July, while at that time PredictWise had it 70-30 in favor of Clinton.

At any rate, there's two months left before the November election.

Quite a few ups and downs likely remain for both presidential candidates. Like I said, it's easy to get overwrought about temporary blips in the long term trend. The time to worry is when your favored candidate is on a steady downward trend close to election day.

Once the presidential debates begin, I suspect we'll see some significant bumps for the candidates. The debates will give people a chance to see Clinton and Trump on the same stage, talking about the same issues. I'm predicting Clinton will benefit from the debates.

But I'm not betting on it. I'll be watching PredictWise as a detached observer.

Comments

[Harry Vanderpool]

The morning after the election, the Daily Dead Fish Wrapping Oregonian, and the Statesman Urinal will both have great big bold font headlines, "LANDSLIDE!!"
And the land slide is going to be for Trump.
I offered a bet to Brian of lunch over this prediction which he yellowed out of.
Is that because he knows I am right?
HE KNOWS I AM RIGHT!!
:-D

[Rain Trueax]

Do you think it's significant that there is a photo going around that shows Hillary with an earpiece during the recent quasi-debate? The new hearing aids are quite small, but I've never heard she had a hearing problem. If she needed someone feeding her facts, does it indicate a problem in her memory? The photos are there but what they mean is more iffy. I imagine Hillary supporters don't care as that seems to be how it works. If someone though is a Hillary supporter, I hope they are reading enough of the concerns to at least be informed. There is an alternative to either of these two choices-- the libertarian or green party. I like the libertarian choice for the first time ever as he's socially liberal and economically conservative. They say a third party cannot win but it won't as long as Americans are convinced either the Dems or Repubs have their best interests at heart. They don't. They are bought and paid for as is Hillary, but for many Americans, they just keep hoping for better but are unwilling to make the change themselves.