So, at the end of a day when Twitter was alive with the sound of pundits railing against poll averages (well, one poll average or even one poll averager in particular), I thought I'd try this.
I've simply taken every poll in nine battleground states over the last two weeks from Pollster's data base, converting the reported result to a two-party result. The states are CO, FL, IA, NC, NH, NV, OH, VA and WI. I've then made a graph with each data point covering area proportional to the sample size of the poll, stacking the polls on top of one another, to give a visual sense of where the weight of the evidence lies; I rounded the two-party results to make the vertical stacks. The labels indicate the state.
No house effects. No modeling. Just the data.
The precision-weighted average of these 110 polls (yes, 110!) is 50.6 percent two-party vote share for Obama, with a margin of error of just +/- 0.35 percentage points. That is, given these data, we're extremely confident Obama is polling north of 50 percent, at least averaged over two weeks of polls across these nine states.
99.97 percent sure.
We're not making this stuff up.
Obligatory tech notes: "Precision" = 1/variance; the variance of a proportion p estimated with n observations is p*(1-p)/n. A precision-weighted averaged (PWA) of the polls is formed by summing the poll results (each weighted by its precision) and then dividing by the sum of the poll-specific precisions. The precision of the PWA is the sum of the poll-specific precisions. The variance of the PWA is the inverse of the summed precisions. The standard deviation is the square root of this variance; the MOE is plus or minus 1.96 standard deviations. The probability that Obama's PWA is above 50 percent is the area under a normal density lying to the right of 50 percent, where the normal density is centered at the PWA (50.62 percent) and has standard deviation 0.1775 percentage points.
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● In the final weeks of the 2010 governor’s race in California, Rasmussen’s results suggested, using more polling “data” than anyone else, that the race was a toss-up. Right up to until Election Day, Rasmussen flooded the media with the view that Meg Whitman was going to pull off one of the greatest upsets in US voting history. So what actually happened when voters went to the polls? Whitman lost to Jerry Brown by 13 points. This is despite the $140,000,000 of her own money she used to lather the airwaves with advertising. This was not a “close race” or “tossup”—it was a slaughter.
● Rasmussen also had an apparently out-of-thin-air rosy view of Sharron Angle’s Senate candidacy the same year in Nevada. If he had set out to stir the chattering classes to accept the possibility of Harry Reid’s defeat, he sure got that to happen. Press organs from coast to coast were all eager to participate in the “scoop” of Harry Reid, the Majority Leader of the US Senate, losing his seat. Yet once again, Rasmussen’s polling proved to be entirely off the rails. Reid beat Angle 51% to 44%. Not even close.
May God illuminate the American people on the 6th.
Lets hope Americans will want to stay on course with a more fair and just society instead of going back to the warmongering neocons, greed and selfishness.
We all know what happened when we chose Bush again. The second term was full of nice things, from Katrina to the melting of the Economy
"With less than a week before the election, the race for the White House is dead even: Barack Obama and Mitt Romney receive 46 percent each, according to a Fox News poll of likely voters."
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/10/31/fox-news-poll-race-for-white-house-dead-heat/#ixzz2Ay3d9JZQ
In the face of polls showing that their candidate is losing, Faux News puts up a brave front and claims a tie.
Obama/Biden ~ 2012