Real Clear Politics Archives - Orion's Cold Fire

Real Clear Politics Updates Republican Senate Projection from 52 to 53

October 21, 2022October 21, 2022 photog Current Events 2022 elections, Political Poll, Real Clear Politics

This is a small indicator but currently Real Clear Politics have updated their projection of the post election Senate Republican count as 53 seats.

This lists seat pic-ups in Arizona, Nevada and Georgia and holds in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and North Carolina. What I notice is that in several of these races the poll averages favor the Democrat candidates. This must mean that someone at RCP thinks there is either a problem with the polls artificially favoring the Dems or that the dynamics of the race are rapidly shifting away from them.

A projection like this that basically shows the Republicans running the table seems kind of over optimistic but maybe that’s just my hard knocks pessimism shining through. So this is a little thing but it got a smile out of me today.

Someone Is Going to Handicap the Pollsters

October 13, 2022October 13, 2022 photog Current Events 2022 elections, fake polls, Real Clear Politics

Real Clear Politics (RCP) provides an average of the various polls for all the elections going on. The idea is that the average of a bunch of polls will be more accurate than any particular poll. But if most of them are biased then that will hardly produce an accurate estimate.

But they’ve just announced that they are going to use this present election (and past ones) to assign correction factors for the various pollsters going forward. In other words if the YouGov poll is always 3 points too high for the Democrat candidate then going forward RCP will apply a -3 point correction on their polls.

It’s actually a really good idea. With a really large database of historical data I could see how a statistician could develop a model that provides a much better estimate for how people will vote. I’m looking forward to this. I suspect once these pollsters start getting rated on accuracy the worst offenders will start squealing like stuck pigs. But over time it will boost the honest pollsters and who knows it might convince some of the worst offenders to mediate their lies.