Daily Kos Elections is pleased to roll out an important new feature for our 2016 election forecast model: a page for each state! We’d been displaying day-to-day trendlines for Hillary Clinton’s overall odds, as well as the median number of electoral votes for each candidate churned out by our simulations, and you could also see the percentage odds for both sides in each state.
But to understand how the various parts and pieces of the model add up to the totals that you see on the front page, you need more—and we’re giving you more. You can now click through and get more information about each moving part within the model (i.e., each state), which we hope will make the model itself feel more transparent.
To get there, start with the model’s President 2016 page, and look at the “chance of winning each state” graphic in the left column, which shows all the states ranked in order of most likely to go blue to most likely to go red. (We informally call this list the “totem pole.”) Try clicking on any of the states in the totem pole; when you do, now you’ll go to the individual page for that state.
From there, let’s take a closer look at Florida, which is one of the closest states, poll-wise, and also potentially the pivot point for the entire election. As you can see in the image at the top of this post, one feature you’ll see for each state is the average of all the polls conducted in that state, what we call a set of “smoothed trendlines” (similar to what you see if you visit Huffington Post Pollster).
That’s only the first step in the process, though.
Our model takes the polling average and uses that to calculate odds for Election Day. For Florida, that 46.5 Trump, 45.4 Clinton margin translates into 53 percent chance of victory for Trump to 47 percent for Clinton. You can see this in the chart below:
All of our graphics are interactive, so you can mouse over them to see what either the poll average or the odds of victory were on any given day. And Wednesday, actually, is one of the rare days that Trump has been ahead in the Florida aggregate, thanks to the Florida portion of the new UPI/CVoter 50-state survey that dropped a day earlier. But because the Florida trendline has been neck-and-neck for almost all of September, the forecast model still thinks the odds here are almost evenly split, despite Trump’s small uptick in the polls. (Also, Clinton’s odds improved in several other states, especially North Carolina, so because of the way the model correlates state behavior, her odds in Florida improved fractionally overnight even though her aggregate poll numbers worsened slightly.)
Finally, you can see the data that actually goes into each state’s polling aggregate. At the bottom of each page, you’ll see the most recent set of polls that the ever-assiduous Steve Singiser has entered into our database:
The data includes not just the two-way numbers between Clinton and Trump, but also the field dates and the sample size (and whether the poll tested likely or registered voters). This is important perspective, because human nature is to remember either the best- or worst-seeming polls, the one that best confirm our hopes or fears … so the trick in aggregating is to include truly all the polls, including the ones with completely mundane, middling results and the ones from little-known pollsters that might not have been blasted out prominently on Twitter.
Unfortunately, what I can’t tell you is that hitting “refresh” over and over will cause the new post-debate polls to come in any faster. While the outcome of Monday’s hilariously lopsided debate already seems clear (thanks to snap polls and prediction markets), it’ll take a number of days for the non-snap pollsters to make their calls, sort their data, and post their releases. So it may be until next week before we start to see real gains for Clinton, and even then, it’ll be unclear whether we see something convention bounce-like in nature, or if perceptions are already pretty much baked in and the gain is more modest.
But for now, we certainly encourage you to click around on a variety of states and look at the full range of what’s going on. We’ll also soon have similar individual pages for the Senate. And any feedback you have is greatly appreciated.