2008 Election Analyzed by Baseball Statisticians

October 7, 2008

In the USA there are five hundred and thirty eight electoral votes that decide an election. This led to an intriguing website founded by Nate Silver: fivethirtyeight.com

Nate is a baseball statistician who decided to apply his craft to politics:
“What we do over there and what I’m doing over here are really quite similar. Both baseball and politics are data-driven industries. But a lot of the time, that data might be used badly. In baseball, that may mean looking at a statistic like batting average when things like on-base percentage and slugging percentage are far more correlated with winning ballgames. In politics, that might mean cherry-picking a certain polling result or weaving together a narrative that isn’t supported by the demographic evidence.”

Poll Tracker

As a result fivethirtyeight weights each poll in accuracy and over time to predict the most likely scenarios. It’s a number cruncher’s dream, including this chart in which 10,000 scenarios are run:

Probability distribution of 10,000 election scenarios

Closer to home it is interesting to see how fivethirtyeight evaluates projections in our beloved North Carolina: he doesn’t track voter numbers, just probability of how NC will vote. It really does look like a baseball scorecard!

NC projections

Just imagine what would happen if just HALF of the army of statisticians and fact checkers involved in one NFL game were pulled over for a political debate!

Stumble it!

Tags: , baseball, election, electoral college, fivethirtyeight, mccain, obama, statistics