Congratulations, Jesse.  You have discovered the power of aggregation of data, meta analysis, and systematic review.

In other words, one poll is never enough data.  Multiple polls, however, provide far more.  If you can combine them or simply look at trends in results, you have enough information to vastly reduce the margin of error in the prediction.

Yep.  I’m a fivethirtyeight junkie and PROUD!

Clearly you are unaware of the fact that Obama is a Muslim. I suspect knowing that will instantly change your mind.

But Bush *lost* in 2000. The pollsters blew it. The fact that the Supreme Court installed him as President anyway does not change that fact.

I woke up in a panic this morning, thinking it was Tuesday and ohmigod I have to get to my polling place right now even if I’m wearing my pajamas!

It is not, in fact, Tuesday.  Ahem.

This ties in nicely with the post below from Amanda.  The cure for both polling and anxiety, voting, tomorrow.

Go vote.  Make sure everyone you know votes.

That is all that matters right now.

Go over to Huffpo today, and look at their elections section.  It is an absolute sea of worry about this election being stolen.  Naturally, they may be right.

The one thing that leapt out at me was the statistician showing how, using the electoral college, one could technically be elected President with only about 22% of the popular vote.

If there is a President Obama with a Democrat congress, one of the first things they should work on together is legislation—including, if necessary, constitutional amendments—to (a) get rid of the electoral college, (b) have a national voters registry under nonpartisan control, (c) ongoing updating of said registry, (d) taking electoral supervision out of the hand of the Secretaries of State of the individual states, (e) ensuring that voting methods are consistent across the entire US, and (f) targeting resources by population rather than by district, ensuring that X number of voters get Y number of polls, workers, ballots, (etc.) rather than Y minus A in poor and minority areas and Y plus B in white, middle-class areas.

If Obama walks away from his Presidency (existence to be confirmed) having done nothing but ensure that every election after his own is fair then he deserves to be numbered among the great presidents.  If he does little or nothing to ensure that these messes don’t happen again then he should be deeply ashamed of himself.

If by helping them with their record, you only mean that it will prove out that Obama is ahead, I am all for it.

However, most of them seem to be claiming that the election will be fairly close, possibly even requiring staying up late for. I would be far more happy if it turns out that the pollsters were deeply and desperately wrong and that they have to redefine the concept of “landslide.” THAT part of their record can go take a flying leap.

Off topic, I do hope that there are film crews in place near selected pundits and right wingers so we have footage of their heads exploding. In some cases, like Limbaugh or Dobson, they’ll need high-speed cameras in order to catch how fast they reverse themselves and claim that this is what they expected all along.

I want the pollsters to be off—but only off in predicting a narrower Obama win than will happen in reality.

In my dream world the GOP base will be depressed and the Dem base (particularly blacks) fired up enough that we get an east coast sweep, taking SC and GA as well as the rest of the eastern seaboard.

I’m pretty confident about Obama. Any similar good news regarding Prop 8 would be appreciated though.

Go over to Huffpo today, and look at their elections section.  It is an absolute sea of worry about this election being stolen.  Naturally, they may be right.

The Rethugs will have a hell of a time pulling any fast ones in Ohio.  The Democratic Party has got more than 550 lawyers deployed in Columbus alone.  (I am one of them.)

There will be at least two observers at each polling station, one inside and one outside.  Some polling places will have more.  We have to call in to headquarters once every two hours even if we’re having no problems, and have to report any line longer than 15 minutes.  That’s just a fraction of all the things they’ve got us doing tomorrow to make sure everything stays on track. 

I’m not sure who organized this voter protection program, but they have really got their shit together.

OK, lookin’ ahead:  Registration reform is good and all, when it’s not just a rovian tool of oppression, but what about gerrymandering?

Math nerds, help me out: is there some formula, maybe ‘fractal dimensions’ or something, that would allow people to judge the craziness of congressional districts borders and outlaw ones that are too ‘pathological’, in the mathematical sense?  Because there are some LUDICOUSLY distorted congressional districts in our land, and the worst are often engineered to be Republican.

+++++++++
Re: the poll watch:  gahd, I’m LOVING whoever is orchestrating this!!!  Kick ass!

I’d like to recommend “The Opinion Makers,” by David W. Moore, and also his, “How to steal an Election.”  The first looks at how mainstream media used polls to distort public opinion leading up to the Iraq war, and how they continually use flawed polling techniques.  The second is about how Jeb Bush used Fox news to help his brother steal the election.

Polls are not really adequate measuring devices for public opinion because they are often slanted toward whatever the pollster or the media want public opinion to be.

<blockquote.Eric, the next census is 2010.  Hopefully, we will have a Democratic Congress deciding the boundaries for 2012.</blockquote>

Unfortunately, it is the State Legislatures that set the boundaries.  However, an upswing in (D) controlled legislatures will help a great deal if not help everywhere.

@BenD

SC going blue is highly unlikely. I’ll be thrilled if McCain wins by 8 points or less, however. And I’ll throw a party if my politically backasswards state has the embarrassment of being the only red spot on the east coast. (C’mon GA, you can do it!)

Ms. Kate, I’m hoping to find an algorithmic (heh, “Al Gore-rithmic”) methodology to prevent ALL gerrymandering, not just Rethuglican (there, I finally typed it) gerrymandering.

It’s ALL bad.  And yeah, some districts should be ‘funky’ shaped, but I’m hoping to cut down on the “ten miles long and sixty feet wide” bullshit one can find (Texas, I’m lookin’ at you).  IOW, they can be odd, but not insane.

Wapsie—

Too bad you can’t somehow get the entirety of Charlotte Metro within the borders of SC. Then you would be going blue this time. NC would still have the research triangle, so it wouldn’t hurt it.

But if SC is the only read state on the East Coast, do what some jokers did with the New Hampshire border in 1936 (one of the few red states). Drive to the nearest state border, and post a not on the “Welcome to South Carolina” sign that says “YOU ARE NOW LEAVING THE EAST COAST”.

Whew!  For a second there I thought those figures said that Oblammo was winning!  Of course, that can’t happen, Americans of The Heartland of the USA of America would never elect a Muslamosocialist as ruler of the world, not unless he was a Republican white man.

During the primary voting, Obama’s exit polling was overestimated by SEVEN percent on average.  I’m not feeling comfortable until Wednesday morning.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1008/14778.html

But Bush *lost* in 2000. The pollsters blew it. The fact that the Supreme Court installed him as President anyway does not change that fact.

Indeed, he did, and indeed SCOTUS got it wrong.

But you can’t really say, “the pollsters got it wrong” unless your belief that pollsters only do a good job if they predict the results perfectly.  Fact is, even if Gore had become POTUS, he would have done it with one of the smallest margins of victories ever.  In statistical terms, nobody really “won”, it was functionally a tie.  But the pollsters always give it to one guy or another… they happened to give it to Bush, but only by a razor thin margin.  And while Bush didn’t really win, he only lost by a hair - Gore did not spank him in the race.

It’s not always about whether or not the pollsters are accurate in predicting who will win or not, especially in an election like 2000, where nobody won a substantial victory, but how close they are to the final results.  In 2000, they were pretty close, numerically speaking.  If a pollster predicts 51-49 for one guy, but in truth the other guy wins 51-49, the pollster did a pretty good job, because his analysis was only off by 2 points.

Eric, one reasonable measure of how gerrymandered a district is would be to look at the district’s isoperimetric ratio: (area)/(perimeter)^2.  This is maximized by a round circle and is very small for highly gerrymandered district.  One could try excluding redistrictings which included districts below a certain threshold.

topometropolis: you had me at “isoperimetic”.  Take me, you mad thing!

During the primary voting, Obama’s exit polling was overestimated by SEVEN percent on average.

Primaries aren’t indicative of what happens in a general election.

topometropolis, how do you reconcile that geometric ideality with the reality of topography and the use of census tracts/blockgroups to construct said districts?  Especially when said census units exclude areas without people living in them?

seeker6079,

“(a) get rid of the electoral college”,
while it’s a great idea, the less-populated staes would never go for it, because it inflates the weight of their vote versus more densily-populated states.