Grading the Pollsters - Part 1: Popular Vote

Hello World! Say Hi to a New America! Hearty Congratulations to President Elect Barack Obama. As you may have realized from my earlier posts, I am very excited that my candidate won and won quite handily, contrary to what some of the polls were indicating towards the end.

Speaking of which, I decided to put my limited Excel skills to use and try to come up with a Report Card for the 12341521 pollsters (seemingly) that covered this election. In this post, I have compiled a list of all the final National Polls (courtesy realclearpolitics.com) and have tried to rank the pollsters based upon the proximity of their numbers to the actual results.

First, here's the table that I use (Click on the picture for a larger view). The tan row is the RCP average. The green row is the actuals. The yellow highlights indicate the numbers/pollsters who are closest to the actuals.




(Click on the Picture for a larger view).

As you can see, when it came to estimating Obama's support, the top 3 were CNN/Opinion Research, Ipsos/McClatchy and ABC News/Washington Post. They were all only 0.17 percentage points off the actual number (53.17%).

When it ccame to estimating Sen. McCain's support, the top spot goes to Battleground (Lake) who were off by 0.17 percentage points and the second spot is shared by 4 pollsters - Rasmussen Reports, Ipsos/McClatchy, CNN/Opinion Research and Pew Research, who were all off by 0.83 percentage points.

Finally, when it came to estimating the spread, the top spot is shared by Rasmussen Reports and Pew Research who were off just by 0.34 percentage points and the third place is tied between Fox News, Ipsos/McClatchy and CNN/Opinion Research, who were all off by 0.66 percentage points.

So, if we were to grade these pollsters using some basic ranking logic, here's how it would look like:

First Place: Tied between CNN/Opinion Research AND Ipsos/McClatchy
Third Place: Tied between Rasmussen Reports AND Pew Research

Occupying the bottom rungs would be Battleground (Tarrance), Reuters/C-Span/Zogby (no surprise here, Zogby is a really bad pollster by any measure), Diageo/Hotline and Gallup (that's a surprise!).

Some additional thoughts:
1. The narrow margins by which these polls were off tells us how far along election polling has come in this country.
2. None of the polls were incorrect when it came to predicting the winner.
3. We can officially put the Bradley Effect to rest.

In Part 2, I'll look into how the pollsters did in the so-called "battleground" states (mental video of Sen. McCain drawing air-quotes).
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Palin accuses Obama of palin' around with Left-Wing Radical in Kindergarten

GOP Vice-Presidential nominee Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska hurled yet another accusation at Democratic Presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama today. Palin said that Obama was friends with Richard Graystone, the noted Nobel laureate and eminent economist of our times, when they both went to Kindergarten in Hawaii in 1966.

Palin portrays Mr. Graystone as a communist because he and Paul Krugman, another Nobel winning economist were at the same day-care in New York, a year prior to Graystone moving to Hawaii. Mr. Krugman is considered to be a liberal economist who often write for the New York Times. Although Mr. Graystone was awarded the Nobel for his ground-breaking work on free market economy and positive effects of deregulation, Gov. Palin contends that he is a communist by virtue of having been in pre-school with Mr. Krugman.

The accusation was the main piece of primetime news even on the always fair and balanced, Fox News Network. Even one of their most unbiased and neutral analysts, Sean Hannity, expressed shock that Sen. Obama would pal around with Graystone. The reader may recall that Hannity was extremely reluctant to bring up Mr. Obama's association with known domestic terrorist and another Chicago professor, William Ayers, because Obama was only 8 when Ayers indulged in his anti-govt activties. Hannity told his viewers that Obama ought to have known that Graystone was in pre-school with Krugman and that Krugman would turn out to be a communist. Hannity said that this shows Obama's poor judgment in choosing his company.

A snap poll of Fox showed that his viewers agreed with him. 70% of the respondents said that Obama should have known about Graystone and 30% said, 'F*&k Yeah!'.

In an unrelated poll conducted on Fox News, 99.99% of their viewers said that they believe the Earth is flat and that's one of the reasons why they don't visit Alaska (because they're afraid that they would fall off the edge of the Earth if they went too far West). A mysterious lone voter made up the remaining 0.01% and rumors about the lone vote being cast from the Governor's mansion in Alaska are running wild on the internet. Experts suspect that the lone voter may indeed be Gov. Sarah Palin who has repeatedly said that she could see Russia to the West of her house in Wasilla.

Other news media such as NBC, CBS & CNN were criticized by the McCain campaign for not taking this story seriously. McCain complained of blatant bias in the coverage of new events. NBC's Tom Brokaw responded by saying that there was no bias against McCain/Palin and that the only known bias that NBC had was against stupidity. He also said that NBC was working hard at removing the anti-stupidity bias by running shows such as Lipstick Jungle and Kathy & Kim. Sphere: Related Content