2024-election-modelling/README.md

1.7 KiB

Nuño's deads imple election simulator

First round: just consider the base rates.

  • Get past electoral college results since 2000
  • Get number of electors for each state with the new census
  • Combine the two to get an initial base rates analysis

This initial approach gives a 25% to republicans winning in the 2024 election. Why is this? Well, consider the number of electoral college votes:

Year Republican electoral college votes
2000 271
2004 286
2008 173
2012 206
2016 304
2020 232
Year Democrat electoral college votes
2000 266
2004 251
2008 365
2012 332
2016 227
2020 232

When Democrats won with Obama, they won by a lot, whereas when Republicans won with Bush and Trump, they won by a smaller amount. Or, in other words, this initial approach doesn't take into account that states are correlated.

Remedy: consider the conditional probabilities? But how? Or, relax assumptions using Laplace's law?

  • Consider conditional probabilities
    • See how other models account for the correlation
  • Add uncertainty using Laplace's law of succession?
    • Maybe only do this for contested states? Alabama is not going to turn Democratic?

Second round: just consider polls

  • Download and format
  • Read
  • Add date of poll
  • Consider what the standards error should be
  • Consider how to aggregate polls?
    • One extreme: Just look at the most recent one
    • Another extreme: Aggregate very naïvely, add up all samples together?
  • Aggregate polls?
  • Exclude polls older than one month?
  • Exclude partisan polls
  • ...