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
• ...

https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/274211/calculating-the-probability-of-someone-winning-from-a-poll

This time, the republicans win by a mile.

What is happening?

• Trump polling ok in Minessota,
• No polls in Iowa yet
• Trump polling very well in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, Michigan, Florida, Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina
  • In part because of the Kennedy/West/Stein vote.
• Biden is poling well in Colorado
• Not that many polls yet, in general