I came across this site today www.fivethirtyeight.com.
If you like statistics and you like politics than this is the site for you. If you like baseball stats and you like political stats than Nate Silver could be your messiah. In short his claim to fame was picking Obama to win in NC and Hillary’s win in IN when all the polls were showing otherwise. Not only did he pick the winners but he picked the winning margin within a point in each case. Almost anyone can pick a winner but picking the winner and the margin is reserved for the truly talented.
How does he do it? Simply put he uses math and large data sets.
Nate Silver looks at a cross section of polls, demographic data, and vote history than mashes that in with weighted averages to come up with an accurate prediction of voter turnout.
Nate takes readily available data (lots of it is free) and cuts out the clutter, refines the good data, adds in some outside indicators and uses modeling programs to predict polling outcomes. The point is that Nate can predict political elections with readily available data. That is important because that means that the answer to who is going to win an election could be floating around right now – you just need the right tool to figure it out. Now, to be clear I am not saying that campaign managers, messaging strategies, or ground operations are not needed I am saying that a data driven look at a candidates chances of winning in the thick of the campaign can be the timely catalyst to change or tweak those strategies.