Like www.electoral-vote.com? Did you look

[yesthattom]

I know a lot of people do a daily check of the map on http://www.electoral-vote.com to see how Kerry & Bush are doing. However that map changes EVERY DAY and its always a different conclusion: Bush, Kerry, Kerry, Bush. If you click on “Least Squares Prediction” it shows Kerry with 294 E.C. votes, much better than the 270 required to win.

Comments

[king-tirian.livejournal.com]

O.o The least-squares analysis also changes wildly every day. Seems to me that the primary issue is that a state's representation changes because the most recent poll is likely by a different organization that the previous one, so you've got different methodologies, different margins of error, yadda yadda yadda. Don't get me wrong, it's a fabulous site and it is my go-to site to see what's going on with the elections, so the mental whiplash of Strategic Vision polls coming in and out of focus is a small price to pay for this quantity of information.

Nobody on this earth knows who the likely voters are, much less how to get them to talk to you on the phone. To me the message is that unless you like in New York or Utah, your vote counts, and getting your friends to vote counts big.

[awfief.livejournal.com]

you don't even have to click the least squares prediction. I read the whole first link before I read the 2nd one. If you scroll to the bottom of http://www.electoral-vote.com, you'll see

"Some statistically-sophisticated readers asked me to do a sensitivity analysis on how the undecideds break. Fair enough. Suppose Kerry gets a fraction α of the undecideds and Bush gets 1 - α. How does the final result depend on α? Here is the table
α Kerry EVs Bush EVs
0.667 294 244
0.650 294 244
0.625 267 244
0.600 257 244
0.550 257 244
0.500 257 271

What is happening here is that with a 2:1 break (α = 0.667), Kerry wins 294 to 244. At α = 0.625, Florida (where Bush now leads) becomes a tie because not enough undecideds have gone for Kerry. At α = 0.600 (a 3:2 break for Kerry), Minnesota also becomes a tie. At α = 0.500, the undecideds split evenly and we get today's result, Bush carries Florida and an exact tie in Minnesota."

So they actually don't need to look beyond the first page. :) I'll note that if the undecideds go 2:1 to kerry, kerry wins. If the undecideds go 13:7 to kerry, kerry wins. 5:3, 3:2, nobody has enough votes to win. At 1:1, Bush wins.

[dieppe.livejournal.com]

At this point I would be more comfortable predicting who the winner of the World Series will be (an American team perhaps?) than I would be predicting the winner of the 2004 Presidential election.

From where I sit, I would say Bush is most likely to win because Republicans will be/have been/are going to be up to their usual dirty tricks come election day... It's happened once before, and if we don't fight to stop it (and encourage voters to remove Bush from office by a wide margin), it will happen again...

Welcome to the next 4 years of Hell, folks. VOTE! Don't let that happen! ARGH!