Wisdom of the crowds: a different poll question

AdMan

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AdMan
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A Different Poll Question: Who Do You Think Will Win?

In the tight 2004 campaign, the polls that asked Americans which candidate they supported — all the way up to the exit polls — told a confusing story about whether President George W. Bush or Senator John Kerry would win.

But another kind of polling question, which received far less attention, produced a clearer result: Regardless of whom they supported, which candidate did people expect to win? Americans consistently, and correctly, said that they thought Mr. Bush would.

A version of that question has produced similarly telling results throughout much of modern polling history, according to a new academic study. Over the last 60 years, poll questions that asked people which candidate they expected to win have been a better guide to the outcome of the presidential race than questions asking people whom they planned to vote for, the study found.

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The study also offers another window on the current presidential contest and the endless debate over what the polls mean. In the last three weeks, polls — including by ABC/Washington Post, Gallup, Politico/George Washington University and Quinnipiac University/New York Times/CBS — have consistently found that more Americans expect President Obama to win than expect Mr. Romney to win.

The margins have varied between 13 and 24 percentage points for Mr. Obama among samples of likely voters, registered voters and all adults. The gap is similar to one from a Gallup poll in mid-October 2004, when 56 percent of respondents expected Mr. Bush to win, compared with 36 percent for Mr. Kerry.
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Interesting study. Is the crowd right again?
 
Cain said:
I can't wait until this is over.
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I understand (and can relate to) your tiredness with the current electoral season, but don't you think this is an interesting study? I do.

The question allows people to consider not only their views but also those of their relatives, friends and colleagues, he said. Some voters may also give more-honest answers about their own plans, rather than naming a candidate who briefly intrigues them, as happened in the Republican primaries this year. And an expectations question allows people to take into account speeches, debates and news media reports.
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I'm just tired of all the forecasting. Maybe it's an excellent predictor, but the notorious problem when it comes to Presidential elections is that there are not many data points.
 
AdMan said:
Interesting study. Is the crowd right again?
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Maybe, but I wouldn't bet heavily on it.

In order for this sort of thing to work right, information has to flow fairly smoothly. Not everyone will get all the information, and not everyone will process that information correctly, but as long as it's pretty uniformly available, then the people who process it wrong in each direction should basically balance out and the net effect should be in the right direction.

But that flow of information isn't guaranteed to always work. If it doesn't, if something messes it up, then the majority can still be wrong. And there's reason to think we might be facing such a situation. Poll response rates are down to historic lows, media distrust is high, and partisan acrimony can lead people to publicly falsify their preferences. And the bitch of it is that you can't even know if these factors have polluted our information stream enough to cause errors until after the errors are made (in this case, that means after the election), because every attempt to determine that beforehand is susceptible to the same potential information pollution.
 
Cain said:
I can't wait until this is over.
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Yeah, and to make it worse, election season is starting earlier and earlier, kinda like Christmas put with marginally less obnoxious music. This time it started halfway into Obama's first term. I expect the 2016 campaign will get rolling somewhere around February.
 
RandFan said:
Hence betting and trading sites. This has been shown in controlled studies. Participants are asked to predict an outcome. They then are asked to wager on the outcome. The wager is consistently closer to the actual outcome.
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538 Blog says that wager sites are good predictors of the winner, but overestimate the chances for the loser. It's called something like the underdog effect - some people just always bet the longer odds.

In any case, all of the predictions done in any manner are now starting to line up for an Obama electoral college victory, if not a popular one.
 
Loss Leader said:
538 Blog says that wager sites are good predictors of the winner, but overestimate the chances for the loser. It's called something like the underdog effect - some people just always bet the longer odds.

In any case, all of the predictions done in any manner are now starting to line up for an Obama electoral college victory, if not a popular one.
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I don't know if the underdog effect is similar but there is also longshot bias.
 
Loss Leader said:
538 Blog says that wager sites are good predictors of the winner, but overestimate the chances for the loser. It's called something like the underdog effect - some people just always bet the longer odds.
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Yet another thing that Nate Silver is wrong about. Look at the trading at the wager sites on the day of the elections in 2004 and 2000, if you want to be disabused of the notion that they are good predictors of the winner.

The only thing the wagering sites are good for is that they are an accurate distillation of the conventional wisdom at a given point in time.
 
Brainster said:
Look at the trading at the wager sites on the day of the elections in 2004 and 2000, if you want to be disabused of the notion that they are good predictors of the winner.
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I can't find anything older that 2008 (I can see why you didn't use that year). Do you have any links for the other years?
 
RandFan said:
I can't find anything older that 2008 (I can see why you didn't use that year). Do you have any links for the other years?
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The sites don't appear to maintain data that would illustrate the point for 2004, but if you look at the 2000 IEM price graph, you can see what I'm talking about. By mid-October, the prices reflected Bush winning, and they continued to rachet upwards. But on the actual day of the election they whipsawed wildly, as first Gore, then Bush was declared the winner. Of course, things got even more insane, because the IEM's "winner take all" market was based on the popular vote, not the EV, so the market whipped back to Gore even though Bush ended up as the president.

A similar effect was noted in on election day 2004, when early exit polling data indicated John Kerry was going to win the presidency. The markets moved strongly in his direction, and then in the early evening the bubble burst and Bush preferred surged forward.

Again, none of this is particularly surprising if you understand that the markets are only good as barometers of the conventional wisdom. The idea that they are excellent predictors is silly.
 
Cain said:
I can't wait until this is over.
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Now that this is known, I would expect paid consultants to game it. Ask their own slanted questions, or try to build background noise about expectations. Don't know if it's happening yet this election, but expect it.
 
Brainster said:
The sites don't appear to maintain data that would illustrate the point for 2004, but if you look at the 2000 IEM price graph, you can see what I'm talking about. By mid-October, the prices reflected Bush winning, and they continued to rachet upwards. But on the actual day of the election they whipsawed wildly, as first Gore, then Bush was declared the winner. Of course, things got even more insane, because the IEM's "winner take all" market was based on the popular vote, not the EV, so the market whipped back to Gore even though Bush ended up as the president.

A similar effect was noted in on election day 2004, when early exit polling data indicated John Kerry was going to win the presidency. The markets moved strongly in his direction, and then in the early evening the bubble burst and Bush preferred surged forward.

Again, none of this is particularly surprising if you understand that the markets are only good as barometers of the conventional wisdom. The idea that they are excellent predictors is silly.
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Thank you. Fair enough. But I think in this election all of the sites have been fairly consistent and those have trended with the poles. I think the aggregate of them all over the long haul will be fairly accurate.
 
Brainster said:
The only thing the wagering sites are good for is that they are an accurate distillation of the conventional wisdom at a given point in time.
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Well, that's right. But the premise of the OP is specifically that conventional wisdom is likely to be best forecaster of the election.
 
And the problem is, it's impossible to accurately survey the conventional wisdom, because large and possibly skewed sections of the population refuse to be surveyed.

I'm not convinced it's possible to make this work at all.
 
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