Introducing the Popular Vote Projector, our newest feature. I have created a model to predict the popular vote. Of course, the popular vote is not terribly important at all. Four Presidents have won office while losing the popular vote, mostly recently, of course, in 2000 when Al Gore topped George Bush by over half a million votes. (The others who won the popular vote but lost the election were Andrew Jackson in 1824, who lost to John Quincy Adams, Samuel Tilden who "won" but lost to Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, and Grover Cleveland who "won" but lost to Benjamin Harrison on 1888.)
Nevertheless, no respectable analytic political website/blog out there should lack a popular vote projector, so here is mine. The model looks at past election voting patterns, population trends, turnout expectations, demographic factors (like the growth of Hispanics) and, of course, up-to-date state-by-state polling to come up with the projection.
The feature will be updated frequently, reported on with the Dashboard every Monday, and you can find it all the time on the right hand column (with all sorts of other fun stuff).
As of now, like every other measure, this one is leaning toward Obama:
Vote
|
%
| |
Obama
|
65,703,977
|
50.5%
|
Romney
|
62,258,142
|
47.9%
|
Other
|
1,988,683
|
1.5%
|
Comments welcome!
A few days ago, there was an article in the NYTimes about the 18 to 24 year old cohort. It basically said that this group voted for Obama in 2008 but was now either apathetic or much more conservative than four years ago. How do you feel this will effect the popular vote?
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