Polls Suggest Trump Will Win Between 8 Percent And 64 Percent Of The Vote

[Stuckinthebush]

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/polls-suggest-trump-will-win-between-8-percent-and-64-percent-of-the-vote/

In 2007, I woke up every morning — alarm set with a 1980s or ’90s TV show theme song — opened my computer and searched the term “poll” on Google. I did this through the spring, summer, fall and winter. And when I did, I saw the same person leading the Republican presidential contest: Rudy Giuliani. I thought Giuliani had a great chance of winning the nomination. You see, no Republican who had led for so long had ever lost the nomination: Ronald Reagan in 1980, George H.W. Bush in 1988, Bob Dole in 1996 and George W. Bush in 2000 — they all easily won.

Welp.



Giuliani, of course, didn’t come close to winning. Eight years ago, I didn’t know what I know now: Although Giuliani led the field, he was polling at only around 30 percent in the last couple of months of 2007, while all the previous nominees above were polling at about 40 percent or higher. That distinction is lost when you’re just looking at whether someone is a front-runner or not, and it’s why it’s a mistake to make too much of binary outcomes in small data sets. Beware pundits proffering “no candidate has ever lost when …” rules.

It’s better to look at a continuous variable, such as how well polling in the past has predicted the eventual vote percentages of the candidates. If I had done that in 2008, I would have known that polls even at this stage in a primary campaign — a couple of months before the voting starts — still have a wide predictive margin of error compared with the final national outcome.

[Javaman]

1. I sadly predict...

if there is another gun massacre about 3 weeks before the general election and trump is the repuke candidate, he will win.

[Stuckinthebush]

2. Indeed, a sad prediction

but likely very accurate.

[Spider Jerusalem]

3. Only if the shooters are Muslim.

White US citizen snaps and goes on a killing spree? nothing to see here, this is just one of those unfortunate things! A Muslim does it? Terrorism! Close the borders!

[Javaman]

4. Good point.

but for the GOP, anyone that is non-white will do.

the rest will be semantics to them.

[B2G]

5. Well that narrows it down. nt