Sunday, November 4, 2012

Wisdom of Crowds, Part 2

Oh the polls! At this stage of the presidential election there are so many new polls every single day that it's hard to consider any of them that valuable, never mind that the race is so close that the predictions are always conflicting. Most of the time, I'm with Abbie.

Sure, if you care, you can try to generalize across survey results; my preferred tools are this Wall Street Journal site and this New York Times site (you should try them, they're kind of fun really).

Even so, at last today I heard of a measure that might actually be useful. The people in this particular national sample were asked not who they would vote for, but rather who they thought was going to win. President Obama was favored by a margin of 54 to 34 percent, with the others unable or unwilling to hazard a guess.

If you ask me? I think they're on to something. (Especially after this post.)

But only Tuesday will tell.

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