A New Approach to Estimating the Probability of Winning the Presidency

Edward H. Kaplan () and Arnold Barnett ()
Additional contact information
Edward H. Kaplan: Yale School of Management, Box 208200, New Haven, Connecticut 06520-8200
Arnold Barnett: Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139

Operations Research, 2003, vol. 51, issue 1, 32-40

Abstract: As the 2000 election so vividly showed, it is Electoral College standings rather than national popular votes that determine who becomes President. But current pre-election polls focus almost exclusively on the popular vote. Here we present a method by which pollsters can achieve both point estimates and margins of error for a presidential candidate's electoral-vote total. We use data from both the 2000 and 1988 elections to illustrate the approach. Moreover, we indicate that the sample sizes needed for reliable inferences are similar to those now used in popular-vote polling.

Keywords: Government: elections; electoral college; Statistics: Bayesian sampling; Probability: stochastic model applications (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2003
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/opre.51.1.32.12794 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:oropre:v:51:y:2003:i:1:p:32-40

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Operations Research from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().