Unlikely Voter

While playing around with primary polling lets me practice how I look at an individual poll, it does nothing for my work on aggregating polls and creating national projections.

So if I can get the historical election week polling data I expect to start doing some backtesting over the spring and early summer. I’ll come up with models and test them by “projecting” past House elections, Senate elections, and Presidential elections.

Whichever model works best I will use to project the 2010 midterms. Additionally I’ll learn which pollsters are better than others, which will only improve my projections.

Today I use a poll of a primary race between two Democrats to illustrate my initial model of a horserace election poll. Until the general election season begins in earnest, the primaries are all we have and I intend to use them as a warmup.

I wanted to see how my single-poll model looks when I apply it to the history of a race, and selected the Florida Republican Senate primary between former Speaker Marco Rubio and Governor Charlie Crist.

Rasmussen Reports polled all three likely California Senate matchups of Republicans against Senator Barbara Boxer, but only one candidate’s electability is routinely called into question: Assemblyman Chuck DeVore’s. Just how unelectable is he, according to Rasmussen? This poll serves as a fine example of how my individual poll analysis is going.

Welcome to Unlikely Voter! A plain summary of what this site is about can be seen in the About page, but I’ll now share the human side of that.