New Senate: 51 Democrats 49 Republicans
News from the VotemasterYesterday we looked at how well the Senate pollsters did. Today we will look at the House pollsters. Below is a table that gives the final vote in column 2, followed by the results of 5 pollsters. Each cell consists of the Democratic percentage minus the Repubican percentage. For example, in AR-02, the Democrat - Republican value is 22, meaning the Democrat won by 22%. The last poll from SurveyyUSA predicted a Democratic win by 21%. The data is available in .csv format.
To see how well a pollster did, we can subtract the actual vote from the prediction. For example, in the table below, if we subtract from SurveyyUSA's prediction for AR-02 (21) the actual vote total (22) we get -1. In other words, Mason-Dixon predicted that the Democrat would do 1% worse than he actually did. A perfect pollster would have a column consisting entirely of 0s. Since the margin of error in predicting each candidate's score is about 4%, the margin of error in predicting the difference is about 8%. Thus to a first approximation, any number less than or equal to 8 should be considered a correct prediction. Anything more than 8 is wrong. However, using the standard 95% level of confidence, about 1 in 20 polls should be "wrong." A negative number means the Democrat did better than expected. A positive one means the Democrat did worse than expected.
Projected New House: 230 Democrats 197 Republicans 8 TiesDem pickups: AZ-05 AZ-08 CA-11 CO-07 CT-05 FL-16 FL-22 IA-01 IA-02 IN-02 IN-08 IN-09 KS-02 KY-03 MN-01 NC-11 NH-01 NH-02 NY-19 NY-20 NY-24 OH-18 PA-04 PA-07 PA-08 PA-10 TX-22 WI-08 GOP pickups: See the details of the Senate and House races with photos, maps, links, polls, etc. If you like this site, please announce it to news groups and blogs and tell your friends about it. If you have your own blog, please click on "For bloggers" above. -- The Votemaster |