The Tipping Point State

The U.S. Presidential elections are today and I want to throw some interesting nerd commentary into the mix.

While doing research on electoral voting and the U.S. presidential election I discovered a wealth of data at electoral-vote.com. The site aggregate all of the polling data from around the country and even allow it to be downloaded. Anyone who is into data should get excited about this. If you hack something cool together from the data let me know.

The site has all kinds of different data around the election and past presidents. Graphs plotting the polling numbers of states vs. time, Does having experience make you a better president, and a whole bunch of other data.

The site also has a tipping-point state report which is incredibility interesting. After learning about this report, I’ve asked others if they’ve heard of it. The answer was surprisingly no. Even people who read and discuss politics hadn’t heard of it.

The Tipping-Point State(s)

The tipping-point state is a table which predicts the outcome of the U.S. presidential election. The table uses the most recent polling data, excluding partisan pollsters but including robotic polling, to create a table of all the states. Each row lists the electoral votes the state represents, the polling data of the state, the delta between those voting republican versus democrat and the sum of all the electoral votes the candidate has.

The table is then sorted by the delta of polling data and the states are listed from most Democratic to the most Republican. The states in the middle of the table are the contested states. These are the states to watch for when the election results come in.

Retrieved Nov 5, 2012 at 6:30pm PST

You will also notice the hand on the right hand side of the table. This is the tipping point which the candidates need to get to in order to win.

The table and the hand answers the questions:

How deep into red territory does Obama have to go to win? How deep into blue territory does Romney have to go to win?

So, according to the tipping point state table, Obama should win by a landslide. Romney needs to penetrate pretty far into the currently controlled democrat territory in order to win.

The tipping point state table is always updated with the latest polling data and unfortunately there is no history, at least from the table view.

I’ve been watching this table since the first presidential debate and it’s fascinating. In one week a lot of fluctuation happens. You can get an idea of how much the data changes from comparing yesterday’s table to today’s table. The image above was retrieved on Nov 5th, 2012. The day before the elections. The table below was retrieved the day of the election, Nov 6th.

Retrieved Nov 6, 2012 at 7:30am PST

The Results

I wanted to compare the results of the tipping point state report to the actual results of the election. I’m always curious how accurate polling data is in general.

I will post the results and comparisons after the election is over.