Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the Electoral Vote Strength Factor

berni_mccoy

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Tue Jul-15-08 01:19 PM
Original message

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the Electoral Vote Strength Factor

Edited on Tue Jul-15-08 01:24 PM by berni_mccoy

I've been watching the EV data on both electoral-vote.com and fivethirtyeight.com. From time-to-time, I've published the data here in my Journal when something significant has happened, for example, a weakening in McCain's position or an increase in Obama's strength.

One thing I've tried to determine is how strong is each candidate's position. For example, Obama could have the number of electoral votes he currently has, but he could be in an extremely weak position, which would not bode well for the general election.

EV strength is a good measure of momentum and how solid a candidate's hold is on his current position. Of course, electoral-vote.com publishes this data in numerical format, but I thought it would be worth-while to put it in an image. To do so required calculating a new metric.

Presently, EV.com has three categories: Strong (> 10%), Weak (>5%, <10%) and Barely (<5%). If we weight each category of EV's a candidate, say 1.0 times for Strong, 0.5 times for Weak and 0.25 times for Barely and then add that up, we get an idea of how many EV's are solid. This would be a raw strength value. For example, today, Obama's raw strength would be

200 X 1.0 + 39 X 0.5 + 81 X 0.25 = 239.75.

But a raw number doesn't tell us much by itself. We'd like to gage that number against a target or a goal. If all of those numbers were in the Strong Category, the total would be his current EV total, which well exceeds the total number needed. But that is an unlikely event (until the General Election actually occurs). We could use 538 as a goal, but that too is likely not achievable. If we use 270 as a target, then we have a reasonable target such that if Obama had 270 Strong, we could say he's doing great. He could do better, but it's a good goal to start with and so we use it as a target for the EV Raw Strength.

Therefore, we could say Obama's EV Strength Factor today is 89%. He's not at 100%, but he's close.

On the contrary, looking at McCain's EV Raw Strength today, we see he's at

77 X 1.0 + 101 X 0.5 + 26 X 0.25 = 134

McCain's EV Strength Factor for today is therefore 50%.

Now we can compare how the candidates are doing with respect to each other's Electoral Vote Strength over time. Below is a graph I made from June 6 through Today using the data from Electoral-Vote.com:

As you can see, Obama's EV Strength is increasing while McCain's is steadily decreasing. In fact, if the trend continues, Obama will be very close to a strength of 100% and could possibly be higher. The polynomial trend line is a power 4 trend line for all series.

And we can see how Obama's strength is compared directly to McCain's by looking at the Ratio of the Strength Factors of Obama to McCain. The following graph shows this relationship:

As you can see, Obama's EV Strength is nearly 2:1 against McCain's. If it stabilizes where it is at, then things look very good for the Fall, given that the EV.com data is based on solid polling data and uses averages from multiple pollsters. Furthermore, there does seem to be a correlation between the EV Strength Ratio and the Win Percentage (computed at fivethirtyeight.com), even though the numbers are computed in a completely different way.

At any rate, I am finally happy I have a means to track candidate strength and I will monitor this value moving forward.