Nate's Changing His Model (A Bit)

[FVZA_Colonel]

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/11/technical-note.html

Technical Note
I'm going to be making a small change to the model for the polling update that we'll run in an hour or two today. Specifically, I'm going to increasing that the premium that the model places on the recentness of a poll. If this is the kind of detail that makes your eyes glaze over, just skip ahead to Sean's Georgia overview. Otherwise, read on.

When I originally designed the model back in the spring, I designed it to be fairly tolerant of "old" polls -- far more so than other aggregation sites like Real Clear Politics or Electoral-Vote.com. This was not an arbitrary decision; on the contrary, it was dictated by some empirical work I had done on state-level polling the 2004 and 2000 elections, which suggested that including some comparatively "old" polls produced a more accurate result than an RCP-type calculation in which polls are dumped from the average fairly quickly.

There are a couple reasons why I feel compelled to hedge a bit on this now:

Firstly, 2004 was an unusually stable election, relative to other elections in the past ... the numbers just did not move that much, and when they moved, they did not move quickly. (2000 had roughly average volatility; this year appears to have about average volatility as well. To find a highly volatile election, look at something like 1992 or 1976). If the numbers are stable from period to period in a certain election, then recentness will not be all that important. However, since there is reason to believe that the 2004 election was in some ways atypical, and since at least half of my state-level datapoints were from the 2004 election, this presents an argument for ramping up the premium on recency.
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I doubt this'll make Pennsylvania any bluer then it is right now, so I don't see much of a problem here.

[Phx_Dem]

1. My eyes glazed over.

If this is a big deal, let me know.

[Libby2]

2. lol, me too.

[FVZA_Colonel]

3. Nate himself doesn't see it as a big deal.

The changes are only very minorly favorable to McCain in a few areas, and to Obama in others. It's essentially a wash.

[Phx_Dem]

4. That's all I need to know. I'll all about Nate.

And I try not to let the fact that he's a million times smarter than me get me down. LOL.