I want to explain what my model does and doesn’t do. This model came from my undergraduate research I did at Texas Tech that was financially supported by the Undergraduate Research Scholars program. I built the 2016 model in about two months during my second year, and then post-election I spent time analyzing and writing the draft of the first paper on the model and started a project on voter behavior that got abandoned in the fall of my third and final year. I then decided to revamp the model by altering the structure of how the model worked and compared different methods.
This whole project has always been growing as I have grown as a statistician. But since it takes me a lot of time to build a model, it’s always lagged behind my abilities. I’ll admit that there are some assumptions that are not ideal and that the current model right now is not the best way to do this. It can be better. But I have always carefully considered the effects of the unideal assumptions in my model. I may not have communicated this well in 2016, but I did know that my model could be wrong.
I will technically be running about 12 models for research purposes, but my main two models consist of a model that pools the polls together and one that iterative updates based on new polls. Both calculate what is essentially a fancy weighted average between the polls in other similar states and the polls from that state. The iterative model converges much more quickly to the latest poll, and that is the one I tend to favor, and the other model gets the mean and variance of the polls and does the weighted average once.
My model does not adjust polls for bias or weight polls based on quality and when they were conducted. These changes will be implemented in 2020, but I haven’t had the time to do it for this election. I’ve never predicted Senate elections, but my track record on Presidential elections is incredibly similar to the major models, and this model has gone under peer review. I can’t say for sure that my model will work, but I’m hopeful that it will hold its one on Tuesday compared to other models.
This work by BrittanyAlexander is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International