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Notes -
Re: the Selzer poll.
I'd like to examine the wording of this poll and the effect had on the outcome. The wording was as follows:
The September poll, by contrast, did not include language targeted at early voters:
The 2020 wording of the Selzer poll was as follows:
The 2016 wording was as follows:
I believe the "If you already voted, for whom did you vote?" wording of the October 2024 poll skewed the results for a few reasons. First, it seems slightly confusing. It's possible that respondents could have interpreted the additional wording as being about their perception of how others would have voted. Given that Democrats tend to vote early and people tend to know this because of the 2020 election coverage, this may have skewed the result. Secondly, poll questions should be as short and simple as possible. The 2020 wording of the question was much shorter, and did not include multiple parts for poll respondents to think through. The 2016 wording, while structured similarly to 2024, also did not include language about early voting. One rule of survey design is to avoid asking multiple questions at once, and this violates that.
Lastly, the inclusion of this language may bias participation towards respondents who did vote early. And while that does tend to favor Democrats, Nate Silver has written about how early voting doesn't predict results. Therefore, the accuracy of this poll result may be skewed.
Overall: The markets moving from 60/40 to 50/50 might have happened anyway and this just happened to be the outlier poll that triggered it. It's probably a good thing that the betting markets now accurately reflect where the race has been according to aggregators like Nate. But the result seems to be due to the wording of the poll, rather than an underlying change in the Iowa (read: Midwestern) electorate.
EDIT: For contrast, the Emerson poll showed a 53%/43% lead for Trump and was worded as follows:
Does anyone know if there are models that take into account sentiment analysis (ie ingest lots of data from TV viewership, FB,YT, comment sections, clean it, weight it, etc)? This is how I'd solve the game for betting purposes.
Just by eyeballing it, Trump seems to have a massive advantage. Trump-positive yt vids are more viewed and have a better like/dislike ratio than any vaguely Dem positive video. The top comments are often mostly pro Trump. A large percentage of MSM TV coverage is pro Trump, FB used to lean more pro Trump, Twitter is operated by a Trump fanatic. Polling leans old, this leans younger. The comment section of NYT, WaPo are obviously anti Trump, but these are comparatively microscopic players. What does themotte think, and what might I not be seeing?
Many people build their own. I know Bloomberg and probably also Refinitiv have at least some election-related alternative data and then there are countless smaller providers and consultancies selling their own models and datasets to others. I don’t think it would yield any actionable insights radically different to what the markets are expecting now, though.
Some further digging and it seems "election prediction by SM (usually twitter) sentiment analysis" is an academic area of research with dozens of papers going back at least to 2010, getting more advanced. However I can't find anyone doing publicly. This is why I wish the election prediction markets were more accessible and liquid. Eventually it'd be profitable to build the most accurate model even if you gained only a few percentage points in accuracy. With enough to be gained you'll get a Jim Simons team of election forecasters.
if all the polls are 'herding' the results in order to remove outliers then there should be some kind of opportunity for someone with a lot of cash and willing to take the risk to produce 'real' polls, keep them a secret and make EV bank on polymarket.
This is kind of how it worked at the top levels of online poker in ~2016ish. Various groups spent 100kish each to build analysis software years before a dev released a version for sale. Top regs eventually pooled resources to build GTO bots, prompting top poker sites to learn how to ban them. For prediction markets the stats are way different (ie fewer trials, lots of noise) and a 10% edge wouldn't translate translate into a lot of money unless you could bet many millions, plus the variance would be insane. With active trading (ie more trials) I could see decent profits, but I don't know what liquidity looks like.
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