Nytimes election odds full#

When there was traffic to subpages, it went disproportionately to the more competitive races in states like Pennsylvania, Florida, Texas, Georgia, and Arizona. Only about 1% of visits went to the Senate or House forecast pages or to specific state races. The vast majority of visits to FiveThirtyEight’s forecasts went to its top-level forecast page. This was from 510 unique visitors, or about 0.15% of the active panel that day. presidential election, there were 16,657 panel visits to FiveThirtyEight’s forecast, which was only 0.002% of the total traffic generated by the Comscore panel that day.

Nytimes election odds full#

On November 2, 2020, the last full day before the U.S. Here’s how the visits vary over time, showing a clear peak on Election Day: adult population: ~120,000 total visitors, ~1,000,000 total visits), so I’ll focus the rest of this post on FiveThirtyEight. The numbers were much, much lower for The Economist (panel: 5,407 page impressions, 641 visitors U.S. adult population in 2020, we can estimate that perhaps 1 million people visited the FiveThirtyEight election forecast pages, and there were maybe around 64 million visits to those pages in total. If we extrapolate these numbers to the U.S. These visits came from at least 5,202 people, who represent about 0.38% of the Comscore panelists. In all of 2020, there were 336,000 visits recorded within Comscore’s panel to any of FiveThirtyEight’s election forecast pages. Using this panel data, which tracks desktop browsing behavior, we can estimate just how many people visited FiveThirtyEight’s and The Economist’s forecasts in 2020. Comscore maintains a panel of more than 1.3 million people who consent to having their internet activity measured. To do that, I looked at some data from Comscore. Given their potential to impact behavior and be misinterpreted, it’s important to understand how pervasive these predictions are in people’s media diets. What’s the audience for election predictions? For instance, Newsweek had to post a correction in July when it misinterpreted FiveThirtyEight’s forecast as meaning that the Republicans would win 60 seats in the Senate, rather than that they had a 60% chance of winning a majority in the Senate.

And people can misinterpret or mix up all the varying numbers put forward (probabilities, vote shares, seats won) - including journalists who report on them. One study found that “presenting forecasted win probabilities decreases the impression that an election is competitive compared to vote-share projections,” and that this decrease could potentially depress voter turnout by generating overconfidence in the predicted outcome. Predictions are also hard to communicate with the correct amount of uncertainty. (They probably need to hire some quality assurance engineers.) Already in 2022, both FiveThirtyEight and The Economist have acknowledged technical errors in their forecasts, publishing lengthy explanations about what happened and why. They are devilishly complex and hard to get right. Some critics, like Zeynep Tufekci, have argued we’d be better off ignoring them. Publishing election predictions of this sort is controversial. But more recently, the forecast has had Republicans pulling ahead. For a while, FiveThirtyEight had the Democrats leading in terms of their chances for keeping control of the Senate. They build statistical models, drawing heavily on polls and other information, to simulate the possible outcomes. Who’s leading, and who’s going to win? This is prime season for FiveThirtyEight, The Economist, and others to use their own election prediction systems to try to answer those questions. The midterm elections in the United States are today.