By DANIEL LLOVERAS<\/p>\n
In a wild and chaotic election season, pollsters and statisticians are attempting to do the seemingly impossible: predict the winner of the 2016 presidential election.<\/p>\n
National and state polls get the most attention from\u00a0media organizations, as they are simple ways of communicating how much support the candidates are receiving.<\/p>\n
However, political scientists also produce forecast models which may provide a more insightful look into what will happen come election day.<\/p>\n
The forecast models incorporate the voting history of each state and hundreds of national and state polls\u00a0in order to determine how many electoral votes each candidate is likely to receive.<\/p>\n
The models are produced by organizations such as\u00a0The New York\u00a0Times,\u00a0<\/em>FiveThirtyEight, and the Princeton Election Consortium.<\/p>\n According to the forecast models, Hillary Clinton is the overwhelming favorite to be elected president. The Princeton Election Consortium model gives Clinton a 97% chance of being elected.\u00a0The New York Times<\/em>\u00a0says that Clinton is 89 percent likely to win the presidency. The FiveThirtyEight model gives Clinton an 86 percent chance.<\/p>\n When reporting on the 2016 election, individual state and national polls only tell part of the story.<\/p>\n While the forecast models clearly have error and uncertainty, they take hundreds of\u00a0pieces of information into account to produce an\u00a0exhaustive look at the presidential race.<\/p>\n When news organizations only report the results of individual polls, they are providing people with incomplete and unreliable information.<\/p>\n In addition to providing poll results, news media outlets should report on the forecast models to make sure people are not\u00a0receiving skewed interpretations of the presidential race.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By DANIEL LLOVERAS In a wild and chaotic election season, pollsters and statisticians are attempting to do the seemingly impossible: predict the winner of the 2016 presidential election. National and state polls get the most attention from\u00a0media organizations, as they … Continue reading