LPStrat's blog
Over the last few weeks, there has been a lot of chatter about the Congressional sequester cuts going through and shock from some that we have reached this point. This astonishment is somewhat warranted given that Congress and the White House reached a deal to avoid going over the so-called fiscal cliff in January, and then voted to raise the debt ceiling for a three month time period. So why has there been no deal or at a minimum a punt? Let’s look back a bit.
In the aftermath of the fiscal cliff deal, both parties began setting the stage for the next parts of these fiscal negotiations: the sequester, the debt ceiling, and the budget. Each party is convinced that they have leverage in this fight and that the other party will be forced to come to them. Of course it is impossible for both sides to be correct. Time will tell who ends up with the upper hand, but with all of these challenges that need to be addressed, it is useful to look at the preferences of the White House, Congressional Republicans, and Senate Democrats.
By comparing the preferences of the various groups, the likely outcomes of the three fiscal issues become readily apparent: Read more
With President Barack Obama currently in the process of filling vacancies in his cabinet—already one current United States Senator has gotten the nod—and with the retirement of Senators Rockefeller, Harkin, and Chambliss, there has been a good amount of chatter about the ramifications of opening up a U.S. Senate seat. While every state is a unique case, we started wondering what the actual numerical advantage is when it comes to incumbency.
The answer is 7 or 10, or 9 or 16, depending on the situation. While this is a little less prophetic than the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life (42 for all the non-Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fans out there), there is an interesting pattern that has developed over the past six years or so. Read more
As many might remember in July of this year we released the results of our presidential electoral model to predict the results of the 2012 election. As opposed to many predictive models out there (Nate Silver’s 538 blog being the best known) that rely on publicly available data up to the day of the election, our model is based mainly on past results and demographic changes in the country. We do not use any polling or factor in who the candidates are.
The model not only performed exceptionally well at predicting the national support Obama would receive, but we also predicted the state that would put Obama over the 270 threshold (Colorado). Read more
As many might remember in July of this year we released the results of our presidential electoral model to predict the results of the 2012 election. As opposed to many predictive models out there (Nate Silver's 538 blog being the best known) that rely on publicly available data up to the day of the election, our model is based mainly on past results and demographic changes in the country. We do not use any polling or factor in who the candidates are.
The model not only performed exceptionally well in predicting the national support Obama would receive (only 1/10 of a point off), but we also predicted the state that would put Obama over the 270 threshold (Colorado). Additionally, when looking at the state by state results, the model was only off by an average of 2.3 percent across all 50 states. However, in the 10 swing states it was only off by .8 percent. 538 was off by .7 percent in the same 10 states. Additionally we were closer to predicting the results in 5 of the 10 states, while 538 was closer on 4 and we tied on one. Read more
