Data-Driven Predictions for the 2016 US Presidential Election

A presidential election with real, cold results is the one thing that could cut through Trump’s bullshit veneer of awesomeness. Indeed, during the 2012 campaign, Obama held a relatively small but stable lead over Romney in state and national polls for months. As the election drew near, leading poll aggregators like Nate Silver, Sam Wang, Drew Linzer and others projected with high confidence that Obama would win easily. Yet a sizable contingent on the right simply chose to deny the empirical evidence. Joe Scarborough mocked Nate Silver just one week before the election for suggesting the data showed it was more likely Obama would win. George Will predicted a Romney landslide. Peggy Noonan predicted Romney would win because she saw he had large crowd sizes and lots of yard signs. “Unskewedpolls.com“ became every right-winger’s favorite site for a time that fall because it weighted the polls to show a huge Romney lead. Meanwhile, many Republicans simply chose to stop believing in the accuracy of statistical inference.

As a result, Republicans were positively shocked at the election results. Romney’s own pollsters had constructed an outdated model of the demographics of the American electorate to give their boss encouraging results and buoy his spirits. Consequently, Romney and Paul Ryan were left dumfounded; their high-priced campaign pollsters misled them about an election result they could have seen coming for free on Silver’s, Wang’s, or Linzer’s blogs. There was no sorcery in the math—these blogs simply projected the likely outcome of the election by aggregating publicly available, state-level polling data, which has proven to be highly accurate and reliable in modern presidential general elections, especially due to the highly polarized nature of the American electorate.

Even the great Republican Svengali Karl Rove suffered a meltdown on live television when he doubted the math of the statisticians at the Fox News decision desk. After all, the actual voting results—though entirely consistent with state-level polling leading up to the election—conflicted with Rove’s deeply held faith that Romney would win. (Lest anyone think it was only recently that Rove was out of touch with electoral math reality, it’s worth remembering that he had George W. Bush waste precious final hours campaigning in California in the waning days of the 2000 election—a state Bush lost to Gore by a whopping 12 points—as Florida hung in the balance.)

I agree it's going to fluctuate, but I don't see how Trump can gain when he continues to show his ignorance and bigotry.

In past elections I have found the consensus of Vegas Bookies predictions to be the most accurate,

It’s illegal to bet on political races in the United States. But overseas, almost anything goes. William Hill, Britain’s second-largest betting house, has already received more than 200,000 pounds ($290,000) in bets on the presidential race, spokeswoman Serena Momberg said.

All it takes is one major terrorist attack and the voters will flood to him, believing only a strong leader like him has the will to thwart such attacks.

He won't, he'll only make it worse like Dubya did after 9/11, but that doesn't matter to those who want simple solutions.

overnight, in some of the few hours that headquarters isn’t whirring with activity, the team’s computers run 400,000 simulations of the fall campaign in what amounts to a massive stress-test of the possibilities on Nov. 8. That way, in morning calls with senior staff, Kriegel can deliver any key findings.

If you have any other good sources for such things please share!