Friday, April 29, 2067: Polling Roundup and JULYSSA Forecasts Vol. 2

In the Democratic primaries, not much has changed in the last week.  Abdullah is still the front-runner, with a nearly 3-in-5 chance of victory:

Here are the events-based simulation results.  Note that I'm showing a different report than I showed you last time.  This report includes the odds of each candidate winning the nomination; these are simply the number of times each candidate won the nomination in 100,000 simulated primaries.

Note that the events-based simulation gives Carpenter a much higher chance of winning the nomination than the basic, polls-based model.  Meanwhile, Hancock has surged, winning 512 delegates in this week's best fit simulation, as opposed to 10 last week.  Fairchild, Hillman, Underwood, and Knotts do much better, delegate-wise, than last week as well.

What is happening here?  To be honest, I'm not entirely sure.  None of those five candidates have had an especially good week; JULYSSA could be picking up random noise.

Meanwhile--there's been a poll including Harper Henry!!!  In fact, only one (reputable) poll has included Henry in the week since she launched her candidacy.  Oddly, two polls included possible candidates, but not Vickers' actual challenger!

To say Henry has long odds is a bit of an understatement!  Indeed, in the best fit model for the convention, she receives no delegates at all.  As mentioned in the post about her campaign launch, she is very similar to Vickers politically except in an area--polyamory--where her views don't match the party as a whole.  JULYSSA knows this, and thus doesn't expect her to catch on.

The output for the general election simulations, I've realized, is a bit hard to read, so I need to clean it up before I post it.  Stay tuned for those results!

Friday, April 22, 2067: Polling Roundup and JULYSSA Forecasts

It's Friday, and I'm introducing what is intended to be a regular feature of this blog: a weekly summary of the polls and current state of the race.

There are plenty of sites out there that do poll averaging, but this blog has the added bonus of JULYSSA forecasts.  For those of you who have not read the about page, JULYSSA is the election forecasting AI I developed with Alice Everett at UC Bakersfield.  JULYSSA has won several prizes for statistical forecasting, including MIT's Wilson-Williams Prize last month.

JULYSSA's model is very complex, and forecasts from the primaries through the general election.  In the Democratic primaries:

(For more information on the candidates, see the new "Meet the Candidates" feature on the sidebar.)

The conventional wisdom is that Abdullah is well on his way towards winning the nomination, and JULYSSA agrees: her basic, "Polls-Based" forecast gives him a nearly 3-in-5 chance of victory.

This basic model has only two components: horse-race polls, and name recognition figures.  We have shown that, all things being equal, a candidate with lower name recognition actually has a better chance of winning a nomination than a more-recognized candidate with the same polling numbers.  This can be seen, more or less, with Stephen Dahl and DeShawn Andrews: their polling figures are nearly the same, but Dahl, who is much more famous, has a much lower chance of winning the nomination.

In short, a less well-known candidate who is very well liked by those who know them is more likely to win than a well-known candidate who isn't all that liked.

Now, this basic model is more of a snapshot of the race at present.  But the convention is more than a year away, and a lot can change at that time.  JULYSSA uses Monte Carlo event simulations to develop a forecast of the entire primary process, accounting for how candidates' polling figures are likely to develop over the rest of the primary--and who is likely to drop out.

(You can ignore ARMSE; it's a technical, statistics thing.)

Again, Abdullah comes out on top; JULYSSA's median case has him getting a large plurality, and the vast majority of the delegates.  In the median case, Dahl, Hogan, and Kennedy drop out before the primaries begin, while Ridge, Suarez, Zhang, Wilcox, and Wong drop out very early, receiving few votes.

The most unusual simulation result, in my opinion, is Hancock's.  Look at both tables: he goes from 3.5% support now to 6.2% at the end, outpacing Andrews, Fairchild, and Hillman.  Indeed, in nearly 8% of the simulations, he comes in as high as third (!) place or higher.

The reason for this can be found in one of the components of the events-based forecast: Polling USA's American Values Survey.  JULYSSA processed the survey for likely primary voters, and found that Hancock was actually closest to the values of the activist wing of the party by the Euclidian Distance Criterion.  If other candidates favored by that wing drop out early, he consolidates his support by that wing and makes substantial gains.  His odds of winning the nomination are still quite low, however.

I haven't done any forecasts for the Republicans yet; as I mentioned in my last post, no polls have included Harper Henry to date.  As such, JULYSSA doesn't include her in simulations of the general election, which is why I'm not posting them yet.  Hopefully, I can include preliminary results by this time next week.

EDIT: An earlier version of this post just read "Indeed, in nearly 8% of the simulations, he comes in as high as third (!) place."

Tuesday, April 19, 2067: And Then There Were Two

It's now official: Congresswoman Harper Henry is running against Vice President Vickers for the Republican nomination.

It seemed very unlikely that Vickers would face a primary challenge; the 35th Amendment was largely supported by Republicans because they hoped he would run for president someday.  But it's been a long time since 2058, and Vickers is now so far right, especially on robot and AI issues, that the party's liberal and moderate wings have been openly clamoring for someone to challenge him.

Harper Henry would be an odd choice for them; her ADW-NOMINATE score is actually further to the right than Vickers was when he was last in Congress.  Indeed, they agree on almost everything: supporting the Gomez-Lausen Act and denying robots civil rights, expanded global warming mitigation efforts, and foreign intervention and an expanded role of the US in the Democratic Alliance.  There is, however, one issue where they differ significantly: polygamy.

Vickers' support for a constitutional amendment to ban group marriage is a hallmark of his campaign.  Henry, on the other hand, is polyamorous herself: she has lived with her two boyfriends and their children for almost twenty years.

It's hard to know what damage Henry can do to Vickers based on this position.  As I have mentioned in my paper on JULYSSA, the model includes Polling USA's monthly American Values Survey, and in last month's survey, Republican voters were opposed to polygamy 61% to 29%, with 10% undecided.

Then again, I have also mentioned that JULYSSA does not use a Rational Actors Model, because we (Alice and I) have shown that voters are not rational actors, and their preferences can be, frankly, weird.  In other words, voters may choose Henry if they feel Vickers has an electability problem, even if she doesn't match their values on marriage and is otherwise politically similar to him.

Right now, JULYSSA has Henry's chance of winning the primary at 12.5%, but this estimate must be regarded with extreme caution: she has not, as of yet, been included in any polls, and JULYSSA assigns it's greatest model weights to polling results.  More time will be needed to see what Henry's chances really are.