Twas The Night Before Ballots
A Detailed Election Watching Guide
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I wanted to add to my election post from yesterday. If you haven’t checked it out, you should. It has a variety of baskets for each winner: https://www.mindthetape.com/p/election-baskets-and-election-trades
I was swamped this weekend trying to understand the nuances of the polling data. This is a very tough election to call.
In part, that’s because it has become increasingly difficult for traditional pollsters to reach a representative sample of voters, which is why Trump overperformed in 2016 and 2020.
This year's performance is even worse. In response, pollsters have started weighting their data more aggressively to account for this.
That means that polls are much closer to models of the state than actual representative polls.
The one pollster who (mostly) doesn’t do that is Ann Selzer. Ann is considered one of the top pollsters in the country. She is #1 on Nate Silver’s Pollster Ratings.
She made waves over the weekend by releasing a poll showing Kamala leading Iowa by 3.
Obviously, if Kamala is leading Iowa by 3, a state he won in 2020 by 8 points, then the election is going to be a Kamala blowout.
Still, Ann’s poll is just one data point. It differs so widely from the other data available that it’s likely to be an extreme outlier. If it’s not, however, or even if it’s just directionally correct, that could pull the blue wall states heavily, Kamala.
Looking past the specific details of Ann’s results it raises some interesting questions about what’s happening with the other pollsters.
Polling Dynamics
If you check Nate’s forecast, you’ll see he has the election pegged close to 50/50. Nate produces this forecast by taking a weighted average of all recent polling data. He weights and adjusts the data based on several factors, including recency and quality of the pollster.
Looking at the list of polls, one thing of interest should stand out. AtlasIntel is on there three times. It is #8 of 400 on Nate’s Pollster Ratings.
AtlasIntel is a notable name for two reasons:
They correctly predicted Trump’s outperformance in 2020
They have consistently put out the highest volume of polls this year, and those polls have largely favored Trump
If you remove AtlasIntel from Nate’s consideration completely, I imagine Kamala would quickly become a significant favorite. Therefore, understanding how they differ from other pollsters is key.
Comparing Atlas
AtlasIntel does more online polling than rivals but still primarily uses phone-call-based polling.
They are either reaching more Trump voters using this method or weighting it to compensate for the lack of Trump voter responses.
We don’t know precisely what AtlasIntel is thinking because, as far as I can tell, they aren’t on record discussing it in detail.
AtlasIntel, as an organization, is fairly opaque. We don’t know who pays them for their polls or much about their business model. All we know is that they put out a high volume of polls that have tended to favor Trump, and they did so correctly in 2020.
Who Weights The Weightors
So basically, we are heading into the election with a 50/50 prediction based on three broad buckets of pollsters:
AtlasIntel
Other quality pollsters
Ann Selzer
Either AtlasIntel is overweighting its polls to attract more Trump voters, or the other quality pollsters are underweighting them.
Ann’s poll is one small but significant datapoint that the other pollsters might all be overweighting them. And if that’s not the case, her results imply that at least AtlasIntel is.
An Election Forecast
With Polymarket back to almost 60/40 in favor of Trump, I can’t help but feel like the markets are overpricing him.
My mental model currently has him as a slight dog. It's not the reality I was hoping for, but it’s what I’ve got.
Trading The Election
I’m going to give some resources and a brief guide to how I’m thinking about trading on election day tomorrow.
If you aren’t subscribed to premium, consider giving the free trial a try. Below I discuss:
A list of resources for tracking the election
How I’m adjusting for in-person vs. mail-in
What I’ll be trading in real-time
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