Good friend and RedState colleague Neil Stevens has launched Unlikely Voter, a new poll-analysis site. Go check it ouand get in on the ground floor of what is sure to be a busy site this election season. The initial explanatory post looks at the Specter/Sestak Senate primary race in Pennsylvania.
Neil is RS’ resident tech/math guy, and aims to provide some mathematical rigor to the space already inhabited by RealClearPolitics’ multi-poll averaging and Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com; while both of those sites are useful, RCP is an apples-and-oranges snapshot rather than an analysis site, and Silver’s site, while superficially impressive, is too often driven by advocacy and in some cases apparent vendettas against particular polling firms, and tends at times to overstate the degree of certainty in its models, which tend to assume that all trends will continue indefinitely (like when Silver constructed a polling model predicting approval of same-sex marriage in 2009 by the following states: Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Maine, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Nevada, Washington, Alaska, New York, Oregon) or tend to predict things like legislative votes that can’t reliably be predicted with mathematical models.
We really have never had a satisfactory replacement in this space for Gerry Daly’s site, and hopefully Neil will fill that gap.