Election Poll Tracker

UPDATE–11/6, 3:30AM PST

As an addition to the data provided below, results from our presidential poll tracker from Monday, 11/5 indicates that Virginia has gone blue in all three of our models. Also, our raw model now matches our model that is weighted on “how” we sampled. Our “who” model is still bluer than both the others.

Updated expected electoral totals and popular votes are below along with the remainder of results.

At some point, there isn’t any more data to collect before an election—it just needs to happen.

Estimating election results is a complicated business—as you can probably tell if you’ve watched the pundits squirm and speculate over the past few weeks. They throw around terms like “margin of error” and “dynamic weighting” and disagree with each other vehemently. But at the end of the day, there is only one right answer.

First, a few disclaimers about what might bias an online poll of election results…

1. VIRTUAL REALITY: People might be giving different answers on an online survey than they do on the phone, or, more importantly than they do in the polls! This might be because they aren’t taking the online survey seriously, or simply because it makes people respond differently than they would otherwise.
2. SEEING THE FUTURE: Our survey asks people to predict their future attitudes (Who do you want to vote for?) and behaviors (Will you actually vote?), things that psychological research has shown people to be notoriously bad at.
3. SAMPLING THE FUTURE: Not everyone who answered the survey will actually show up to vote. And, despite the fact that over 1.2 million people have filled it out survey so far, not everyone who shows up to vote will have taken our survey. We are relying on an internet sample here which is fairly new ground, and may contain systematic biases about who it is reaching.

So, newbies that we are, we have hedged our bets a little bit, and created three different models to estimate what will happen on Election Day.