More Like Five Thirty Great!

I just wanted to give a quick heads-up to all of you about an amazing website that deals with two things I desperately love: statistics and politics. FiveThirtyEight.com uses a sophisticated model based on polls and past trends to determine who will win the presidential election. Although they admit to a liberal bias, the modeling seems to be based entirely on actual data.

But here's the cool part: before each update, they run the model 10,000 times. Based on each run, they establish percentages for all sorts of neat things. These range from pretty standard (currently, Obama is projected to win 80.5% of the time, but only with 50.8% of the popular vote) to pretty awesome and minute (14% chance that Obama will win Ohio, but lose Pennsylvania.) There's also a state-by-state rundown of odds. (Most surprising/elating for me: Virginia goes to Obama 84% of the time.) Now, I don't know enough about modeling to assess the validity of their model, but even if it's all wrong, it's still fun to look at.