Hats in the Ring

In the previous post I presented the five data inputs to a model of 2020 Democratic presidential candidate ratings: national polls, early state polls, political pundit power rankings (a lot of alliteration...), and political betting markets.  Now I'll show how I scale the data and average them for an overall rating.  It's pretty simple but I'll show the details for transparency. To start with I put each of the five inputs on a 10 point scale, with 10 being the theoretical best score a candidate could achieve on that metric.  In some cases 10 represents more of a practical/feasible best score than theoretical, as I'll explain below. National Polls: poll numbers are scored as the candidate's polling average (as calculated by RealClearPolitics ) divided by 60, then multiplied by 10.  I chose 60 because any candidate that reaches 60% in polling pretty well has the nomination sewn up.  We aren't likely to see a number higher than that until the end game in summer...

If you're a rabid follower of electoral politics you probably know that polling for the 2020 Democratic nomination is already underway in full force.  Along with the polls is a lively debate over how informative polling can be this early out.  538's Nate Silver recently weighed in  with his take arguing that there's good information to be had, along with a huge amount of uncertainty.  I wanted to see if I could shed a little more light on the state of the race by supplementing the polls with other sources of data, and what I have (so far) is a fairly simple model that averages these inputs together to give an overall score for each candidate.  My interest is not at all to successfully predict in advance who will win the nomination.  What I really want is to be able to track trends over time, and maybe spot a darkhorse who's gaining momentum before we see it in the headlines.  So here we go. There are (currently) five inputs to the model: National P...

Welcome to Hats in the Ring, a blog I'll be using to track and share trends in the 2020 U.S. Presidential Primary season.  I've developed a fairly simple rating formula for measuring the relative strength of all major candidates for president and have begun applying it to the Democratic field. If the Republican party sees serious challengers to the current incumbent I'll be tracking that too, but this type of analysis adds little value if the result is not in doubt. The 2020 Democratic field, with more than a dozen credible contenders expected, is an enticing case for this sort of data aggregation and modeling to look for trends (the 2012 and 2016 Republican races would have been fascinating as well, with several lead changes before the outcome was settled). Next up I'll present the model I'm using to compile information, from the polls to the pundits, to distill a rating for each candidate that I'll be updating through the primary season next spring. It's...