The Virtual Tout®

Political horizon charts help us to analyze the progress of campaigns and elections. Even to an untrained eye, it is easy to identify trends across time both within and between the panels of a political horizon chart. Red and blue show Republican and Democratic advantages, respectively. White suggests a competitive election. The political horizon chart was introduced by Tom Miller in Data Science Quarterly and on Twitter as part of his analysis of the presidential and senatorial elections of 2020/21. It is a valuable tool for data journalists. Concepts reviewed in this episode apply equally to margin-of-victory and chance-of-winning scales, as illustrated in a cheat sheet. Voting margin-of-victory scales are especially useful for comparing alternative election forecasting methods, such as preference surveys (political polls), prediction markets, and prediction surveys. A working paper provides additional discussion.

Music: Enchanté by Vendredi is licensed under a Creative Commons License   Listen to the full track.