Barack Obama’s win was as much a triumph for mathematicians. For all the inherent uncertainties in electoral outcomes, the 2008 contest may be the one that established election forecasting as a powerful predictive science.
Even pollsters who predicted Barack Obama’s smooth ride to the White House were aware of a possible fly in the ointment: the so-called Bradley effect, in which white voters say they will vote for a black candidate for fear of seeming racist if they admit otherwise. Statisticians are still crunching the data, but say that only a weak effect has emerged. Pollsters say this is because voters could cite valid reasons for…
