[lbo-talk] using statistics to estimate the elections in Michigan and Florida that didn't happen

[Robert Naiman]

With all the ink that's been spilled over the question of how Michigan
and Florida will be represented at the Democratic convention, and with
a much-anticipated meeting of the Democratic rules committee at the
end of this month to consider this question, I'm surprised that I
haven't seen anywhere anyone trying to answer the following basic
question:

If Michigan and Florida had voted when they were supposed to, and if
both candidates had campaigned there, what would have been the result?

Of course, the true answer to this question is an unknowable
counterfactual. But, as you all know, economists answer such questions
all the time, often on the basis of considerably less data than exists
in this case.

Since January, 48 states and DC have voted, and we know the result. We
also have detailed demographic data on who voted, in the form of exit
polls, for example, here:

http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/

We should also include a right-hand variable for time since Iowa.

So we could run a multiple linear regression of the results against
the demographic data and time.

Let's say, as a first pass, that we do the following: ignore other
candidates, make the left hand variable Obama's share of the Obama/
Clinton vote in terms of delegates, ignore the internal dynamics of
delegate apportionment within the state, pretend that the demographics
of the Florida and Michigan votes matched their demographics in the US
Census (this last one should be straightforward to correct by
estimating the demographics of the turnout first, but that would take
another round of entering data from the census for each state.)

This would be a great exercise for a college statistics class that
e.g. uses Excel. It would take a little effort to enter the data into
the spreadsheet, but if a class were working on it, they could easily
divide up the task using e.g. a shared spreedsheet under Google Docs.