Shy-Tory Weighted Polling

A couple of days ago I posted my opinion of what is happening in the tightening polls. I stand by my opinion that this is an orchestrated mechanism that the left uses to suppress conservative turn out and enthusiasm.

My advice was to ignore the polls and vote. I signed off with this statement.

Hell I got an email this morning claiming that New Jersey is in play!

Apparently this loyal reader felt like I was mocking him which of course I was because he sent a long but informative follow up email.

The general idea of his dissertation was a mathematical model using what British polling experts have named the “Shy Tory Factor”.

As I said in the earlier post, Polling is big business and the industry is held together only by its ability to be reliably correct. A phenomenon started in Britain in the early 90’s that showed polling was routinely under-calculating Tory (Conservative) votes.

In 1992 the whole industry was rocked when almost all of the polls had Conservatives and Labour within one point. The election however showed Conservatives with a 7.6% margin of victory.

The polling industry’s governing body called an emergency council to try to identify and rectify the predictive algorithms that were in standard use. They discovered that Conservatives were far less likely to answer polling questions and in particular exit polls. They developed a fairly complex model that included several factors but it also included an assumption that Labour will poll approximately 3% higher than reality and Conservatives will poll approximately 3% lower. This adjustment has brought the British polls back into a very accurate range.

Remember the exit polling in 2004? Kerry was supposed to be running away with it.

Using this model in the map above two things appears evident.

a.) New Jersey is in play
b.) We will not know who won Tuesday night

Category: Politics