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Daily Beast Election Oracle

- October 7, 2010

So some more on prognosticating the 2010 mid-term elections. The Daily Beast has unveiled something called the “Election Oracle”:http://www.thedailybeast.com/election-oracle/, which they describe as:

bq. Our WiseWindow technology scrapes millions of posts from all over the Web for a daily picture of public opinion. That is merged with poll data for the most current and frequently updated election predictions on the Web.

It apparently produces likelihood percentages of candidate victories, but I can’t seem to find anything that describes their methodology. It sounds interesting, but does anyone have any idea where these percentages actually come from, how the “millions of posts” are aggregated, or how the posts vs. polls are weighted? For example, the chance of Jerry Brown winning in California supposedly jumped from “50% to 60% today”:http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-10-07/election-oracle-jerry-brown-leads-meg-whitman-in-california/. Anyone know how?

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