Al GoreAlbert Arnold Gore Jr. (born March 31, 1948) is an American politician, businessman, and environmentalist who served as the 45th vice president of the United States from 1993 to 2001 under President Bill Clinton. Gore was the Democratic nominee for president of the United States in the 2000 presidential election. He lost the electoral college vote 266–271 to Republican nominee George W. Bush, despite winning the popular vote by approximately 543,895 votes. The election concluded after the Supreme Court of the United States ruled 5–4 in Bush v.
FiveThirtyEightFiveThirtyEight, sometimes rendered as 538, is an American website that focuses on opinion poll analysis, politics, economics, and sports blogging in the United States. The website, which takes its name from the number of electors in the United States electoral college, was founded on March 7, 2008, as a polling aggregation website with a blog created by analyst Nate Silver. In August 2010, the blog became a licensed feature of The New York Times online and renamed FiveThirtyEight: Nate Silver's Political Calculus.
Nate SilverNathaniel Read Silver (born January 13, 1978) is an American statistician, writer, and poker player who analyzes baseball (see sabermetrics), basketball, and elections (see psephology). He is the founder of FiveThirtyEight, and held the position of editor-in-chief there, along with being a special correspondent for ABC News, until May 2023. Silver was named one of the world's 100 most influential people by Time in 2009 after an election forecasting system he developed successfully predicted the outcomes in forty-nine of the fifty states in the 2008 U.
Survey (human research)In research of human subjects, a survey is a list of questions aimed for extracting specific data from a particular group of people. Surveys may be conducted by phone, mail, via the internet, and also at street corners or in malls. Surveys are used to gather or gain knowledge in fields such as social research and demography. Survey research is often used to assess thoughts, opinions and feelings. Surveys can be specific and limited, or they can have more global, widespread goals.
Political forecastingPolitical forecasting aims at forecasting the outcomes of political events. Political events can be a number of events such as diplomatic decisions, actions by political leaders and other areas relating to politicians and political institutions. The area of political forecasting concerning elections is highly popular, especially amongst mass market audiences. Political forecasting methodology makes frequent use of mathematics, statistics and data science. Political forecasting as it pertains to elections is related to psephology.
Hurricane KatrinaHurricane Katrina was a devastating that resulted in 1,836 fatalities and caused damage estimated between 97.4billionto145.5 billion in late August 2005, particularly in the city of New Orleans and its surrounding areas. At the time, it was the costliest tropical cyclone on record, tied now with Hurricane Harvey of 2017. Katrina was the twelfth tropical cyclone, the fifth hurricane, and the third major hurricane of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season. Vote splittingVote splitting is an electoral effect in which the distribution of votes among multiple similar candidates reduces the chance of winning for any of the similar candidates, and increases the chance of winning for a dissimilar candidate. This is commonly known as the spoiler effect, which can discourage minor party candidacies. Vote splitting most easily occurs in plurality voting (also called first-past-the-post) in which each voter indicates a single choice and the candidate with the most votes wins, even if the winner does not have majority support.
PsephologyPsephology (sᵻˈfɒlədʒi; from Greek psephos) is the "quantitative analysis of elections and balloting", a technique within the branch of political science known as political methodology. Psephology attempts to explain elections using the scientific method and is related to political forecasting. Psephology uses historical precinct voting data, public opinion polls, campaign finance information and similar statistical data. The term was coined in 1948 in the United Kingdom by W. F. R.
Exit pollAn election exit poll is a poll of voters taken immediately after they have exited the polling stations. A similar poll conducted before actual voters have voted is called an entrance poll. Pollsters – usually private companies working for newspapers or broadcasters – conduct exit polls to gain an early indication as to how an election has turned out, as in many elections the actual result may take hours to count. There are different views on who invented the exit poll.