The PULSECAST represents a consensus of mainstream polling and election models, expressed as a percentage chance of victory for a candidate or party. It’s not a prediction from Stu, Glenn, or BlazeTV, nor does it guarantee certain victory or forecast impending doom for any candidate.
What is the PULSECAST?
So glad you asked. The PULSECAST is a statistical measure of more than a dozen different data sets designed to give you a simple and cohesive picture of the consensus State of the Race. We use everything from polling averages, prediction markets, and fully built out election models to try and synthesize all of the data. Some of these metrics are well known public facing products, and some are built by various data nerds and publications less known to the public.
You host a podcast called State of the Race. Did you use that phrase to promote the pod?
Obviously. That’s why I linked to it. It is available under the Stu Does America audio feed, wherever you get your podcasts.
Why did you create the PULSECAST?
We created the PULSECAST to address the wide disparities in how data journalists, pollsters, and experts interpret the same data. These differences can lead to confusion, so our goal is to provide a more unified and comprehensible summary of the overall consensus.
Take Nate Silver, for example—he hosts his own election model on Substack, while his former site now features a completely different model designed by another data guru.
They may both be good faith efforts, but they tell vastly different stories, sometimes differing by up to twenty percentage points. And these are only two of many different models, averages, and markets trying to interpret the same data.
Why are these metrics so different?
Each and every one of these indicators are based on individual decisions by individual people. People who often disagree.
Pollsters must decide on how to weight their polls, and how to select their samples. The creators of polling averages must decide on which polls to include, and whether to weight them based on quality and other variables. Campaign modelers must decide which polls to use, which fundamentals to include, what historical precedent to consider among dozens of other factors.
What does the PULSECAST attempt to do?
The PULSECAST attempts not only to boil all of this information down into one understandable number, but also to smooth out all of these decisions made by all of these different experts.
The very human instinct for most people is to do a little doctor shopping when it comes to election time. “This poll shows my candidate ahead, so I like that one.”
The PULSECAST cuts through the noise, distilling everything into a single percentage, aiming to answer the key question: who do experts think is most likely to win?
What does the PULSECAST not attempt to do?
The PULSECAST is not Stu Burguiere’s idea of who will win the election. It is not Glenn Beck’s idea of who will win the election. It is not TheBlaze.com's or Blaze TV’s or any of its hosts or writers opinions of who will win the election.
It is a summary of mainstream data experts and what they are saying.
This does not mean the consensus is right, of course. But knowing what they believe is going to happen can be helpful for judging their performance retrospectively, as well as generating palpable fear or calming optimism, depending on your perspective.
Why is it called the PULSECAST?
The idea was to have a finger on the pulse of all of these different electoral data sets.
It also is an acronym that stands for:
Predictive Update and Leveraged Summary of Electoral Consensus and Statistical Tracking.
This sounds like an acronym that you just retrofitted after coming up with the name.
How dare you.
Why bother looking at the polls in the first place?
We want polls to tell us who is going to win. They are limited in that way. Polls are good at telling us general stories, and not so great at telling us specific ones. They are more blunt instruments than surgical ones.
Every poll has a margin of error, on each side of the equation. If one candidate leads by six points, with a margin of error of three, the poll is telling us that there’s a 95% chance that the margin is between three and nine. There is a 5% chance it’s outside of that range entirely. (This is an example. Different polls have different margins.)
Another way to look at polls is like betting lines in sports. If one team is shown to be a seven point favorite, this doesn’t mean they are going to win by exactly seven. It means that most of the time, they will likely win. But, sometimes they will win by more, sometimes by less, and occasionally, they might even lose.
I think polls are stupid and fixed, so why would I care?
While we scoured the legal books far and wide, it turns out there’s no mandate requiring you to care about polls. Don’t like them? Feel free to pretend they don’t exist. However, campaigns don’t have that luxury. Whether we love them or not, both public and private polls play a crucial role in shaping campaign strategies, and influencing where candidates spend their time and resources. So, while we can ignore the polls, just know that the people trying to win your vote certainly won’t.
Well, I don’t want to look at your graphs and numbers.
I understand. Neither did any girls in high school.
