Date: February 11, 2009

Speaker: Sam Wang

Title:The Princeton Election Consortium: A First Draft of Electoral History

Description: How we experience political races is dominated by opinion polls. Polling data can be confusing because of their sheer number. In 2008, hundreds of polls were released during the Presidential campaign. Is there a way to cut through the resulting noise?

Four years ago Dr. Wang devised a statistical approach to analyze state polls to get a single, easy-to-understand snapshot of the race, viewed from the point of view of the Electoral College. In 2008, this approach made near-perfect predictions of the electoral vote count as well as Senate and House outcomes.  Meta-analysis of polls also allowed the horserace to be tracked with high accuracy. Presidential races are stable most of the time, with game-changing events happening only once a month on average. Dr. Wang will show which events helped Barack Obama and John McCain - and which did not.

Bio: Sam Wang is an Associate Professor in the Princeton Neuroscience Institute and the Department of Molecular Biology. He has published fifty papers in neuroscience, including many contributions to the statistical analysis of complex data. He has received young investigator awards from the W.M. Keck Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, and the National Science Foundation. Before coming to Princeton he worked at Bell Labs and spent a year as a member of Congressional staff. He is the author of the award-winning bestseller Welcome To Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys But Never Forget How To Drive. He lives with his wife and daughter in Princeton, NJ.