We Ask America
Graded against the actual result across 50 races (from 86 polls, through 2020).
Head-to-head vs the VotePredictor model
The fair, apples-to-apples test: on the 50 races We Ask America actually polled, how its final poll's margin compared to what the VotePredictor model predicted for those same races.
| Model | Avg miss (pts) | Called right |
|---|---|---|
| We Ask America | 4.39 | 80% |
| VotePredictor | 3.44 | 90% |
VotePredictor aggregates all the pollsters, so it's expected to beat any single one on margin — that's the value of averaging. The honest comparison among forecasters is on the combined board.
Every race (50)
Each race We Ask America polled, scored on its final poll — the call right before the vote — against the actual Dem−Rep result. Click a race for its full detail.
Accuracy by time to election
Lower is better. Time to election runs right (election week) to left (~2 months out).
By the numbers
| Time to election | Polls | Avg miss | vs field | Called right |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ≤1 wk | 14 | 3.48 | -0.80 | 93% |
| 1–3 wk | 22 | 5.50 | +0.43 | 77% |
| 3–6 wk | 36 | 5.58 | -0.16 | 53% |
| 6–9 wk | 14 | 4.18 | -1.97 | 86% |
vs field is this pollster's average miss minus all pollsters' at the same lead time — green beats the field, redtrails it. Our historical polls reach ~2 months out; earlier polling isn't in the record.
Track record by cycle — getting better?
| Year | Polls | Avg miss | Lean (house effect) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2010 | 12 | 3.7 | R+1.1 |
| 2012 | 54 | 5.5 | R+3.8 |
| 2014 | 17 | 4.8 | D+2.9 |
Do we credit a pollster for fixing its bias? Each cycle, the model re-estimates every pollster's lean from all its earlier polls (walk-forward) and subtracts it before using the poll. We tested weighting recent cycles more — it doesn't help: a pollster's lean in one cycle barely predicts the next (correlation 0.28), so the swings above are mostly noise, and averaging over more history beats chasing the latest cycle. The all-time estimate we use came out within ~0.5% of the best option.