Bullitics

1/11/08

By:   Ricardo Rossello, PhD

It might be true, as the saying goes, that there are lies, damned lies, and statistics, but sometimes there are just the plain old facts.

Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary has produced all kinds of discussions about what went wrong with polls and pundits, but at least one test measure of the granite state’s electorate picked up what was happening in real time (figure 1).  From the ABC News debates Saturday night to Hillary Clinton’s ‘crying game’ to the actually vote, there were two key points of inflections – independent movement from the democratic primary to republican and undecided shifts in the last 30 hours to Clinton

The alpha-version Bullitics platform, a novel mechanism to determine society’s pulse, predicted the NH results and trends, observing movement in the electorate that started on Saturday, January 5th after the debate and continued 24 hours before the polls opened.

Bullitics uses a novel allocation mechanism that enables users to change their allocated percentages of answers as many times as they want.

For this prediction, the platform performed in its alpha stage, using only a small number of NH voters (276), and 6 questions (2 general, 2 Republican, 2 Democratic).  Two general questions were asked: (a) How likely are you to vote in the primary? and (b) What party affiliation best reflects your views?  On both Republican and Democratic questions, individuals were asked whom they were inclined to vote for and who was more presidential.

Based on that sample size and the questions, Bullitics was able to predict Senator Clinton’s victory in the NH primary, and identified two instances where a shift was occurring. To analyze the Democratic results, tallies were taken for those who were voting either Democratic, None, or Undecided. On the Republican side, those who aligned themselves with Republican, None, or Undecided were also tallied. This type of tallying reflected the reality of a semi-open primary in NH (independents can vote anywhere).

The first tally was taken after Saturday (Jan 5th) night’s debate. Before that time, Senator Obama had been steadily increasing his aggregate score after the Iowa Caucus. The changes in percentages were not significant (as Senator Obama remained consistent, Clinton only slightly increased, and Edwards slightly decreased). However, two things changed.

First, the percentage number of “Undecided” increased right after the debate. Second, a rising number of “None” and “Undecided” shifted to the Republican polling alternative. Thus, it could be concluded that the presidential debate affected the trends in public opinion by (1) enhancing uncertainty in the Democratic pool, and (2) shifting more attention to the Republican primary (relative change — most Independents still were with the Democratic party, figure 2 ).

The second tally was taken 30 hours before the polls closed in NH, when the Undecided segment started yielding steadily to Senator Clinton (77% of the Undecided segment tracked an increase for Clinton).The momentum started changing then, most likely due to the press coverage of her “emotional” moment on TV. In the end, the Bullitics platform had Barack Obama (37%)behind Hillary Clinton (38%) at 7pm EST, the night of the primary.

Figure 1

The conclusion is that Obama did not lose votes to his Democratic competitors, but rather lost a segment of the independents to the Republican Party and a large portion of the “Democratic-Undecided” vote within the last 30 hours. Had pollsters been able to pick up on this trend, they would have advised Senator Obama to target either the “Independent” crowd more heavily, or concentrate on the “Democratic-Undecided” vote.

Although this is a pilot study with no gender/race differentiation, future studies will be able to consider the effects of a gender/race shift in the contest.  The beta version of this study will be able to differentiate within that context. Still, our preliminary data points more to a shift in Independent voters (None-Undecided) going to the Republican primary, and a significant gain of “Democratic-Undecided” votes by the Clinton camp, rather than Obama losing the support of his base of voters.

Contact: rickyrossello@hotmail.com