How accurate is the “generic ballot” for Congressional vote preference?
analysis by the Pew Research Center in October 2002 concluded in off-year elections, the final pre-election measure of the generic vote (presumably as reported among “likely voters”) has been “an accurate predictor of the partisan distribution of the national vote,” showing an average error between 1954 and 1998 of only 1.1%. Similarly but less formally, MyDD’s Chris Bowers did a simple comparison last year and found that on average these results for the final polls in 2002 and 2004 came reasonably close to the final margins.
