How Well Did the Polls Predict Democratic Delegate Allocations on Super Tuesday?
UPDATED on 2/10 I’ve been referring to the Democratic Convention Watch, the New York Times, and various state party websites for the latest state-by-state estimates of how the candidates fared in terms of delegates on Super Tuesday. We still do not know have full final delegate allocation estimates in CO, GA, and IL. However, we do appear to have a good idea of the delegate allocations in 14 states for which we had polling data before Super Tuesday. On Monday (2/4), I used polling data from pollster.com to generate estimates on how the delegates would be allocated in 17 states. The basic point was that it really didn’t matter much on the Democratic side who won or lost states since proporational allocation of delegates meant that the percentage of the vote each candidate received was most important. The assumption I was making was that if the polls were right, we could get a pretty good estimate of how many delegates each candidate would receive from each state simply by assuming they
