Stiff Arm Trophy in the Wall Street Journal

Today, we had the honor of being profiled by Carl Bialik - the "Numbers Guy" for the Wall Street Journal:

A political consultant in Oregon successfully forecasts election winners and runner-ups for six years running, thanks to his exclusive survey of hundreds of voters. That election? The Heisman Trophy, college football’s premier annual award. ...

Despite the Heisman Trust’s secrecy, media voters often announce their ballots in columns or on air, ahead of the award presentation. Mr. Chisholm and his tipsters gather as many of these declared votes as possible, then smooth any discrepancies arising from over- or under-sampling certain regions. Mr. Chisholm also queries writers who have said in the past they have a Heisman vote, but haven’t yet announced their ballot.

Bialik explains how it works:

Despite the Heisman Trust’s secrecy, media voters often announce their ballots in columns or on air, ahead of the award presentation. Mr. Chisholm and his tipsters gather as many of these declared votes as possible, then smooth any discrepancies arising from over- or under-sampling certain regions. Mr. Chisholm also queries writers who have said in the past they have a Heisman vote, but haven’t yet announced their ballot.

Of course, our slightly-high number on Tebow (and low number on McFadden) this year has an explanation:

But Mr. Chisholm’s success is also a reminder that sample size is not all. The representativeness of the sample is also crucial. While this year, Mr. Chisholm got the correct order of the top four finishers, he overestimated Mr. Tebow’s winning margin by 10.2 percentage points. Mr. Chisholm blames that in part on his reliance on revealed votes: “After all, our system assumes that those who talk to us vote along the same lines as those who don’t,” Mr. Chisholm wrote on his site. “And while that’s usually true, there may have been a slight gap this year.” His explanation for that gap: Tradition-minded voters may be especially reluctant to reveal their votes, and also to vote for the young Mr. Tebow, the first sophomore to ever win the award. Because Mr. Tebow’s margin was still relatively wide, that didn’t affect the outcome.

Read the rest.

Kari Chisholm | December 11, 2007 | Comment on This Post (0 so far)
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