The Election: Religion, Simulation and Prediction

The mildly offensive term "values voters" to describe fundamentalists, evangelicals and the very religious generally should also be noted. The term seems to suggest that the irreligious, the secular and the moderately religious lack a concern for "values" when they are merely possessors of different ones. Nor is the latter class of voters small, just unorganized. A poll by the PEW organization found that one in six of the respondents said they were not affiliated with any particular religious faith, a figure that rises to one in four for those 18 to 29 years old. Unaffiliated does not mean irreligious, of course, but 4 percent of Americans, likely a significant undercount, do explicitly say that they are atheists or agnostics.

Simulations of the Race

Whatever religious voters' influence is, the essential question about the election is, Who is going to win? To help with that question there are a number of online sites that attempt to simulate the presidential election results if the contest were held today. The rough idea is that they run thousands of virtual elections given the polling data available and see who wins in most of them.

In a bit more detail, almost all the simulations begin with polls in the so-called battleground states and use them to estimate the probability of one candidate or the other (either will do, but most use Obama as a base) winning each of these states. If, for example, Obama leads McCain 52 percent to 48 percent with a margin of error of 4 percent in a given state X, then standard statistics might tell us that his chance of winning the state is roughly 85 percent. (That is, because of sampling error there's an 85 percent he'll get at least 50 percent of the vote in state X.)

If there are other polls in the state or sources of relevant demographic data, they are averaged in, with more consideration given to recent data and polls as well as to those that have been more accurate in the past.

These computations are done for all states, and then a computer runs thousands of virtual elections in which Obama has an 85 percent chance of winning state X, McCain has a 60 percent chance of winning state Y, and so on for all the other states. The various ways that Obama can attain at least 270 electoral votes and hence win the election are determined, and then the overall likelihood of his winning is calculated.