Practice Management

Predicting Pennsylvania--and the rest of the primaries.

By Dan Hull

Pollster and consultant Mike O'Neil of O'Neil Associates is a friend of ours. We liked the following article by Mike--he prepared especially for the Pennsylvania primary today--enough to print it entirely and word-for-word:

The Rest of the Story: Predicting the Outcome of All of the Remaining Democratic Primaries

Michael J. O'Neil. PhD

"It is difficult to predict, especially the future."

--Yogi Berra

Last month, I sent out a missive "The Myth of Momentum in the Democratic Primaries" in which I argued that the pattern of Obama and Clinton victories could be explained primarily by the demographics of the various states, rather than by any of the "momentum" that has been widely discussed in the press.

The beauty of any such argument is that of ex post facto logic: if you explain after the fact, you will always be "right" in your "prediction" since you can alter the theory to fit the known facts precisely.

Full post as published by What About Clients? on April 22, 2008 (boomark / email).