UVA Center for Politics, Ipsos Public Affairs Launch New Midterm Election Forecasting Tools

New Political Atlas features expert race ratings, poll-based forecasts, and social media trends in advance of the 2018 election

News provided by

Ipsos

Aug 28, 2018, 11:30 ET

WASHINGTON, Aug. 28, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, at the National Press Club, Ipsos Public Affairs, in partnership with University of Virginia Center for Politics, launched the 2018 Political Atlas, a multidisciplinary approach to election forecasting for the 2018 midterm elections.

The site provides daily updates of the main issues affecting citizens in all 50 states, along with poll and social media indicators for every congressional, senate, and gubernatorial race in the country, with expert assessments.

"The most robust predictions use multiple and independent indicators to derive the most accurate predictions, not just a single approach. Political Atlas draws on these methods to look for common conclusions or divergent directions for the most accurate findings," said Cliff Young, President of Ipsos Public Affairs.

Ipsos will conduct about 10,000 interviews a week, plus 20 state polls over the course of the next few months in conjunction with Reuters and the Center for Politics. The first state-level polls will be released next month. Crystal Ball's qualitative race rating assessments are adjusted on an ad hoc but frequent basis. Together this partnership can accurately handicap the midterm elections integrating information that challenges preconceptions.

"After the 2016 election, we strove to try to find new data sources and perspectives in political forecasting and to present these to Crystal Ball readers and the general public. Our partnership with Ipsos combines into one place, the Political Atlas, several different methods for looking at the possible outcome of the coming election," said Larry J. Sabato, Director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics and Editor-in-Chief of Sabato's Crystal Ball.

Charting the day-by-day pulse of public opinion through social media is a function Ipsos has increasingly used in its international polling in Mexico, Brazil, and Canada. Bringing this to the midterms provides further resolution to the ebbs and flows of the campaigns. Ipsos uses machine learning and natural language processing algorithms to collect and categorize over 5 million individual posts a day.

For more details about the Political Atlas, please visit https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/new-midterm-election-forecasting-tools or www.Political-Atlas.com.

SOURCE Ipsos