In the 2021 Senate runoff elections in Georgia, this writer did a number of stories following forecasts by Thomas Miller, a prominent data scientist who’s a professor at Northwestern University. Miller crunched the numbers and made the contrarian call that Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock would win. In the 2024 presidential race, I tracked Miller’s numbers once again, and he scored by positing a Trump triumph.
I found Miller’s methods so convincing because he takes the novel approach of starting not with polls, but with the biggest prediction markets at the time, then making adjustments using proprietary algorithms that adjust for the sites’ inherent biases. For the 2024 contest, Miller broke new ground by updating his odds of a Trump or Harris victory every 10 minutes, so you could see the latest numbers posted on a continuously moving band resembling a stock ticker.
