Statistics in Politics

It has been a really long time since I have gotten excited about math. In fact, throughout elementary and middle school I even referred to myself as a "math person." You know, one of "those people" who truly gets math and even enjoys it. But, everything changed my junior year of high school. I decided to take AP calculus, and as far as I knew it, my days of enjoying math were officially over.

But, I am finally excited about math again! So why am I suddenly reminiscing over my past of enjoying and then eventually despising math? After all, this is supposed to be a blog discussing politics. 

Well I am currently enrolled in a statistics class, and this recent New York Times article discussing the Texas governor race caught my attention. 

Seeing as how not every citizen nor even University of Texas at Austin student has taken statistics, I would assume that not everyone knows how to correctly interpret the information given in the article. Thus, I will now take my newly acquired statistical knowledge and do my very best to explain the results from this poll. And in case you haven't noticed, I'm very fairly excited that I actually have the skills to do this! 

Just in case you aren't already aware, the two candidates in today's election are current Texas Governor Rick Perry and Bill White. And according to the article published Oct. 29, Governor Rick Perry is likely to get 49 percent of the votes, while Bill white is expected to get 37 percent.  The poll surveyed 637 likely Texas voters. 

When you read a poll, it is very important to read that small, but important information usually included towards the bottom of the results. This is called the margin of error. And the margin of error for this particular poll was +/- 3.8 percentage points. But what exactly does that mean? 

To put it simply, the surveyors believe that the true number of people who will vote for Perry is 49 percent. But, the problem is that because it is not economical to survey the entire population of voters, this sample cannot give an absolute correct number. 

Thus, to find a more accurate number, you will need to add and subtract the margin of error to the expected percent for each candidate (3.8 for this particular poll). So we should really expect between 45.2 and 52.8 percent of people to vote for Perry and 33.2 and 40.8 percent of people to vote for White.

Because these intervals do not cross, we would not expect the candidates to receive the same amount of votes. If the intervals were to cross, the percent of people voting for each candidate could be the same. Thus, according to the results from this particular poll, we expect Governor Rick Perry to receive more votes than Bill White. 

The polls are now officially closed, and it will be interesting to see if this statistical poll has correctly predicted the winner in the Texas governor race. I hope you all voted. Happy election day! :)