Folks, I have yet one new statistic for you all to look at this election season. It is my idea, and it uses the Gallup and Rasmussen traking polls (I may all more tracking polls to the model. What is does, it show which side has the momentum in the campaign. Right now, the Shayko Momentum Indicator shows John McCain with 2.25 points of momentum. Still, this is down from 2.56 points yesterday. Thus, John McCain momentum is slowing just a tad. With the people initially deciding that (according to horrible snap polls) Obama did better in the debate, today is the first day that the momentum number would include results from the debate. Here is a graph of the Shayko Momentum Indicator (SMI).
What you see are three lines. When the lines are above zero, that means Obama has the momentum and is moving the numbers in his direction. If it is below, then McCain is moving the numbers in his direction. It is important to understand that this graph does not show who is leading. It shows who is gaining. Right now, Obama is ahead in every survey.
The SMI is showing that over the last week or so (the yellow line), McCain has been closing that lead slightly. One is the indicator for the Rasmussen tracking poll, another for the Gallup tracking poll. The SMI is an average of those two. The indicator compares the tracking poll for the last 4 nights to the same week prior. The closest days are given the largest weight. The current day tracking poll is half of the weighting. The day before is one quarter of the weighting. The 2 days before that are 1/8th of the weighting each.
You can download the Excel Spreadsheet for the SMI here and see the formula for yourself soon. I may add other tracking polls, as it will help eliminate noise. Since we are talking about a derivative here, it is quite useful because the bias in a given tracking poll is basically taken out. You will notice that the Gallup poll picks up move usually quicker, but it suffers for have a bit more variance. Please ask any questions in the comment area. I would love to answer, but I don’t want to get too wonky here. This is wonky enough.
