In contrast to presidential elections, when turnout typically exceeds 50percentt of the voting-age population, congressional election year turnouts are always under 40percentt; since 1972, when 18 year olds first voted, the average turnout for presidential elections has been 53percentt, compared to 37percentt for congressional elections -- a 16-point gap.
This, together with somewhat stronger assumptions about the behaviour of respondents who decline to say how they will vote, has the average effect of reducing the Labour vote share by about two percentage points and increasing the Conservative vote share to a similar extent.
He urged residents of this newly contested state to "vote the hopes and dreams of average people," and told them, "I want you to vote your hopes for the economy".
In case of ambiguity (i.e. multiple sentences with the same number of votes), the average of the prediction scores were used to make a decision.
(The same is true of the thirty-one members of the House who have endorsed an impeachment resolution: in 2004, all won with at least fifty-seven per cent of the vote. The average was seventy-five per cent).
The Governor's vote, unlike the average citizen's, would really, truly, definitively count.
They ensemble several decision trees (usually from hundreds to thousands) and give predictions by taking either the majority vote or the average of the single trees' outputs.
Research commissioned (pdf) by the Christian thinktank Theos suggests that, while more Christians voted Labour than Conservative in the last election, Christians are more likely to vote Conservative than the average voter.
That's a potential extra 800 to 2,000 Labour votes in the average marginal constituency – enough to make the difference between winning and losing in dozens of seats.
With more than 50 votes counted, the average response was that Mitt Romney has an 87 percent chance of winning the Republican nomination if he wins Florida, but only a 53 percent chance if he doesn't.
