Can the Internet Predict Elections?

Can the Internet Predict Elections?

Using online opinions to help predict results, The Daily Beast’s Election Oracle nailed almost every major race last week. Randall Lane on whether this is the future of polling.
George Gallup described polling simply as the science of reflecting public opinion, and like any science, it’s only as good as the technology driving it. The first “modern” election polls, launched between the World Wars by Literary Digest, leveraged a new innovation, air mail, but failed famously in 1936, as the disproportionately wealthy audience forecast an Alf Landon landslide over FDR. Telephone surveys proved better, but also favored the rich at first (when phones were a luxury) and the old more recently (since younger voters tend to be cell-only, unreachable by pollsters). Exit polls, demographic modeling, prediction markets—all have been deployed to varied results.