DISH ‘Viewers to Voters’ predicts Clinton victory
November 8, 2016
US satellite broadcaster DISH has shared the results of its ‘Viewers to Voters’ predictive model that analyses the potential outcomes of the 2016 presidential election. Based on anonymised customer viewership data generated from Internet-connected set-top boxes, DISH’s Viewers to Voters modeling predicts that Secretary Hillary Clinton will win the 2016 presidential election.
Further, the Viewers to Voters model forecasts a Republican majority victory in the US House of Representatives, with an estimated 245 out of 435 seats. This data would represent a two-seat gain for Democrats in the 115th Congress. Sufficient historical viewership data was not available to meaningfully predict the state of the Senate.
“With so much focus around national polling, we thought it’d be interesting to see if we could find a correlation between how our customers interact with DISH and how they may vote,” said Warren Schlichting, DISH Executive Vice President of Media Sales, Marketing and Programming. “We recognise that our call on the distribution of seats in the House may be an outlier. Yet when we tested the model against 2014 House elections, we found that we were able to predict the outcome at a 98 per cent reliability point.”
Developed in partnership by DISH’s Data Science and Media Sales divisions, Viewers to Voters is the first project completed under the company’s extra-curricular initiative, “Wisdom of Crowds.” DISH’s Wisdom of Crowds programme will explore the potential relationships between TV-viewing behaviors and real world actions.