Predictive model for election outcome
A fun interactive tool at the link below, and an interesting article on why most issues raised along the way don't really help to predict the outcome of a presidential election:
The interactive model is here. Fun to move the sliders back and forth and hit "Calculate"....I asked three political scientists — Seth Hill of Yale, John Sides of George Washington University and Lynn Vavreck of UCLA — to help me create an election forecasting model. And when I say “help me,” I mean that they did all the work and then sat me down and explained, slowly and using small words, what they had done.
The final model uses just three pieces of information that have been found to be particularly predictive: economic growth in the year of the election, as measured by the change in gross domestic product during the first three quarters; the president’s approval rating in June; and whether one of the candidates is the incumbent.
That may seem a bit thin. But it calls 12 of the past 16 elections right. The average error in its prediction of the two-party vote share is less than three percentage points.
Before you go nuts, please remember that when it says things like "he wins 74 percent of the time", it doesn't mean that the candidate gets 74% of the votes case, just that he wins 74% of the time.
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Originally Posted by TANSTAF1
