Election Forecasting for Turbulent Times

Abstract

Election forecasters face increasing turbulence in their relevant environments, making predictions more uncertain, or at least apparently so. For US presidential contests, economic performance and candidate profiles are central variables in most statistical models. These variables have exhibited large swings recently. Before the 2008 US presidential election, the economy fell into a Great Recession, and the candidate of one of the two major parties was, for the first time, a black man. These unprecedented conditions were trumpeted in the media, with heightened frenzy over the “horse race” question of who was going to win the White House. In the press, many forecasts appeared, taking different forms—polls, models, markets, pundits, to name some—offering a broader range of possible outcomes than ever before. Just looking at the predictions of the statistical modelers alone, we find that for 2008 many teams offered estimates of the incumbent (Republican) vote, ranging over an 11 percentage point spread. At one extreme, Lockerbie (2008) forecast 41.8% while at the other extreme Campbell (2008) forecast 52.7%. Of course, other methodologists offered their own, different, forecasts. The media, in its various forms, added to the hyperbole, aggressively reporting different forecasts on an almost daily basis.

Proxy Models and Nowcasting: U.S. Presidential Elections in the Future

“…His argument stems from the strong link between national and state results, based on evidence from the notion of “uniform swing.”) We have also addressed the argument that the usual national level forecasts are limited in value because presidential elections are decided by the Electoral College vote, which is derived from the state‐level results combined. However, we have also shown that the national popular vote and the electoral college vote are tightly linked, currently r = 0.97 (Lewis‐Beck and Rice , 24; Lewis‐Beck and Tien , ).…”

Issue and leader voting in U.S. presidential elections

“…The dominant economic variable used is economic growth, measured in terms of GDP (Abramowitz, 2012;Campbell, 2012) or GNP (Lewis-Beck and Tien, 2012). Other measures used include perceptions of personal income, either retrospective (Holbrook, 2012) or prospective (Lockerbie, 2012), job growth (Lewis-Beck and Tien, 2012), or an index of leading economic indicators (Erikson and Wlezien, 2012a).…”

Long-Term Trends and Short-Term Forecasts: The Transformation of US Presidential Elections in an Age of Polarization

“…We are concerned with predicting the outcome of one election at a time. In making our forecasts, we therefore focus on factors that can contribute to an accurate prediction of each party’s share of the vote in a particular election—factors such as the incumbent president’s approval rating (Abramowitz 2012), the performance of the economy in the year of the election (Abramowitz 2013; Campbell 2012; Erikson and Wlezien 2012; Holbrook 2012; Lewis-Beck and Tien 2012; Lockerbie 2012;), the length of time that the president’s party has held the White House (Abramowitz 2012), the results of trial heats between the major party candidates (Campbell 2012) or the performance of the candidates in their own party’s primary elections (Norpoth and Bednarczuk 2012). However, by focusing on individual elections and short-term forces, forecasters may be missing long-term trends that are profoundly altering the nature of electoral competition in the United States.…”