The Trial-Heat and Seats-in-Trouble Forecasts of the 2016 Presidential and Congressional Elections

Social networks and citizen election forecasting: The more friends the better

“…Often, such models include vote intention or government approval ratings a few months prior to the election as a gauge of the electorate's preferences. 1 Such variables are found in models of elections in the US (Campbell 2016;Erikson and Wlezien 2016), Britain (Ford et al 2016;Stegmaier and Williams 2016) and…”

A Recap of the 2016 Election Forecasts

“…On balance, the forecasts expected a Clinton plurality in a tight race. Summing up, I wrote that “the median forecast predicts that Clinton will win 51.1% of the two-party national vote” (Campbell 2016, 653). This calls for an end-zone celebration.…”

“…Forecasting the 2016 US presidential election, the polls stumbled while the models stood tall. With respect to the latter, we look to the 11 models appearing in PS: Political Science & Politics (October 2016) and their post-election evaluation by James Campbell (2016). These models all predict the two-major-party vote share to be a function of a few select independent variables, measured at the national level and over time (usually on the elections across the post-World War II period).…”

“…7 The more recently constructed Convention Bump and Economy model now has a mean absolute error of only 0.8 percentage points in three elections. As well as being accurate, both models are simple, stable, transparent, and have a strong foundation in a well articulated theory of presidential campaigns (Campbell 2008). 8 Their strength supports their common premise that campaigns are not purely retrospective contests, that the candidates and the public’s pre-campaign evaluations of them are important to an election’s vote division.…”

“…Preferences expressed on polls at time 1 may or may not be related and may or may not be identical to preferences at time 2 just as other variables at different times may or may not be related to preferences at time 1 or 2. My theory of campaign effects, including competitiveness effects and the effects of other campaign contexts, provide the foundations for the two presidential models used here (Campbell 2008).…”