Thursday, July 01, 2004

Bush’s Formulaic Win Prediction

I got the link to this article via email (thanks, Ace!).

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Polls may show the presidential race in a dead heat, but for a small band of academics who use scientific formulas to predict elections President Bush (news - web sites) is on his way to a sizable win.

That’s the conclusion of a handful of political scientists who, with mixed results, have honed the art of election forecasting by devising elaborate mathematical formulas based on key measures of the nation’s economic health and the public’s political views.

Most of these academics are predicting Bush, bolstered by robust economic growth, will win between 53 and 58 percent of the votes cast for him and his Democratic opponent John Kerry (news - web sites).

Their track record for calling election outcomes months in advance has often been surprisingly accurate. In 1988, the models projected Bush’s father, former President George Bush, would win even though Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis enjoyed a double digit poll leads that summer.

I’m pretty confident that the President will be re-elected. I’ve said before that this summer reminds me of 1988, when the media were all but declaring Dukakis to be the next President instead of Bush 41. Even if we have a major terrorist attack within our borders, I think the President will win reelection - think about it, we know how he will respond to an attack because we’ve already seen how he responds. We have no clue how a President Kerry will respond and I shudder to think how a Kerry administration will handle the War on Terror. I think most Americans will vote with their safety, and the safety of their kids, in mind.

That said, the academics did get one election prediction gloriously wrong.

...they predicted in 2000 that Democrat Al Gore (news - web sites) would win easily, pegging his total at between 53 and 60 percent of the two-party vote.

Why were they so wrong?

The forecasters chalk up the 2000 error to Gore’s campaign, which distanced itself from the Clinton record. All the models assume the candidates will run reasonably competent campaigns, said Thomas Holbrook, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee.

Heh. Posted by at 04:26 PM
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