For those who wish this long and often dismal presidential campaign were over, help is already here. To the rescue have come the forecasters — political scientists with prediction models that have already called the election, in some cases many months ago.
Their work will soon be published collectively in the upcoming issue of the journal PS: Political Science and Politics. On Friday, a handful of the forecasters appeared in Philadelphia at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association to offer their thoughts. Some of their analyses have been carried on Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball website at the University of Virginia.
Lost in the extraordinary amount of attention that has been focused on the strengths and weaknesses of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is the reality that the outcome of presidential elections often depends as much or more on fundamentals as on candidate performance. It’s not that campaigns and candidates don’t matter, but events play out against a backdrop of attitudes and conditions that often favors one side over the other from the very start….
Alan Abramowitz of Emory University uses what he calls a Time for Change Forecasting Model. His model does not rely on polling data but instead takes into account the incumbent president’s approval rating at midyear, the growth rate of real gross domestic product in the second quarter of the election year and whether the incumbent president’s party has held the White House for one term or more than a term.
On that basis, his model predicts a narrow victory for Trump. But Abramowitz also suggests that Trump could underperform. “A model like mine that relies entirely on fundamentals is likely to miss the result because Trump is such an atypical candidate,” he said.
Abramowitz, who has been openly critical of Trump this year, said he would rather his model be wrong this time. In his paper, he writes: “The Time for Change model wi