Yeager was right...Academics Predict Bush Win...Sorta

[muckmaw]

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=564&ncid=564&e=4&u=/nm/20040701/ts_nm/campaign_forecasts_dc_3

[Dead Man Flying]

This is an interesting article.  I wish they'd offer more credit where credit is due as far as prediction models go.  I met and heard a talk from the fellow who predicted Clinton's vote within 1/10th of a percentage point; the exact same model in 2000 predicted Gore winning by 6 or 7 percentage points over Bush.

Thomas Mann (with whom I'm not familiar) really overstates the inaccuracy of presidential predictions when he declares that forecasters will be "going out of business soon."  Utter nonsense.  He also makes some blanket statements about the upcoming election and its important variables without couching any of his statements in fact or evidence.  He states supposition as fact particularly regarding the impact of foreign policy and the Iraq war.

However, we should remain wary of apologists like Thomas Holbrook, who blames the Gore campaign's incompetence for the discrepency between prediction and outcome in 2000.  If political scientists truly wish to measure systematic phenomena, then you need to measure and predict things systematically.  How do we measure "incompetence?"  If the results do not match expectation, do we blame the models or the actors we are modelling?  Blaming Gore's campaign is an easy out for election forecasters, but they do a great disservice to political science by taking that stand.  Inaccurate predictions reflect poor or incomplete modelling.  Unless they can operationalize "incompetence" and include it as an independent predictor variable before an election, they're just making excuses.

-- Todd/Leviathn

[Masherbrum]

"However, we should remain wary of apologists like Thomas Holbrook, who blames the Gore campaign's incompetence for the discrepency between prediction and outcome in 2000. "

The only discrepency was Gore not getting Tennessee to vote for him.  Hilarious.  Dubya in 2004.

Karaya

[Dead Man Flying]

Originally posted by Masherbrum
The only discrepency was Gore not getting Tennessee to vote for him.  Hilarious.  Dubya in 2004.

You don't know much about political science, do you?

-- Todd/Leviathn

[Masherbrum]

I know plenty and it is Gore not winning his homestate that shuts up Democrats real quick.  

Just stating a fact for a change, a short break from the rhetorical spewings about a fat, documentary director who's claims are merely opinion at best.

Karaya

[Dead Man Flying]

Originally posted by Masherbrum
I know plenty and it is Gore not winning his homestate that shuts up Democrats real quick.

[/b]

What about this statement demonstrates any understanding of political science?  Why don't you offer a theory as to why Gore might have lost his home state?  Stating what happened is history.  Predicting or explaining what happened is the purview of political science.

-- Todd/Leviathn

[Masherbrum]

Originally posted by Dead Man Flying


What about this statement demonstrates any understanding of political science?  Why don't you offer a theory as to why Gore might have lost his home state?  Stating what happened is history.  Predicting or explaining what happened is the purview of political science.

-- Todd/Leviathn [/B]

Being neither a Republican or Democrat myself, noone been able to answer it for me.  My buddy (die hard Dem) still cries over the "heisted election".  Maybe Gore pissed off hunters, maybe they didn't like his campaign foundations.  I dunno, I live in Michigan, I was in the minority and voted for Bush (the rest were independants).   I have heard he didn't campaign enough in his home state, trying to persuade "swing states".  

Karaya

[Dead Man Flying]

Originally posted by Masherbrum
I have heard he didn't campaign enough in his home state, trying to persuade "swing states".  

I think the story is a bit more complicated than that, though a failure to campaign in his home state indicates a poor election strategy.

If you look at the Tennessee electorate, you'll see that the state has gradually, since the 1980s, begun realigning itself from the Democratic to the Republican party (as most states in the South have done since the Reagan administration).  Other than the fact that Gore was from Tennessee, every pertinent variable suggests that Tennessee should vote Republican in presidential elections.  I expect they'll do the same in 2004.

-- Todd/Leviathn

[Masherbrum]

I concur, I'm just speaking from disbelief, that Gore could not pull his homestate.   Take the rust belt up here for instance, they have swung to Dems.  Just shocked me to see the South switch, but for a Presidential candidate to not pull his homestate was shocking to me bro.

Silly question, Mondale did win his homestate against Reagan right?  Minnesota?  

<>

Karaya

[xrtoronto]

the academia predicted a Conservative win here in Canada last week....

they were (snicker) .... wrong!

enjoy the last 4 more months of GW:lol

[Dead Man Flying]

Originally posted by Masherbrum
Silly question, Mondale did win his homestate against Reagan right?  Minnesota?  

I'm pretty certain that Mondale won Minnesota (and probably only Minnesota) in 1984.  I would consider the fact that a candidate hails from a state a contributing factor in winning that state, but it is just one of many factors.  I'm pretty sure that all of the variables in 1984 would have inclined Minnesota to vote for Mondale regardless of whether or not he was from there.

-- Todd/Leviathn

[Toad]

Originally posted by Dead Man Flying
Inaccurate predictions reflect poor or incomplete modelling.  
-- Todd/Leviathn

Is there a belief that everything can be modeled correctly?

You are dealing with human voters here, after all.

[Toad]

Hey Todd, what do you think of this approach?

Forget the polls, check the markets

There's another way to predict the winner, and, while it's not foolproof, it's proven far better that polling. Don't ask individual Americans for whom they'll vote if the election were today. Instead, ask traders on a specialized exchange - similar to a stock market - for whom America will vote on Nov. 2.

One such exchange is called the Iowa Electronic Markets, founded in 1988 by the University of Iowa College of Business (http://www.biz.uiowa.edu/iem). Anyone can trade by betting up to $500 to predict the outcomes of events like governors' races and Federal Reserve policy. Results have been uncannily accurate.

Academic papers have found that the IEM, on average, has whipped the polls soundly. For presidential elections, the IEM's margin of error on the brink of the vote was just 1.5 percent, compared with 2.1 percent for Gallup. Three-fourths of the time, the IEM has been more accurate than the average pollster.

[Dead Man Flying]

Originally posted by Toad
Is there a belief that everything can be modeled correctly?

You are dealing with human voters here, after all.

Realistically speaking, you can't hope to model everything accurately.  Humans sometimes act in very random ways that you can never model.  However, when humans act in systematic ways, you do hope to capture some of that through modelling.

If presidential elections are actually random events, then no amount of modelling could ever predict more accurately than just flipping a coin.  However, we know that some systematic processes drive how people vote at the individual and aggregate levels.  Disagreement over the degree to which these factors matter and, more importantly, how to operationalize many of the concepts lead to different results and sometimes inaccurate findings.

Case in point:  How do we measure "the state of the economy?"  That's a theoretical concept that we potentially measure using any number of indicators.    Do we use GDP growth?  Stock market growth?  Consumer confidence?  Some combination of those?  Better political scientists than Holbrook demonstrate quite convincingly that different operationalizations lead to better predictions (c.f. Bartels and Zaller 2001; Lewis-Beck and Tien 2001).

Lewis-Beck and Tien, for example, argue that voters apply retrospective and prospective evaluations of candidates differently for incumbents and challengers.  They measure the "state of the economy" through GNP change, leading economic indicators, and the Dow Jones with an interaction between incumbency and GNP.  This interaction indicates an unequal relationship between economic evaluations of the incumbent president and economic evaluations of challengers.

-- Todd/Leviathn

[Dead Man Flying]

Originally posted by Toad
Hey Todd, what do you think of this approach?[/URL]

It's a nifty approach.  I know a number of graduate students who followed the presidential election "market" studiously throughout 2000.  Some actually made bets based on it.

[Edit] Keep in mind, of course, that a market-based approach provides predictive but not explanatory power.  We still know little about what leads to electoral outcomes using such a method.

-- Todd/Leviathn