from Hacker News

Paper by political scientists predicted election results in October

by mvelbaum on 11/8/24, 12:08 PM with 1 comments

• by mvelbaum on 11/8/24, 12:08 PM

  A group of political scientists published this piece back in October, before the election. They predicted every state correctly, a popular vote victory for Trump, and 3/4 chance of Trump victory in Electoral College.

  The same people, using the same model, predicted a Biden victory in 2020 and 49/50 states correctly (they missed Georgia, which they predicted for Trump back then).

  Their model uses the following fundamentals, for each state:

  1. State deviation from national vote in t-1 election

  2. Presidential approval rating in each state (estimated with Multilevel Regression and Post-stratification)

  3. Economic conditions in each state (personal income deflated by CPI, unemployment rate, non-farm payroll employment, manufacturing hours by production workers)

  4. Presidential and VP home-field advantage adjustments if they apply in the state

  5. If VP runs, an adjustment to account for difference in approval rating between P and VP in question