Last
February, the Signal predicted that President Barack Obama would win reelection
with 303 electoral votes to his opponent's 235--a prediction we made before the
Republican party had chosen the identity of that challenger. This struck many
people as absurd at the time: There were nine months of campaigning left, two
conventions, several billion dollars worth of advertising, four debates, and
untold bumps in the road for both sides.
As of 1
a.m. EST this morning, 50 of 51 of those predictions are correct, with about
60,000 votes separating the candidates in Florida. If Romney can win the state,
the Signal will have gone a perfect 51 for 51.
We point
this out not to brag--mostly not to brag--but to say that it's a vindication
for the broad view of presidential elections: That they are the product of a
complex stew of social and economic forces, not a contest between candidates
and campaigns. At the time, the Signal's prediction model included only one
measure of public opinion: Obama's approval rating, which stood at just below
50 percent at the time. The rest of predictions were driven by a model of those
macro-factors--incumbency, economic growth and contraction, and so forth--that
exist independently of the names and faces on the tickets.
Anyone can
average a bunch of polls and call the election a week before it happens. In the
end, it's the models that tell us something about what forces influence
election. We will talk in most depth over the coming days (with a minimum of
gloating) about how our model maintained its consistency as it shifted to
include more polls and prediction markets in the weeks and months that followed
the initial take. But we are proud to have provided a consistant and correct
message to our readers for the last few months.
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