Political Forecasting - Special Interest Groups
Political Forecasting

The Political Forecasting Special Interest Group is a resource for scholars and practitioners interested in forecasting elections and other political events.

 

 

Contact Information

This website is the product of collaboration on the part of J. Scott Armstrong and

Alfred G. Cuzán

Professor of Political Science
The University of West Florida
Pensacola, FL 32514

Publications

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Telephone: (850) 474-2345
Fax: (850) 473-7001

Randall Jones

Professor of Political Science
University of Central Oklahoma
Edmond, OK 73034

Author of Who Will Be in the White House? Predicting Presidential Elections (New York: Longman Publishers, 2002).

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Telephone: (405) 974-5270
Fax: (405) 974-3823

Acknowledgements: The inspiration and drive for the launching of politicalforecasting.com originated with J. Scott Armstrong, Polly's energizer extraordinaire. Many thanks to Steve Archibald, who suggested the name Polly. Thanks, too, to John Carstens, RIP, our first Pollynician, for his technical assistance during the first years of Polly’s life.

 

What's new

 

Ray Fair has posted his first forecast of the outcome of the 2010 mid-term elections. The dependent variable is not the number of seats but the percent of the two-party House vote going to the Democrats.

Bafumi, Erikson, and Wlezien have a paper, "Ideological Balancing, Generic Polls and Midterm Elections" forthcoming at the Journal of Politics.
 

The November 2010 elections are more than a year away, but Larry Sabato's "Crystal Ball" is forecasting that the Republicans will likely pick up 20-30 House seats. For their analysis, click here.

 

Alfred G. Cuzán and Charles M. Bundrick test the idea that equal weights yield better or no worse predictions than optimal weights in two presidential elections forecasting models. See "Predicting Presidential Elections with Equally-Weighted Regressors in Fair's Equation and the Fiscal Model," Political Analysis, 17, 2009, 333-340. For an an "advance access" pdf file, click here.

Scott Armstrong will present findings on the accuracy of forecasts from novel but evidence-based methods for forecasting election results in a keynote speech at the International Symposium on Forecasting in Hong Kong in June. The research is part of the PollyVote Project with colleagues Alfred G. Cuzán, Andreas Graefe, and Randall Jones. (19 May, 2009)

Polly crows: For the second time in a row, Polly called a presidential election with a perfect or near-perfect forecast. When the final results were in for the 2004 election Pollyvote was off by a mere one-fourth of one percent. This morning preliminary totals showed the Obama-Biden ticket taking 53% of the two-party vote, exactly what Polly predicted on Election Eve. Once again, Polly has shown that a combination of election forecasts within and across methods is hard to beat. (5 November, 2008) more ...

Election decided on issues, not race. Voters selected the candidate they expected to do better in solving the country's problems. Graefe and Armstrong used the index method and data from polling of potential voters’ opinions about how the candidates would handle issues of concern to predict Barack Obama to win as early as March. In their last forecast before the election they predicted Obama would receive 52.5% of the popular two-party vote, which erred by only 0.6%. (5 November 2008) more ...
 

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The Forecasting Principles site was sponsored by the Marketing Department of The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania for the first nine years. The International Institute of Forecasters has been a sponsor since July 2006.