9 - Triangulating Election Prediction

Summary

Forecasting elections is a high-risk, high-reward endeavor. Today’s polling rock star is tomorrow’s has-been. It is a high-pressure gig. Public opinion polls have been a staple of election forecasting for almost ninety years. But single source predictions are an imperfect means of forecasting, as we detailed in the preceding chapter. One of the most telling examples of this in recent years is the 2016 US presidential election. In this chapter, we will examine public opinion as an election forecast input. We organize election prediction into three broad buckets: (1) heuristics models, (2) poll-based models, and (3) fundamentals models.