Predicting the Winner: Could it Be This Easy?

By Jill Kuraitis, 7-21-08

A leading British economist and journalist tell us that there is a deceptively simple way to predict who will be our next president, and it seems to defy everything we think we know.

In London’s Financial Times, Clive Crook writes about a “laughably simple metric” that has gotten it right in 14 out of 15 post WWII presidential elections.

If professional pollsters had a record like that, campaigns would bid millions to hire them.  But Crook says that the up/down polls taken in the summer months are almost worthless, and that the “electoral barometer” he describes is the real deal.

The metric, which has been researched by a politics scholar, Alan Abramowitz, at Atlanta’s Emory University, takes the approval rating of the incumbent president, the economy’s growth rate, and whether the incumbent’s party has been in power for at least two terms, and weighs them.  So….

“President George W. Bush’s net approval rating (favourable minus unfavourable) is currently –40; the economy grew at a 1 per cent annual rate in the first quarter; and Republicans have had two terms in the White House. Plugging the numbers into Mr Abramowitz’s formula gives the Republican candidate a score of –60, about as bad as it gets: second only to Mr Carter’s in the annals of doomed postwar candidacies. The barometer says Mr Obama is going to waltz to victory.”

The metric was wrong only once, in 1968, when it predicted Hubert Humphrey would win by a gnat’s eyelash.  He lost by less than one percentage point, so it was pretty darned close.