Predicting Elections 2024
Whether you want them or not, those Presidential election predictions are back. Every election cycle, we are asked to get off the pollercoaster and predict the future of politics. When it comes to presidential election forecasting, working in politics can make us poor judges of the outcome of an election: after all, we are determined to help our candidates win, which can make us less objective in predicting electoral odds than we should be. In other words, wanting to win is not always a predictor of winning. Check out our past podcast on presidential election predictions.
Presidential election predictions are not always accurate even when they come from people we deem experts. Every four years, many of us turn to academic and economic models that predict the presidency. While some of these models are more predictive than others and have worked well over the years, others have missed the boat a few times, making it clear that an academic basis does not guarantee success in election forecasting either. With the constantly changing landscape of politics and the polarization of our political dialogue, it makes sense that past predictors of elections may not hold true today. Generally, however, I believe that the strength of these models is their ability to filter out the noise in predicting outcomes compared to standard polls.
Below, we list some of our favorite, most popular, and not-so-favorite election forecasting models with the hope of giving you a glimpse into the crystal ball ahead of this week’s Harris v. Trump match-up. This post includes each model’s 2024 prediction as well as its forecasts from 2016 and 2020. Please note that, over the eight years through which we’ve been tracking this information, some folks have stopped issuing election predictions and other organizations have taken up running similar models. Happy election forecasting!
*Note: Many of these models update in real-time. These numbers are a snapshot of what we saw across the models on October 26, 2024.
Betting Markets
Kalshi, PredictIt, and Pollymarket are betting markets that predict in real-time who will win the presidency. Why rely on traditional polls to unreliably capture the public mood (given the typical margin of error in these polls) when real-money markets can serve as a more accurate indicator of how the election may swing?
2024 Presidential Election Prediction: Trump. (2020: Trump; 2016: Clinton.)
TCW’s Take: Polls aren’t perfect, but neither are political betting markets. Detractors say these markets are not predictive anymore due to their ubiquity. Overconfidence in betting markets makes them look misleadingly stable, and that false sense of stability makes it harder for them to predict events that shake up the status quo—such as the outcome of the Brexit referendum or Trump’s election in 2016. Folks can also try to game these markets to help drive a preferred outcome.
The Fair Model
Ray Fair, a Yale economics professor and the author of Predicting Presidential Elections and Other Things, has a market-based model first used to predict the winner of the 1980 presidential election. The Fair Model predicts the popular vote by looking at the strength of the economy between presidential election years. However, as Fair himself admitted in 2016 addressing the possible limitations of a market-driven model, “If there’s any time in which personalities would trump the economy it would be this election.” – this was 2020 and possibly true today.
2024 Presidential Election Prediction: Trump 50.7/49.3. (2020 - Biden 50.5/49.5, 2016: Trump 55/45.)
TCW’s Take: There are many ways to create market-driven models. Fair has been a stable predictor of outcomes over the years - but with our changing electoral dynamics what predicted the pas may not predict the future.
Silver Bulletin Model
Nate Silver and his team have made a huge impact on real-time presidential predictions since the 2008 election when Silver’s statistical model nailed the popular vote within a percentage point and successfully predicted presidential outcomes in all but one state.
2024 Presidential Election Prediction: Trump 53.4/ Harris 46.2. (2020, 71% Biden victory; 2016, 69% Clinton victory.)
TCW’s take: We are big Nate Silver fans, and what he has done to get people to think about polls, models, and election forecasting has made a difference in how we all look at polling and presidential election predictions.
Lichtman’s Model
Allan Lichtman has been said to have predicted the outcome of every presidential election since 1984. Rather than relying on indicators such as polling, candidate likeability, or issues, Lichtman’s model draws upon a series of 13 questions that seek to determine the popularity of the party that controls the White House. Prevailing attitudes toward the in-party measured in this model help to determine which candidate will win the next election.
2024 Presidential Election Prediction: Harris. (2020, Biden; 2016, Trump.)
TCW’s take: Lichtman’s true-false questions can be viewed as subjective. Lichtman also wavered in his 2016 prediction, initially leaning toward Clinton early in the year, but later pointing to a Trump victory at the polls.
Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball
Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia Center for Politics has managed a frequently updated map of how states will cast Electoral College votes to forecast the presidency (and to predict how gubernatorial and congressional races will shape up as well). These projections have been highly accurate, predicting an Obama victory in the Electoral College in 2012 when several pollsters pointed to a Romney win.
2024 Presidential Election Prediction: 268 Electoral College votes for Harris, 203 for Trump. (2016: 293 Electoral College votes for Clinton, 214 for Trump.)
TCW’s Take: Larry Sabato has broken a lot of ground in his practical approach to politics and really embraced practitioners of politics and modern tactics.
Moody’s Model
Moody’s Analytics has successfully predicted every presidential contest since 1980 by focusing on two-year changes in income growth, home prices, and gasoline prices, among other factors.
2024 Presidential Election Prediction: Harris. (2020, Biden; 2016, Clinton.)
TCW’s Take: We like economic-based models, but they aren’t perfect. In 2016, this model came to a different conclusion than the market-based Fair Model, but their 2024 conclusions are the same.
The Primary Model
Helmut Norpoth’s model looks at how candidates performed in the presidential primaries to predict how they will fare in the general election. This primary-centric approach has picked the winner of the popular vote in every presidential election since its 1996 inception. The model also considers in-party fatigue among the public, considering the likelihood that the opposing party will win if the incumbent president’s party has controlled the White House for two terms. In other words, is the public sick of the current president?
2024 Presidential Election Prediction: 75% certain of a Harris victory. (2020, 91% certainty of a Trump victory; 2016, 87-99% certainty of a Trump victory)
TCW’s Take: While this model has been a successful predictor in the past, it got 2020 wrong and did correctly predict 2016. We don’t find this year’s Democratic primary to be a great predictor of the general election, and therefore find this model to not be one of our favorites.
Princeton Model
Sam Wang of the Princeton Election Consortium runs a statistical model to project Electoral College outcomes in presidential elections. This model relies on state-level polls to provide a snapshot of which candidate would win the Electoral College if the presidential election were to be held today.
2024 Presidential Election Prediction: Trump +.2 (2020 + 6% Biden, 2016: +2.6% Clinton)
TCW’s take: If you have not read any of Sam Wang’s writing you should. We found his 2016 article on the effect of the Comey letter to be a clear voice in the chaos of electoral noise.
2024 models: Trump 4, Harris 3. (2020: Biden 6, Trump 2; 2016: Clinton 5, Trump 2.)
Yes, the race is very close.
In general, we think the work to make accurate presidential election predictions should be commended. In 2020, these same seven models predicted Biden and one predicted Trump, but we will see what happens on November 5th.
Of the eight presidential election prediction models we featured in 2016, five predicted President Clinton and three predicted President Trump.
These academic models are interesting, but it’s important to remember that the only real way to determine what will happen is to mail in your ballot or head to the polls –and to encourage your friends and family to do the same.