Despite bookies' odds at 66% that The Democratic Party will win The White House in November, economic models predict a Republican victory (with or without Trump).
As The Hill reports, Republicans are expected to win the White House under two economic models that have accurately forecast presidential elections for decades. A third model run by Moody’s Analytics predicts Democrats will win the White House, in part because of President Obama’s rising approval rating.
“As economists this is a very unusual election and there’s a lot more uncertainty introduced this time around that could upset the balance and the historical relationship of how marginal voters vote,” said Dan White, an economist with Moody’s Analytics who oversees the firm’s monthly election model.
Ray Fair, a Yale professor who launched his model in 1978, told The Hill that while all elections include unruly features that an economic model can’t pick up, “this one seems particularly unusual.”
“If there’s any time in which personalities would trump the economy it would be this election,” Fair said.
Fair’s model has correctly forecast all but three presidential races since 1916 but was wrong in 2012, when it predicted a narrow loss for Obama to Mitt Romney.
It relies on just three pieces of information: per capita growth rate of gross domestic product in the three quarters before an election, inflation over the entire presidential term and the number of quarters during the term growth per capita exceeds 3.2 percent.
Given the sluggish economy, his model doesn’t show enough growth under Obama to predict a Democratic win in the election. In his most recent forecast from January, his model predicted a 45.66 percent share of the presidential vote for the Democratic candidate, less than the 49 percent it predicted in 2012.
The other two models, unlike Fair’s, consider the incumbent president’s approval rating. In both cases, Obama’s improving favorability helps his party’s chances of winning the White House. But only one of those models predicts a Democratic win.
White said that one of the most frequently asked questions he gets is whether a Trump variable could be added into the model to test out how his brand of fireworks factors in.
No way, he said.
“The model doesn’t know or care if there are two or 10 candidates,” he said. “It knows the economics and whether marginal swing voters will keep the incumbent party in or not.”
In fact, their models are designed to sweep away the effects of boisterous personalities and the usual ebbs and flows of a long presidential campaign season and instead track specific economic factors that voters deem most important.
"So the logic that says that these models should have worked over the past few decades also says that they should work in this election cycle, too,” he told The Hill.
“There's no reason to think the models should do better or worse in 2016,” he said.