Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Among other things, it discusses the politics of economic policy
Simon Kuper at The Financial Times🇺🇸 The Fiscal Impact of the Harris and Trump Campaign Plans 🇺🇸
— CRFB.org (@BudgetHawks) October 7, 2024
Our comprehensive analysis breaks down the presidential candidates' tax and spending plans and what they would mean for the #NationalDebt.
Under our central estimate, we find:
➡️ Vice President Harris would add… pic.twitter.com/bhnZEbwiPJ
In 2016, I was one of the fools who thought people wouldn’t vote for Donald Trump. As I explained to readers before the Republican primaries, “The electorate generally just wants a leader who appears sane, which is why Republicans almost certainly won’t nominate Trump.” I was taking my lead from so-called experts. “If you want to know the future,” I wrote in May that year, “the best forecasters are betting markets . . . The Oddschecker website, which compares odds offered by different bookmakers, indicates a chance of just over one in four that Brits will opt for Brexit. The chances of Trump becoming American president or Marine Le Pen French president are judged a tad smaller.” This time, I won’t be making election forecasts. When you are wrong, you need to ask why — especially when you face a similar situation again. Perhaps I’m an out-of-touch elitist who doesn’t understand the suffering of ordinary people, but I’ve come to a different conclusion. In 2016, I still mistakenly believed that most voters were economically motivated, self-interested rationalists. The “rational actor” turns out to be a rare beast.
Are these calculated probabilities any good? Right now, we simply don’t know. In a new paper I’ve co-authored with the University of Pennsylvania’s Dean Knox and Dartmouth College’s Sean Westwood, we show that even under assumptions very favorable to forecasters, we wouldn’t know the answer for decades, centuries, or maybe even millenia.
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The reason it takes so long to evaluate forecasts of presidential elections is obvious: There is only one presidential election every four years. In fact, we are now having only our 60th presidential election in U.S. history.
Compare the information available when forecasting presidential elections to the amount of information used when predicting stock prices, forecasting the weather or targeting online advertising. In those settings, forecasters commonly use millions of observations, which might be collected almost continuously. Given the difference, it isn’t surprising that forecasters in other settings are more easily able to identify the best performing model.
The paucity of outcome data means that election forecasters have to make educated guesses about how to build their statistical models.
