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.
Alan Abramowitz:I'm not being too revolutionary here... The true margin of error is wider than I fear a lot of folks think it is... It's much wider than the reported MOE given that only covers certain types of error.
— (((Harry Enten))) (@ForecasterEnten) October 5, 2024
Anything from a very clear Trump to a very clear Harris win is on the table.
Plugging in President Biden’s net approval rating of -18% in late June and the estimated second quarter growth rate of 2.8% in real GDP along with the fact that Kamala Harris will be defending the White House after a single Democratic term in office, the Time for Change model predicts narrow Democratic victories in both the popular vote and the Electoral College. The predictions are a Democratic margin of 2.6 percentage points in the national popular vote and 281 electoral votes, only 11 more than the minimum of 270 needed to win an Electoral College majority.
Based on these results, clearly the safest prediction that we can make about the 2024 presidential election is that it is likely to be very close. Both the predicted popular vote margin of 2.6 percentage points and the predicted electoral vote margin of 24 votes are much smaller than the standard errors of the two regression equations. Adding to the uncertainty of the predictions are the highly unusual circumstances of the 2024 election, especially the replacement of the incumbent president at the top of the Democratic ticket by the incumbent vice president. These results are based on the assumption that Kamala Harris will enjoy the normal advantage that goes to the candidate seeking just a second-straight party term in the White House (typically this person is an incumbent who was elected to the party’s first term in the previous election, but Harris is not).
