An election model that reportedly has correctly predicted the outcomes of past presidential elections is predicting an easy win for presumptive Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney:
Mitt Romney will win the popular vote and take the White House with more than 300 electoral votes, according to an election model that correctly determines the winner when applied to the last eight presidential elections.
The model, based on state-level economic data, predicts that President Barack Obama will lose nearly all key states that many observers view as toss-ups: North Carolina, Virginia, Ohio, Florida, Colorado, Wisconsin and New Hampshire. He’d also drop Pennsylvania and Minnesota, where polls indicate Obama is ahead, the study says.
The analysis, authored by Colorado political science professors Kenneth Bickers and Michael Berry, looks at unemployment rates and per capita income from the last 22 years and builds a model that would have accurately predicted each election. It also looks at other indicators, like which party currently holds the White House.
“The apparent advantage of being a Democratic candidate and holding the White House disappears when the national unemployment rate hits 5.6 percent,” Berry said in a University of Colorado press release. The unemployment rate is currently 8.3 percent nationally.
But don’t take the prediction to the bank just yet, Bickers and Berry warn. They caution that the current economic data plugged into the model was gathered in June, and also note that the winner-take-all nature of the Electoral College could tip the balance drastically if either candidate sees even a slight surge.
As this story gathers more steam you’ll find that:
–Democrats will dismiss the study.
–Republicans will tout it and say, see Romney is going to win.
But there are variables here and there could be some things that intervene between now and November that greatly hurt either candidate. Another study, the famous 13 keys to the White House, predicted an Obama win earlier this year. TMV’s Pat Edaburn (who is a Republican) did this analysis of the 13 keys last month.
So choose the one based on your partisan prejudice that you think is wise, and accurate, and will come true and the other one that doesn’t fit what you want to happen to call flawed, or untrustworthy.
UPDATE: In terms of where we are now, NBC finds no change since June in the electoral college vote count that puts Obama ahead but a good chunk of states still clearly in play.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.