This video has no political affiliation and is no way intended to offend anyone.
Updating average for each candidate in 2024 presidential polls, accounting for each poll's recency, sample size, methodology, and house effects.
Despite the avalanche of legal indictments, Donald Trump remains favorite to win the Republican nomination for the 2024 US presidential election. According to a poll reported by the website Real Clear Politics on August 19, he has a 41% lead over his main rival Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, in the Republican nomination race. His lead over the other Republican hopefuls such as former vice president Mike Pence is even larger.
There is a lively community of political scientists using a variety of different methods to forecast elections, with many focusing on the US. Most forecasting models use polling data, but since we are 15 months away from the presidential election, current polling should be treated with caution. This is because it reflects public opinion before the full-scale campaign has even begun.
It should be noted that US pollsters have had a mixed record in forecasting elections. This was particularly true in 2016, when pretty much everyone predicted a Hillary Clinton victory.
But there have been successes as well as failures. For example, in the 2008 election, statistician and pollster Nate Silver accurately predicted the winner in 49 of 50 states. Equally, in the 2020 election, statistician Andrew Gelman working with the Economist magazine successfully called it for Joe Biden. But it is instructive that neither of these forecasts relied solely on polling data.
In the past, most US forecasting models have tried to predict vote shares in presidential elections - but this produces an additional source of error. The election is determined by who wins the electoral college, not the popular vote. In the 2016 election, Clinton won a larger vote share than Donald Trump but lost the contest in the electoral college.
The electoral college was created by the US founding fathers, with delegates chosen to reflect voting support for the candidates in each state. There are 538 delegates altogether, made up of 435 from the constituencies in the House of Representatives plus two from each of the 50 states and three from Washington DC. A candidate must get the support of at least 270 to win.
The idea behind the electoral college was to create a firewall between the voters and the presidency and fill it with representatives elected by each state, who then cast their votes according to the popular vote in their state. The concern was to prevent demagogues from becoming president resulting from a wave of voter enthusiasm for a particularly extreme candidate. Ironically, in the 2016 election, it worked in reverse, delivering victory to Donald Trump, who had lost the popular vote.
The first and most important predictor in the model is the state of the economy, with an incumbent being rewarded for a good record on economic growth and punished for a poor one. The logic of this is simple: the voters will throw out an incumbent who fails to deliver prosperity and choose their rival.
Notice the map I used, so as not to get a youtube strike.
15 сен 2024
