Doug Hibbs’s latest forecast

October 31st, 2008, by Andrew

Hibbs writes:

The 3rd quarter data posted by the BEA yesterday are so dire that I [Hibbs] changed my tune and generated a new forecast based on the latest data.

October 31, 2008 update of Presidential Vote Forecast: Preliminary estimates of 2008q3 national income data released on October 30 by the BEA indicate that the economy has weakened so much that I have updated my 2008 election forecast: The Bread and Peace model now predicts a 2-party vote share for McCain of 46.25%, implying Obama will win by a margin of 7.5 percentage points.

Just as a reminder, here’s the graph of Hibbs’s model applied to earlier elections:

As you can see, the incumbent party sometimes loses but they never have gotten really slaughtered. In periods of low economic growth, the incumbent party can lose, but a 53-47 margin would be typical; you wouldn’t expect the challenger to get much more than that. Such things can happen (see, for example, Eisenhower’s performance against Stevenson in 1952) but it wouldn’t be expected.

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• How did the Democrats do in the 2008 congressional elections?
• The myth of poor Democratic performance in House races in the 2008 election

Entry Filed under: Elections