For anyone wondering how much of the vote US President Barack Obama might lose in the Nov. 6 election because he is black, a professor in Iowa has crunched polling data and come up with an estimate: 3.3 percent.
Another US academic has penned a complex equation — using data on the economy and presidential approval ratings — that predicted who won the most votes in the last six presidential contests.
As the election draws closer, pundits and journalists are looking at all sorts of data, from persistently high jobless rates to the latest polls in the politically divided state of Ohio, for clues on Obama’s chances of defeating Republican Mitt Romney.
Illustration: June Hsu
However, at a few US universities, academics have boiled the art of prediction down to a dispassionate science. Some claim their forecasts in presidential elections — typically issued months before election day — have been more accurate than opinion polls taken the day before ballots are cast.
Plugging decades of data into spreadsheets, they calculate everything from how much a bad economy is hurting an incumbent to how the results of New Hampshire’s presidential primaries, conducted 10 months before an election, can signal who the eventual winner will be in November.
“What this forecasting really amounts to is quantitative history,” said James Campbell, a political scientist at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York.
So far this year, forecasters in line with many current opinion polls see Obama squeaking out a victory over Romney.
In a Reuters poll of nine leading forecasters, the median prediction was for Obama to win 50.5 percent of the vote. Although under the complicated US system, that would not necessarily mean victory because the winner is determined by the state Electoral College results.
In 2008, the median forecast of the same group, which estimated that Obama would receive 52 percent of the vote compared with Republican candidate John McCain’s 48 percent, was about as close to the election results as Gallup’s final poll from the last three days of the presidential campaign.
In the end, Obama received 52.9 percent of the vote to McCain’s 45.7 percent, with other candidates receiving the rest.
As scientists, forecasters use their predictions to test theories about what drives election results.
However, the endeavor also has a sporting side. Gamesmanship creeps into scholarly conferences and some academics make small wagers over their predictive powers.
Alan Abramowitz, an Emory University professor and an accurate forecaster of the last half-dozen US elections, won a bet with Campbell over the accuracy of their forecasts in the 2008 election. Campbell had to buy him a beer after Abramowitz’s prediction was closer to Obama’s margin of victory.
“I would say it’s a macho thing, but if you saw what we look like, it’s not a very macho-looking group,” said Abramowitz, whose current forecast has Obama taking 50.5 percent of the vote.
Like most of his peers, Abramowitz is still gathering bits of data before issuing a final prediction by the end of the summer. More bad reports on the economy, such as the data released on Friday last week that showed US economic growth slowed sharply between April and June, could shift forecasts to a Romney victory, he said.
A few models already suggest that the sour US economy will be enough to boot Obama from the White House.
Three years after emerging from a deep recession, the economy has not recovered. The unemployment rate has been stuck above 8 percent for 41 months — nearly Obama’s entire time in office.
For his model, University of Iowa professor Michael Lewis-Beck looks at decades of data on job creation and presidential approval. His preliminary forecast, made with Charles Tien of the City University of New York, gives Obama 46.9 percent of the vote and Romney 53.1 percent.
Lewis-Beck also has tried to quantify how much racial bias could hurt Obama, the nation’s first African-American president.
Views on race are famously difficult to measure. Data on race is easy to find: Roughly 78 percent of Americans identify themselves as white and 13 percent as black (Hispanics can identify themselves as either). However, racist views typically are not discussed in polite company, much less with pollsters.
With Tien and Richard Nadeau of the University of Montreal, Lewis-Beck studied an online poll from March that asked Americans which groups in society have been favored by Obama’s presidency. Options included men, women, blacks and corporations, among others. Voters also were asked whether they would vote for Obama.
It turned out that people whose view of politics was affected by race — that is, they believed the current government favors African-Americans — were less likely to support Obama. Even people who thought the economy was getting better spurned Obama if they saw race as a factor in current politics.
The pattern allowed Lewis-Beck and his colleagues to put a number on what they called Obama’s “racial cost” in the upcoming election: 3.3 percent of the total vote.
“There’s going to be a double whammy — the economic whammy plus the race whammy,” Lewis-Beck said.
In the last four presidential contests, more than 90 percent of leading forecasters picked the popular vote winner, said Thomas Holbrook of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, who surveyed 40 forecasts over that period, including his own.
Therein lies a big caveat to their track record: Every major forecaster correctly predicted that Democrat Al Gore would win the popular vote over former Republican US president George W. Bush in 2000.
Of course, Gore lost the election because he came up short in the Electoral College. Under US rules for the presidential election, each state is worth a certain number of electoral votes, based on population. The first candidate to win enough states totaling 270 electoral votes wins the election, regardless of the popular vote.
“The 2000 election did a great job of reminding everyone about that,” said Simon Jackman, a political scientist at Stanford University.
Some academics try to account for the Electoral College by using state-level data to predict the results of both the Electoral College and the popular vote.
It’s a less traveled path because many professors find state-level economic data to be less reliable that nationwide data. Also, many think voters focus more on the national economy than on how their own states are faring.
Flouting this convention, Carl Klarner of Indiana State University uses a range of state and national data, from how much money people earned in Florida to presidential approval nationwide. A relative newcomer in the forecasting world, Klarner’s prediction was among the most accurate in 2008 when he forecast that Obama would get 53 percent of the vote.
This year, Klarner sees Obama winning 51.3 percent of the vote. He gives the president a 57 percent chance of winning the Electoral College.
Several forecasters acknowledged that because a tight race is expected this year, they could come very close to estimating the vote tally for each candidate, but get the winner wrong.
“It’s a lot like having a formula to try to predict football games,” Robert Erikson of Columbia University said. “You can have a formula based on the past records of the teams, but then there will be intangibles, like the star quarterback breaks his leg.”
I came to Taiwan to pursue my degree thinking that Taiwanese are “friendly,” but I was welcomed by Taiwanese classmates laughing at my friend’s name, Maria (瑪莉亞). At the time, I could not understand why they were mocking the name of Jesus’ mother. Later, I learned that “Maria” had become a stereotype — a shorthand for Filipino migrant workers. That was because many Filipino women in Taiwan, especially those who became house helpers, happen to have that name. With the rapidly increasing number of foreigners coming to Taiwan to work or study, more Taiwanese are interacting, socializing and forming relationships with
Chinese social media influencer “Yaya in Taiwan” (亞亞在台灣), whose real name is Liu Zhenya (劉振亞), made statements advocating for “reunifying Taiwan [with China] through military force.” After verifying that Liu did indeed make such statements, the National Immigration Agency revoked her dependency-based residency permit. She must now either leave the country voluntarily or be deported. Operating your own page and becoming an influencer require a certain amount of support and user traffic. You must successfully gain approval for your views and attract an audience. Although Liu must leave the country, I cannot help but wonder how many more “Yayas” are still
Earlier signs suggest that US President Donald Trump’s policy on Taiwan is set to move in a more resolute direction, as his administration begins to take a tougher approach toward America’s main challenger at the global level, China. Despite its deepening economic woes, China continues to flex its muscles, including conducting provocative military drills off Taiwan, Australia and Vietnam recently. A recent Trump-signed memorandum on America’s investment policy was more about the China threat than about anything else. Singling out the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as a foreign adversary directing investments in American companies to obtain cutting-edge technologies, it said
The recent termination of Tibetan-language broadcasts by Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Asia (RFA) is a significant setback for Tibetans both in Tibet and across the global diaspora. The broadcasts have long served as a vital lifeline, providing uncensored news, cultural preservation and a sense of connection for a community often isolated by geopolitical realities. For Tibetans living under Chinese rule, access to independent information is severely restricted. The Chinese government tightly controls media and censors content that challenges its narrative. VOA and RFA broadcasts have been among the few sources of uncensored news available to Tibetans, offering insights
RSS