Predicting the Next President: A Demographic Model

ECU Author/Contributor (non-ECU co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)

Alexander Walton Prunka (Creator)

Institution

East Carolina University (ECU )

Web Site: http://www.ecu.edu/lib/

Abstract: Political scientists have created numerous forecasting models for elections worldwide. In the United States , there are several models that predict the outcome of the presidential election (see e.g. , Abramowitz , 2016; Lewis-Beck & Tien , 2016; Lockerbie , 2016). Beyond models published in the scholarly literature , a host of models published through mainstream media sources have cropped up in the last decade as the Internet has become more popular and more accessible (see e.g. , FiveThirtyEight , The Huffington Post , The New York Times). Despite the growing number of forecasting models , no models currently attempt to predict the results of the presidential election by predicting the turnout and vote of demographic groups. This project includes a background on presidential election forecasting with a review of the literature and our two-step model to predict the turnout and vote of four ethno-racial demographic groups. I completed a preliminary model and issued a prediction prior to the 2016 election. The project concludes with an analysis of the accuracy of this model and a comparison of the accuracy of other published models to determine whether my demographic model is useful to the future of election forecasting.

Additional Information

Publication

Thesis

Language: English

Date: 2017

Keywords

President, Election, Trump, Clinton, Minority, Demographics, Politics

Subjects

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