Analysis: Scientists go beyond the polls to forecast U.S. election

For anyone wondering how much of the vote President Barack Obama might lose in the November 6 election because he is black, a professor in Iowa has crunched polling data and come up with an estimate: 3.3 percent.

Another U.S. 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.

But at a few U.S. 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, SUNY.

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 American 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 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.

... contd.

ALSO READ

US horrified by reports of Syria massacre

Agent in America raises funds for Imran's party, sends over $7 lakh

Violence grips Bangladesh as Islamists demand stricter blasphemy law

David Cameron warned: 'Shed elitist image'