Bogus Election Predictions

Like most other systems for predicting the winner of the presidential election using income growth to guess who will win (as Noah Kristula-Green does here) probably isn’t all that valuable.  In fact, no far-in-advance predictor of reelection—not the 13 Keys to the Presidency (which is pretty darn interesting), not the even the presence or absence of a primary challenger (which I have highlighted myself)—is all that certain. Frankly, the data set for predicting presidential elections is just too small and the dynamics of each election too different for any sweeping generalization to hold.

The current system for electing the president—universal suffrage for all adults regardless of race or gender--has only existed since the 1968 elections. The elections under this system include one race where the incumbent president had never actually faced voters (Ford vs. Carter, 1976) and another where the winner of the popular vote lost in the electoral college (Gore vs. Bush, 2000). The result is that there are only nine truly “typical” modern elections to draw on. Looking at these nine elections, the correlation all but vanishes.