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The Referendum that Didn't Happen: The Forecasts of the 2000 Presidential Election
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 May 2002
Extract
On August 29, 70 days before the election and more than 100 days before anyone would know who would be the next president, my trial-heat and economy model for forecasting presidential elections predicted that Al Gore would receive 52.8% of the national two-party popular vote. By the actual returns, after all the recounts and court rulings were completed, Gore received 50.3% of the national two-Party popular vote, 2.5 percentage points less than the model predicted. While this error is larger than normal (the mean out-of-sample error from 1948 to 1996 for the model is 1.5 percentage points), three of the last thirteen elections had larger out-of-sample errors. In short, though the performance of the forecasting model this year was well within normal bounds, the model was not quite as accurate as usual.
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- © 2001 by the American Political Science Association
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