Are you wondering who is going to win the Presidential election? Are you watching the polls, following the media coverage, looking at all of the endless analysis?
Clive Crook over at FT says that you need not pay attention to any of it.
Alan Abramowitz, a politics scholar at Emory University, has shown that summer head-to-head polls convey almost no information about the forthcoming election. (Subsequent head-to-head polls are not much better.) Instead, he has a simple “electoral barometer” that weighs together the approval rating of the incumbent president, the economy’s economic growth rate and whether the president’s party has controlled the White House for two terms (the “time for a change” factor). This laughably simple metric has correctly forecast the winner of the popular vote in 14 out of 15 postwar presidential elections.
According to the metric, Obama wins in a rout.
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